South Shore News | Ballot Question Series, Week 9 of 9
This is the ninth in a nine part series looking at each of the ballot questions coming to Massachusetts voters in November. (technically the same week as Question 8)
Please take the poll in the middle of the article.
If you own a firearm in Massachusetts, you have until Oct. 28 to register it with the state and to make sure it carries a serial number.
Six days later, on Nov. 3, you vote on whether to keep the law that requires it.
That is Question 9. It is a referendum on Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024, the gun law Gov. Maura Healey signed on July 25, 2024 and called the state’s “most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.” A yes vote keeps the law. A no vote repeals it. That is the reverse of most ballot questions, where yes means change.
The deadline does not wait for the election, and two things follow that anyone thinking about skipping it should know.
Repeal would not reach backward. The state constitution’s referendum provisions treat a law like this one — one left in force while the vote was pending — differently from a law whose operation was suspended. A suspended law the voters reject is “null and void.” This one, if rejected, “shall, at the expiration of thirty days after such election, be thereby repealed.” Repealed, not void. A law that is repealed stops going forward; it is not treated as though it had never existed. Someone who misses Oct. 28 betting the law is about to disappear would still have missed a deadline that was in force at the time.
And repeal would not take effect on election night. On the constitutional language it arrives about thirty days later, on or about Dec. 3; CommonWealth Beacon describes it as taking effect on certification of the results, which also falls in late November or early December. Either way the law stays in force for about a month after the votes are counted.
How to register, in plain terms
The state’s portal is reached through the firearms services page at mass.gov/firearms-services, and it requires a MyMassGov personal account first. Inside it you register each firearm you possess and request a serial number for any gun that does not already have one. Antiques and relics are excepted. Transfers, losses and thefts have to be reported within seven days.
The penalties escalate — a fine for a first violation, a larger fine or jail for a second, and up to five years for a third.
Guidance #5 says both the registration and serialization portals are operational now; the state’s page said they would be ready in October 2025. The regulations behind them — 501 CMR 19.00 for registration, 501 CMR 20.00 for serialization — have been on the books about as long. The thing that was not settled until three weeks ago was the date.
The deadline was a moving target, and that is part of the story
For most of this year, gun owners trying to find out when they had to register got two different answers from people reading the same law.
On Sept. 17, we read the state’s firearm modernization page. It said: “Firearms must be serialized and registered by October 2, 2026.” Other published guidance pointed to Oct. 28, and attorneys were publicly contradicting each other about which was right. Some still are — a firearms defense firm’s explainer was still giving Oct. 2 as the compliance date this week.
On Sept. 18, the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security issued Guidance #5, a frequently-asked-questions memorandum that consolidates its first four guidance documents and adds new ones. Question 35 says:
“However, individuals are not required to comply with the registration and serialization requirements set forth in sections 121B and 121C of chapter 140 until October 28, 2026, pursuant to section 157 of An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws.”
Read again on Oct. 9, the state’s page now says: “Firearms must be serialized and registered by October 28, 2026.”
So the operative date is Oct. 28. It is also a date the state took most of a year to settle, on a requirement that carries criminal penalties. And Guidance #5 — the document that settles it — is not linked anywhere on the state page that announces the deadline. That page links the two regulations, the firearms services page and the account signup. To find the memo that resolved the conflict, you have to already know it exists.
The second deadline, which almost nobody is writing about
There is a separate requirement in this law that does not fall on Oct. 28. It falls whenever your card expires.
Under Chapter 135, a Firearm Identification cardholder may no longer buy, own or possess a semiautomatic rifle or shotgun. Section 153 of the act grandfathers what a cardholder already had — but only temporarily. Guidance #5, question 41:
“An FID Cardholder may no longer purchase, own, or possess a semiautomatic rifle or shotgun except that section 153 of Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024 allows the Cardholder to possess any firearms they were authorized to possess when the Card was issued until it expires or is suspended or revoked.”
And question 42:
“Cardholders with semiautomatic rifles or shotguns who do not obtain an LTC before their FID Card expires should relinquish possession of the rifle or shotgun through sale or transfer to a licensed dealer or properly licensed person, surrender to an appropriate law enforcement agency, or transfer the firearm out-of-state.”
In practice: an FID holder who owns a semiautomatic rifle or shotgun has to move up to a License to Carry before the card expires, or give the gun up — sell it, transfer it, surrender it, or take it out of state.
There were 24,215 active FID cards in Massachusetts at the state’s most recent published count, in April 2022. This provision reaches them one at a time, on their own renewal dates, which means a hunter in Hanson or Carver who has concluded that none of this touches him may be wrong, and may not find out until his card lapses.
What the law does
Chapter 135 runs 116 pages and took effect in stages over two years. The main pieces:
Registration and serialization. The law directs the state’s criminal justice information services department to build “a real time electronic firearms registration system,” and requires that “all firearms possessed, manufactured or assembled in the commonwealth shall be registered.” All firearms except antiques and relics must carry serial numbers, including unfinished frames and receivers.
Ghost guns and 3D-printed firearms are brought under those requirements.
Red flag orders. School administrators and licensed healthcare providers join those who may ask a court for an Extreme Risk Protection Order; courts issuing a Harassment Prevention Order may also order firearms surrendered.
Licensing. Local licensing authorities may review prior license history and denied involuntary-commitment petitions. Semiautomatic rifles and shotguns now require the owner to be 21. The FID restriction described above. Nonresident business owners are no longer eligible for a license to carry.
Training. New required content for permit applicants, including live-fire instruction, safe storage and suicide prevention.
