MA will ban the sale of “copycat” assault-style weapons similar to those increasingly used in mass shootings, state Attorney General Maura Healey said on Wednesday.
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Healey said gun manufacturers make what they call “state compliant” versions of banned weapons with minor tweaks to various parts of the weapon. Dealers who now have these weapons are not permitted to sell these items to MA buyers. Gun dealers with those weapons now in stock are not permitted to sell them to MA buyers, Healey said.
Speakers at the event said Healey’s actions did not represent a new law or set of regulations but heightened enforcement of an existing statute.
Advocates for the gun industry warn that Healey’s ban is likely to face a legal challenge.
The move takes effect immediately and is part of stepped-up enforcement of Massachusetts’ ban on military-style assault weapons, she said in a statement. “This is going to be probably a very interesting legal challenge at some point”.
Healey, in an opinion piece in Wednesday’s Boston Globe, says the state’s assault weapons ban contains a “loophole of potentially horrific proportions”. “Increasingly, these guns are the weapon of choice for mass shooters, and we will do everything we can to prevent the kinds of tragedies here that have occurred in places like Orlando, San Bernardino, Newtown and Aurora”. For example, they do not have a collapsible stock or a flash suppressor. “These changes do not make the weapon any less lethal and the weapons remain illegal”.
Asked by a reporter after the press conference, Evans said he had previously been under the impression that the guns were compliant with state law.
An estimated 10,000 “copycat” assault weapons were sold in MA during 2015, according to the attorney general’s office, which announced a crackdown effort on Wednesday.
Healey said 10,000 assault weapons were sold in MA previous year, and in the week after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando sales jumped 450 percent in MA alone.
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In Virginia, Attorney General Mark Herring unilaterally changed the state’s reciprocity laws on concealed carry permits, which drew the ire of Second Amendment supporters.
