Question 9: the vote to keep or repeal the 2024 Massachusetts gun law

NEW BEDFORD Massachusetts voters will decide Nov. 3 whether to keep the state's 2024 gun law. Question 9 is a referendum on an existing law, so the ballot runs backwards from most questions: a yes vote keeps the law in place, and a no vote repeals it. This is the seventh in a South Coast 360 series explaining each of the nine statewide questions on the ballot; earlier installments covered the all-party primary plan, Election Day voter registration, the tax-cap rewrite, the conservation earmark, starter-home zoning and the marijuana sales repeal.

The law, Chapter 135 of the acts of 2024, "An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws," passed the House 124 to 33 and the Senate 35 to 5 on July 18, 2024. Most of it is now in effect. School administrators and licensed healthcare providers can ask a court for an extreme risk protection order, which requires a person found to be a present danger to themselves or others to surrender firearm licenses, permits and guns. Courts issuing harassment prevention orders may order the same surrender.

The law penalizes possessing, creating and transferring untraceable ghost guns. It requires serial numbers on all firearms except antiques and relics, including unfinished frames and receivers that can readily be made into a finished product, and counts privately made guns such as 3D-printed guns within the ghost gun provisions. It expands the machine gun definition to cover bump stocks, trigger cranks, Glock switches and auto sears, clarifies which assault-style weapons and large capacity feeding devices current owners may continue to possess, and prohibits carrying firearms in government buildings, polling locations and schools, with certain exceptions.

On licensing, local authorities may request prior license and permit information from the state and may see petitions for involuntary mental health commitments that a court denied, alongside prior commitments, when reviewing applications for licenses to carry, firearm ID cards and licenses to sell. People must be 21 to own semiautomatic rifles or shotguns, a second offense of failing to report a lost or stolen firearm can bring up to six months of incarceration, and 12- to 15-year-olds may apply for a self-defense spray permit with a parent's permission while 15- to 18-year-olds may apply on their own. The State Police may take over dealer inspections from local departments and must provide the training and test for new license applicants, and the state must build a publicly accessible dashboard of anonymized aggregate firearm data.

The official ballot wording says: "A YES VOTE would keep in place the law, which increases the regulation of firearms, including ghost guns, machine guns, and assault-style weapons." And: "A NO VOTE would repeal this law." The Executive Office of Administration and Finance says the state has already made significant investments to implement the law, including training employees, new gun licensure processes and IT infrastructure, and that repealing it "would require the Commonwealth to expend resources in suspending or re-directing those investments."

The yes committee, Vote Yes for a Safe Massachusetts, argues that the 2024 law "made vital updates, including banning ghost guns; outlawing devices that turn semi-automatic weapons into machine guns; expanding tools to help prevent firearm suicide and mass shootings; creating a firearms data dashboard to better understand gun trafficking." It credits the state's comprehensive approach for a gun death rate 70% lower than the national average and closes: "Repealing it would make everyone in Massachusetts less safe." The argument was written by Ned Notis-McConarty of Boston.

The no committee, The Civil Rights Coalition, calls the measure "an unnecessary reinvention of state firearms law," noting Massachusetts already had some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Its argument calls Chapter 135 "a deeply flawed, 116-page piece of bureaucratic overreach," says the state has neither funded nor figured out how to build the real-time electronic tracking system the law mandates, says local police are being pulled from investigating violent crime into administrative paperwork, and says the state's own clarifications have treated historical re-enactors and antique hobbyists like criminals. "Demand common-sense, transparent legislation focused on violent criminals, not limiting citizens' civil rights," it closes. The argument was written by Toby Leary of North Andover.

The Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis says a yes vote preserves the status quo and a no vote brings change. It says the 2024 law closed genuine gaps by letting Massachusetts track home-assembled ghost guns and widening who can seek red flag orders. The center says lawful gun owners face new obligations, including registering all firearms with the state. It says repeal would restore the pre-2024 rules, including gun licenses, safety training, sales tracking and family-initiated red flag petitions. The center says it is too soon to know the law's full benefits and drawbacks, and that two forces limit potential safety gains: Massachusetts already had relatively low levels of gun violence before 2024, and some provisions may not survive constitutional challenges.

For South Coast towns, the practical stakes sit with the local licensing authority, usually the police department: the law changes what it can review in an application and lets it hand dealer inspections to the State Police. Tufts says the pre-2024 rules were already among the strictest in the country. The question on Nov. 3 is whether the 2024 additions stay in place.

Label: Reported by us, from the town's posted records.