Machine guns and assault-style firearms. Bump stocks, trigger cranks, Glock switches and auto sears are brought within the machine gun definition. The assault-style firearm definition is rewritten, with rules for what current owners may keep.
Where guns may not go: government buildings, polling places and schools, with exceptions.
Local enforcement. Licensing authorities may transfer dealer inspections to the State Police and must attend statewide training. A public dashboard of anonymized firearm data, plus two study commissions.
Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis, which takes no position, groups it as “three main pillars: improved tracking; new restrictions on guns; and heightened standards for gun owners.”
How this got on the ballot, and why the law has been operating the whole time
Most referendum questions stop a law before it starts. This one did not, because of one decision in October 2024.
July 18, 2024 — the House passes the bill 124 to 33; the Senate, the same day, 35 to 5.
July 25, 2024 — Healey signs it. Its ordinary effective date would have been Oct. 23, ninety days later.
August 2024 — repeal backers file a referendum petition. The first federal lawsuit is filed the same month.
Oct. 2, 2024 — Healey signs an emergency preamble, putting the law in force immediately. Had she not, the petition would have suspended it until the vote.
Oct. 9, 2024 — petitioners file 93,229 signatures with local officials; they reach the Secretary of the Commonwealth on Oct. 23.
Nov. 22, 2024 — Secretary William Galvin certifies 78,707 valid signatures, against a requirement of 37,287. More than double — and past the deadline for that year’s ballot, which is why the vote is in 2026 rather than 2024.
Two years of implementation followed. Tufts calls this “a veto referendum” — one that normally stops a law before it starts, except that here “an emergency order from the Governor kept the law in place.” Voters are not being asked to prevent something. They are being asked to undo something already built, and that is the consequence of one signature on Oct. 2, 2024.
The ballot question itself begins: “Do you approve of a law summarized below, which was approved by the House of Representatives on July 18, 2024, by a vote of 124 to 33, and approved by the Senate on July 18, 2024 by a vote of 35 to 5?” The margins are printed inside the question. Part of the case for keeping the law is on the ballot.
Unlike Questions 1 through 8, Question 9 carries no 2026 legislative action line in the voter guide — no committee vote, no majority or minority report. It is a referendum on a law the Legislature already passed and held hearings on in 2023 and 2024, so nothing in this year’s process gave anyone a chance to testify.
The case for repeal
The official argument against the law, written by Toby Leary of The Civil Rights Coalition, makes four claims. Massachusetts “already had some of the strictest gun laws in the country” before 2024. The law is “a deeply flawed, 116-page piece of bureaucratic overreach.” It “mandates an expensive, real-time electronic tracking system that the state hasn’t funded and doesn’t know how to build.” And “state agencies have struggled to explain the law, issuing dozens of clarifications for rules that treat harmless historical re-enactors and antique hobbyists like criminals.”
On the last of those, here is what is documented. The state has issued five numbered guidance documents, the fifth of them an FAQ that consolidates the first four. The compliance deadline moved by twenty-six days, three weeks before it landed. For months the state’s own website said something different from the state’s own guidance. And the memo that resolved the conflict is still not linked from the page that states the deadline.
Leary adds a practical objection: the law pulls officers “away from investigating violent crime to plow through piles of administrative paperwork.” Wayne Adams, also of the coalition, puts the burden on hunting traditions and antique guns and describes dealing with the law as “questions, questions, questions.” John Briare, who co-founded the coalition, calls “assault weapon” a “brilliant marketing term” and says the law has made a license to carry hard to get, particularly in Boston.
Tufts adds two points the repeal side can use. Repeal would not return Massachusetts to open ground: “Red flag laws would still allow family and household members to question the fitness of gun owners. And assault weapons that match the old definitions would still be banned.” And on the central empirical question: “Whether Question 9 would lead to more gun violence and gun crime is very hard to know for sure. Massachusetts already had among the lowest rates of gun violence” under the old rules.
The case for keeping it
The official argument in favor, written by Ned Notis-McConarty of Vote Yes for a Safe Massachusetts, rests on what the law closed: “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 claims Massachusetts has “a gun death rate 70% lower than the national average.”
That figure checks out. CDC data for 2024, as compiled by Pew Research Center, puts Massachusetts at 3.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people against a national rate of 12.8 — 70 percent lower, and among the lowest of any state. In raw numbers, the CDC counted more than 280 gun deaths in Massachusetts in 2024, most of them suicides, which is why the suicide-prevention and red flag provisions matter more to this argument than the headlines suggest.
Everytown for Gun Safety, which rates state gun laws, moved Massachusetts from fifth-strongest to second-strongest in the nation after Chapter 135 passed. Tufts describes the same changes in neutral terms: the law “closed some genuine gaps in prior state rules, allowing Massachusetts to track home-assembled and other so-called ‘ghost guns’ and adding school administrators, healthcare providers, and police officers to the list of people who can seek ‘red flag’ orders removing guns from people who pose a risk.”
Ruth Zakarin, who chairs the yes committee, argues the rewrite was overdue — “technology has changed, the world has changed since then” — and says licenses to carry were issued at a higher rate in 2025 than in 2024, the direct answer to Briare’s claim that the law made licensing harder. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the committee’s largest funder, says through President Matt Bach and Vice President Deb Gesualdo that upholding the law keeps “commonsense measures that protect students, educators and families from gun violence” in place.
The state’s budget office adds an argument that appears nowhere in the campaign literature. Since 2024 the Commonwealth has “made significant investments to implement the law including training employees, promulgating new gun licensure processes, and developing IT infrastructure,” and repeal “would require the Commonwealth to expend resources in suspending or re-directing those investments.” It puts no number on either figure.
