Following a procedural move gun rights groups are calling a legislative “shell game,” lawmakers will vote on a controversial new gun bill this week, after House leadership revealed they had attached much of the bill to the 2023 close-out budget.
On Tuesday, the House Ways and Means Committee polled its membership on whether they might vote in favor of recommending “H.4090 ‘An Act making appropriations for fiscal year 2023 to provide for supplementing certain existing appropriations and for certain other activities and projects’ in part, as amended; see attached.”
Attached to that bill, which was submitted in September by Gov. Maura Healey with an aim toward closing the books on the state’s fiscal 2023 budget, was the third version of the House’s gun legislation. All mentions of the budget were removed.
Originally proposed by Stoneham Rep. Michael Day as HD. 4420, or An Act modernizing firearms laws, gun owners met the first draft bill with alarm at many of its provisions. As written, according to opponents, the bill would make many otherwise law-abiding gun owners into felons overnight and restrict them from participating in constitutionally protected activities.
After hearing the complaints of Second Amendment activists, lawmakers released HD. 4607, a bill of the same name, and held a hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee. Gun rights groups were still displeased, openly wondering why the lawmakers were making it harder for people to lawfully keep firearms while ostensibly chasing after criminal use of guns.
The Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association polled its membership on the bill, resulting in an unprecedented unanimous rejection of the proposed legislation. The bill, according to the organization’s executive director, would not actually impact crime.
On Tuesday, without much notice on the matter, the House Ways and Means delivered H.4135, also called “An Act modernizing firearms laws,” and quickly appended portions of it to H.4090, the close-out budget.
“My head is spinning,” Dave Wallace, the executive director of the Gun Owners Action League, told the Herald.
According to Wallace, the “fast-paced, sleight of hand, Houdini-like procedure” is a “twisted end-run around the normal process.”
“In order to avoid the normal bill process, the Speaker had House Ways & Means add the current gun bill language to an existing budget bill, H.4090. Then House Ways & Means, with no public vote record, conjured and released what amounts to a “ghost bill”, H.4135, in order to get it to the House floor for a vote on Wednesday,” Wallace warned his group’s membership in an email.
“This bill simply cannot be fixed … or exorcized,” he wrote.
House Speaker Ron Mariano, after caucusing with fellow representatives Tuesday, said that he expects Wednesday’s House session to include some “spirited debate” on the matter. According to the Speaker, moving the legislation through the budget bill is the best path forward.
The push for stricter laws comes following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last summer in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the high court determined that most extraordinary gun licensing requirements are at odds with the Second Amendment.
