Behind Enemy Lines, Part I

Today's post is somewhat of a departure for me. Usually it's a quick snark, or a road rage rant, or a snappy ripost at the idiot-du-jour. However, with the ascension of The Annointed One less than a week away, I thought it might be instructional to describe what life is like in a gun-unfriendly state. I'm going to start with an overview of MA gun laws in this part I, then progress to attitudes and choices in subsequent parts.

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Part I: Gun Laws in a gun-unfriendly state. I'll cover four aspects of MA gun laws that make MA such a gun-unfriendly state:

A. Discretionary licensing.

B. Tiered permits

C. Assault Weapons Ban

D. Approved Firearms Roster.

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A. Discretionary licensing, a.k.a. "May Issue". What this means is that your right to keep and bear arms is predicated solely on the whim of the licensing body. In MA, the licensing body is your local chief of police or his designee - a single person decides who does or doesn't get to exercise their Second Amendment rights. Pretty scary, eh? Refusals can be and routinely are handed out arbitrarily and capriciously, with "downgraded" or "neutered" licenses given as a sorry consolation prize.

Out of the 50 states in the union, only two do not allow concealed carry of firearms (WI and IL). Of these two, only one requires a permit to own. Two states (AK and VT) do not require a permit to own or carry firearms. Of the remaining 46 states, 9 are "May Issue" like MA and the remaining 37 are "Shall Issue", which means that as long as you meet the criteria for the permit, you get the CCW license. Source.

What's worse is that in MA you need a permit simply to possess a firearm. Of the 11 states that restrict CCW, only MA and IL require a permit to own (not sure about CA, might need a permit for handguns) (thanks to Ross for the correction about NJ - apparently a permit is needed to purchase, not own). IOW, whether or not you are allowed to exercise your enumerated Second Amendment "rights" is entirely up to one person and one person only. Appeals are costly, lengthy, and almost certain to lead to a "restricted" license.

"Suitability" is the bugaboo heard most often on MA gun boards - the chief of police can revoke your permit literally for any reason he or she likes. We had a town that, in the wake of the Columbine shootings, had the CoP decide that she was no longer going to issue ANY permits, nor allow any permits to be renewed. Poof, with the changing of a mind the citizens of an entire town lost their right to keep and bear arms. Failing to turn in or sell your firearms is a felony.

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B. Tiered permitting. I've gone over the different permits in MA before, but I'll recap briefly:
1. FID - allows ownership of shotguns and low-capacity longarms.
2. Class B - allows ownership of all longarms and low-capacity handguns.
3. Class A - allows ownership of all firearms, may also allow CCW

Confused yet?

Well, as if being "May Issue" wasn't bad enough, Mass has to toss different tiers of permitting at the budding gunnie. The hunters and skeet shooters get by with their FIDs - if all you need is a scoped deer rifle, duck gun, or over-under for busting clays, the FID is the permit for you. It's "Shall Issue" - the only one in MA that is - so as long as you take the safety course, join a gun club, get a doctor's note, and/or get three letters of recommendation written by non-family members (yes, all of these are requirements in certain towns in CLEAR violation of the law), you get your permit regardless of the chief's inclination.

The Class B permit is the "tits on a bull" permit - completely fucking useless. It allows you to own a large capacity longarm or a low-capacity handgun - basically, all revolvers and single-stack semi-autos. It does not permit CCW in any manner. It also costs the same as the Class A license. The Class A permit is the only permit which allows CCW, and that's also at the whim of the CoP. Some towns will only issue "Restricted" permits, meaning that you can own anything you like but you cannot carry it concealed. There is literally no difference in the process by which one obtains a Class A vs. a Class B, yet some towns will only issue the B. Source.

I have yet to hear a cogent argument as to why three different permits are needed; it would seem that only two at most would be necessary, yet three we have (five if you consider that there is an FID that is limited to pepper spray and the Class A can be unrestricted or restricted). A suspicious person would think that the lesser permits exist so that chiefs can downgrade folks rather than outright deny them - a denial goes before a board of appeal where, theoretically, the denial could be reversed. A downgrade gets nothing...

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C. Assault Weapons Ban. In 2004, Mitt Romney {SPIT} signed an extension of the Federal AWB into law (which I deconstructed a while back) so that it would be in effect in perpetuity in MA. This means that MA gun owners are and forever will be subject to the arbitrary regulations established by the meaningless and ineffectual Ban On Scary Looking Shit Assault Weapons Ban. You know, the law that banned that "shoulder thing that goes up"...

In a nutshell, we can't own a semi-automatic longarm with a telescoping stock - which makes adjusting the length-of-pull on a rifle problematic. We can't own a rifle with flash suppressor, although a muzzle break is just peachy. I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between the two, but what the hell. And, most troubling, we can't own any magazines with capacity greater than 10 rounds if they were made after September 1994. It also means that 9 out of 10 mail-order places won't ship anything - even perfectly legal to own 10 round magazines - into MA.

Huge. Fucking. Pain. In. The. Ass.

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D. Approved Firearms Roster. This is quite possibly the most infuriating and clandestine gun control regulation we have on the books. Originally passed in 1998 as the "Firearms Safety and Consumer Protection Act", it established guidelines for what would be considered a "safe" vs. "unsafe" handgun. Needless to say, the law was written by people who have no idea which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, but I digress... A handgun can only be sold by a dealer if it is on the "Approved Firearms Roster" *and* meets the unpublished, arbitrary standards of the Attorney General. For example, many Glocks are on the Approved Firearms Roster, yet none can be sold new from an FFL in MA.

This actively discourages manufacturers from presenting firearms for sale in MA - one of the regulations is an insanely heavy (> 10 lbs.) trigger (known as the "MA trigger"); another a "witness hole" (known as the MAhole, I kid you not), and other useless and inane regulations. The infuriating part is that certain guns, like Glocks, are not "safe" for civilians to own, yet are exempt for law enforcement. Yes, these guns are not safe enough to be sold to the general public, but safe enough to bet an officer's life on. G'head. Make sense of that...

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Okay. There's a ton more to write, but to be honest I was getting depressed and more than a little angry at the idiocy that passes for "common sense gun control" in MA. There's no evidence whatsoever that any of this makes a damn bit of difference in crime, especially when MA judges keep slapping the worst offenders on the wrist and sending them on their merry way. It does, however, have a tremendous impact on the law-abiding gun owners: In the 10 years since the 1998 Gun Control Act, permitted gun owners in MA have decreased by 84% (source) - from 1.5 million permit holders in 1998 to 240,000 in 2008...

Gee, it's almost like they planned it that way!

That is all. For now...