Mike Harris is the director of public policy at Gun Owners’ Action League in Massachusetts. The Bay State professional defender of the Second Amendment is a lawyer, used to be a legislative aide on Beacon Hill, and has been with GOAL for a number of years. Harris has been particularly busy the last few years with the legislative attacks on gun owners, dirty tricks from Governor Healey, and everything else he’s juggling. Spoiler alert, it’s as sticky as the great molasses flood.
While attending the 2026 National Rifle Association Annual Meeting, Harris took some time out of his schedule to dish on the Bay State. This interview was made possible by Beretta Holding, the sponsor of the Voices of the Second Amendment at the NRAAM.
Harris explained that the Gun Owners’ Action League is the largest and oldest Second Amendment advocacy group in Massachusetts — possibly New England. The organization is a 501(c)(4) that traditionally focused on lobbying, however has had a phase shift post-Bruen. Lately the organization has had to hang up most of their lobbying efforts in lieu of filing litigation.
“We are the local NRA affiliate,” said Harris. “We also do a lot of work with Second Amendment Foundation, CCRKBA, and we have about 25,000 members at the moment. We’ve been around since 1974. Actually, it’s funny, so GOAL was founded on November 27, 1974. I was born on November 27, 1984. So, GOAL is exactly 10 years older than (me).”
Massachusetts, Harris noted, has a Democratic governor and “hyper majorities,” as he likes to call them, in the House and Senate. On the House side there are 25 Republicans out of the 160 representatives.
“I think when the omnibus bill was passed, I think we only had 36 votes against it,” Harris said. “We can talk about that in a minute. And then in the Senate, out of 40 senators, we have only five Republicans. So it is an uphill battle all the time.”
Something that was unique about Massachusetts in the post-Bruen landscape is how different the restriction removals and responses were handled.
Anecdotally, Massachusetts was essentially about 90 percent “shall-issue” in practice prior to Bruen. Even in some jurisdictions that restricted licenses to carry, generally applications got full carry rights upon renewal. Like most Democratic states with big blue cities, those metropolitan areas steered the bus. When those areas were forced to be shall-issue on paper and in practice, that’s when the outlash came.
Instead of being like New York, New Jersey, or California launching immediate responses, Massachusetts’ lawmakers embarked on a devious journey in how they implemented their post-Bruen rights restrictions. At first, Harris said, some quick changes were made in 2022 at the very end of the legislative season by cramming in some regulations into a judicial technology bond bill. What came next is what really has advocates and activists baffled.
“The Speaker of the Massachusetts House, Ron Mariano, out of Quincy, tasked Representative Michael Day, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee of Stoneham, to embark upon a ‘listening tour,’” said Harris. “It was 11 stops throughout the Commonwealth, from Western Mass all the way down to the Cape, and every stop was addressing some issue that’s going on, and guns, so it was, you know, ‘suicide prevention and firearms,’ ‘domestic abuse and firearms …’”
The tour went on for a year and was chronicled off and on here in the pages of Bearing Arms. Harris said he attended nearly all of the listening tour stops. What was the outcome from a year’s worth of listening to the gun-owning public, activists, advocates, and professional lobbyists?
“They got to the point where they had proposed — they came out with the draft — it was around Columbus Day weekend, they came out with the draft, and we looked at it (and it) was 152 pages, I’m sorry, it was 142 pages affecting 156 sections of law,” Harris explained. “And it was everything we talked to them about — they threw back in our face and smashed us over the head with it.”
Once the bill was voted on and signed into law, Massachusetts activists mobilized. Harris worked diligently with the Civil Rights Coalition — also friends of Bearing Arms — to try and halt the effective date of the law and put it on the ballot. A provision in Massachusetts law allows for the law to go to a referendum vote via a citizens’ petition. One of the big benefits of this tactic is that the law would be put on hold until the next state-wide general election.
The Civil Rights Coalition successfully collected the required number of signatures to stop the law, however Harris said the governor had different plans for them.
He said that Governor Healey “stuck an emergency preamble on there, it went right into effect, and it’s still standing right now.” Harris continued, noting “it wasn’t an emergency back in August when she signed it initially, it only became an emergency (when it looked like we were going to win).” The law then went into effect even though the citizens followed the system in place for them to receive relief.
That ballot question will be coming up during this November’s election.
With a renewed focus on litigation, Harris said: “We’re on top of all this going on, we’re also, we’re suing the hell out of the Commonwealth. We have 13 suits going right now. We’re working with the Second Amendment Foundation. NRA is signed on to, I think, four or five of them.”
Something that Harris also spoke about that he’s excited about — as are we here at Bearing Arms — is a new initiative that’s launching right in the Bay State.
“Anybody who has ever seen a map knows, New England is quite smooshed together, it’s six states that should probably be one or two, so our borders are really close together, and it’s really a patchwork,” said Harris. “We have three constitutional carry states up there: Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and we have three of the worst states in the country for this stuff, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.”
Harris has been an instrumental person in helping plan the New England Firearms Advocacy Conference. The conference is being hosted by the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms — an organization that both Cam and I serve on the board of directors as unpaid volunteers — and is geared towards bringing together the New England states to discuss litigation, lobbying, and grassroots activism.
Harris said the goal is to get “all of the state organizations from all six New England states in a room to discuss this and kind of see what we can do to help each other out, and make sure that our folks do what they can to stay out of jail.” The conference is intended to be a big information share and network these different states into a functioning hive.
The New England FAC is scheduled for May 30 and folks can learn more about it at: CCRKBA.org/FAC
Harris said that people should head over to GOAL.org. They have a wealth of resources to share about the law, training, and everything firearm-related in the Bay State.
“If you have any questions about training (or anything) in general, our guru Jon Green is a master at all things firearms training,” Harris boasted. “He’s also our legal expert, kind of fell into that one, which is funny … if you’re coming to Massachusetts, it might be worthwhile for you to take a look at (our webpage) and see kind of what all of our interpretations of a lot of the provisions of Chapter 135 are on there.”
Before closing out, Harris also plugged the GOAL Podcast, hosted by the organization’s president and vice president — Garet Holcomb and Jeff Strider. The GOAL Podcast can be found hosted on most podcast providers or directly from Libsyn. The GOAL Podcast ranks it the top 3 percent of all podcasts according to Listen Notes.
It was great getting a chance to catch up with Mike Harris from Gun Owners’ Action League. If you’re interested in watching the full interview with Harris, you can check that out HERE or in the embed below.
Editor’s Note: Second Amendment groups like GOAL are hard at work across the country doing everything they can to protect our right to keep and bear arms and our right to self-defense.
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