Massachusetts Senate debates gun bill aimed at ghost guns and assault weapons

BOSTON (AP) — The Massachusetts Senate debated a sweeping gun bill on Thursday as the state crafts its response to a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that citizens have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.

The bill would update state laws to ensure accountability for owners of “ghost guns,” toughen the state’s existing prohibition on assault weapons and make it illegal to possess devices that convert semiautomatic firearms into fully automatic machine guns.

On ghost guns, the bill seeks to ensure oversight for those who own the privately made, unserialized firearms that are largely untraceable.

“I heard concerns about ghost guns from nearly everyone I spoke to over the last six months,” said Democratic state Sen. Cynthia Creem, who helped write the bill. “That’s because the use of ghost guns in crimes has surged in Massachusetts and around the country.”

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In 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice reported recovering 25,785 ghost guns in domestic seizures and 2,453 through international operations.

The state Senate bill would make it illegal to possess devices that convert semiautomatic firearms into fully automatic machine guns, including Glock switches and trigger activators.

It would also ensure gun dealers are inspected annually and allow the Massachusetts State Police to conduct the inspections if a local licensing agency does not or cannot.

Other elements of the bill would: ban carrying firearms in government administrative buildings; require courts to compel the surrender of firearms by individuals subject to harassment protection orders who pose an immediate threat; ban the marketing of unlawful firearm sales to minors; and create a criminal charge for intentionally firing a gun at a dwelling.

Ruth Zakarin, CEO of the Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, said there’s no single policy that is going to solve gun violence.

“I really appreciate the fact that the Senate is, like the House, taking a comprehensive approach to addressing this very complex issue,” she said. “The Senate bill really touches on a number of different, important things all of which together will help keep our communities safer.”

In October, the Massachusetts House approved its own gun bill aimed at tightening firearm laws, cracking down on ghost guns, and strengthening the state’s ban on certain weapons.

The House bill would also bar individuals from carrying a gun into a person’s home without their permission and require key gun components be serialized and registered with the state. It would also ban carrying firearms in schools, polling places and government buildings.

Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners’ Action League, said he’d hoped lawmakers would have held a separate public hearing on the Senate version of the bill because of significant differences with the House version.

“There’s a lot of new stuff, industry stuff, machine gun stuff, definitions that are weird so that’s why the (Senate) bill should have gone to a separate hearing,” he said. “The Senate’s moving theirs pretty darn fast and we keep asking what’s the rush?”

The House and Senate bills would need to be combined into a single compromise bill to send to Gov. Maura Healey for her signature.

Last year Massachusetts Democratic Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced a gun violence prevention unit dedicated to defending the state’s gun laws from legal challenge.

Even though the state has the lowest rate of gun violence in the nation, in an average year, 255 people die and 557 are wounded by guns in Massachusetts. The violence disproportionately impacts Black youth who are more than eight times as likely to die by gun violence than their white peers, according to Campbell.