Many of those sales were to first-time gun owners. Safety features and potential liability for preventable accidental shootings protects not just new gunowners and those gunowners’ families, but other members of the public as well.Īccording to the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, more than 135,000 guns were sold in Massachusetts in 2020. In addition, gun sellers should be held responsible for the resulting accidents if they sell a gun without safety features like a loaded chamber indicator, a magazine safety disconnect, or an external manual safety to a new and untrained gun owner. Regular range recertification, safety training, and a written safety test (like a learner’s permit test for new drivers) under rigorous state-mandated protocols should be a prerequisite for a gun license. New gunowners can acquire dangerous weapons without ever having fired a gun and with little more than a short classroom program on the safety requirements of Massachusetts law. Under current law, the Commonwealth requires far more training to get a driver’s license than to get a gun license. Massachusetts has strong safe storage laws for guns but very few gun safety training requirements. In addition, internet sale of receivers that are designed to be the building block of a firearm should be prohibited by requiring that all receiver blanks for any gun be transferred to buyers only through state-licensed dealers after a background check.īio » Latest Stories » Provide for enhanced safety training. The Commonwealth should also enact enhanced penalties for crimes involving use of a ghost gun. Sale, possession, and use of ghost guns should be banned and criminalized by requiring serial numbers on all receivers and guns, or by redefining what a gu” is to include all partially milled receivers even if further work is required for the receiver to take the necessary parts. Ghost guns have become a popular way for criminals who cannot legally buy a gun (because they cannot pass a background check) to get a lethal weapon. Several internet-based manufacturers offer receiver blanks for ghost guns (sometimes called “80 percent kits”) together with instructions on how to build a gun from them. Take action on “ghost guns.” So called ghost guns are weapons, typically built by individuals rather than manufacturers, that have no serial numbers or other identifiable markings, so that they are not traceable. It will also help mitigate (though not eliminate) the risk that unstable individuals such as Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas mass murderer, will have vast arsenals at their disposal. Such limits will help prevent gun trafficking and dangerous incidents in which residents have more firepower than law enforcement. The Commonwealth should limit the number of guns and the amount of ammunition Massachusetts residents can buy and store in their homes. There are even some individuals who are buying a hundred or more guns on an annual basis. Massachusetts gun registration records show that there are dozens of individuals who buy more than 10 guns each year together with thousands of rounds of ammunition. There is substantial evidence that some Massachusetts residents are hoarding guns and ammunition. The Massachusetts assault weapons ban should be updated annually to include newly designed semi-automatic guns of this kind that have limited sporting use, but are instead intended for purposes identical to the previously banned weapons. Such weapons include the IWI Tavor, a gun designed for the Israeli military the Kel-Tec Sub 2000, a powerful semi-automatic weapon designed to accept handgun magazines and ammunition and the FNPS 90, a Belgian submachine gun designed primarily for military special forces and counter-terrorism. Unfortunately, manufacturers and retailers have responded to the attorney general’s enforcement notice by marketing other equally dangerous military-style weapons that are not covered by the state ban. She then reminded the public, by issuing an enforcement notice, that under state law, copies and duplicates of highly lethal weapons like the AR-15 and the AK 47 are just as prohibited for sale and possession in Massachusetts as the weapons they are designed to imitate. In 2014, Attorney General Maura Healy investigated the sale of assault weapons in Massachusetts and found that tens of thousands of such weapons were being sold despite a longstanding state law banning their sale.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |