“Ghost guns,” untraceable weapons of choice for gangs, must be targeted, Attorney General Andrea Campbell is urging lawmakers.
The AG along with the State Police, explained the call for stronger laws comes while the numbers of ghost guns found by law enforcement rose dramatically in the last two years, all while police and prosecutors struggle to hold lawbreakers to account.
“One of the priorities for the office, of course, is taking on all things related to guns and gun violence, and enforcing our progressive gun laws here in Massachusetts especially post the Bruen decision,” she said. “And really going after ‘ghost guns’ which we know are untraceable guns.”
That 2022 Supreme Court decision stripped states of some long-established firearms licensing rules.
According to members of the State Police assigned to her office, the Commonwealth confiscated 181 homemade guns in 2021. In 2022 that number jumped to 316, a state police official said. None of those firearms bore the serial numbers that gun manufacturers apply to parts of a weapon, and law enforcement can sometimes use them to trace a gun’s specific history.
While private manufacture of a gun or possession of such a weapon is not necessarily illegal in Massachusetts — a weapon so made must be registered with the state within seven days of construction — many of the scratch-built guns found by police were held by people not allowed to keep a firearm, officers said.
Campbell said the numbers are troubling and that under current law there isn’t much more the state can do but confiscate the weapons as they find them.
“Use of ghost guns has increased here in Massachusetts,” she said. “You can buy parts online, or use a 3D printer, to make a deadly weapon and completely circumvent our existing gun laws.”
Massachusetts already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, Campbell acknowledged, but she is still working with lawmakers to include privately made firearms in any new gun legislation.
“We need to get these guns off the street and, frankly, out of communities that are seeing and have seen, probably for generations, an uptick in violence or gun violence,” she said.
Last summer the nation’s highest court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen in favor of the gun group, telling all 50 states that any law which makes the firearms licensing process too onerous is at odds with the Second Amendment and therefore unconstitutional.
Massachusetts laws allowing chiefs of police to deny unrestricted concealed carry rights to those they decided lacked a “good reason” to receive a full firearms license were made unenforceable as a consequence of the decision.
Lawmakers have moved in response to the Court’s order with new legislation in the form of an omnibus gun safety bill filed by House Judiciary Committee Co-chair Michael Day. That bill is currently working its way toward a public hearing, though House and Senate members have not yet agreed on which committee of the Legislature should hold the hearings.
Gun rights groups responded to the proposed law with alarm.
“The proposed legislation is an abhorrent anti-civil rights effort. No community in Massachusetts faces this kind of intentional bigotry and oppression from the State Government,” Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners Action League, told the Herald. “It is simply a post-Bruen tantrum, very similar to Governor Wallace after Brown v. Board of Education.”
Campbell said her office was in touch with Day well in advance of his filing the bill, making more than a dozen suggestions for new rules.
“We’re really proud of what was included,” she said.