Massachusetts’ End Run Around Bruen Challenged by Gun Owners

Massachusetts Second Amendment advocates may be relatively small in number compared to the general population, but they’re well organized and passionate about clawing back their right to keep and bear arms. They’ve managed to put a measure on the 2026 ballot that would repeal the sweeping gun control law known as Chapter 135, while also launching a legal challenge against the law’s multiple infringements in federal court. 

As the Boston Globe reports, they’re also mounting a sustained campaign against the state’s “suitability” language for gun permits, which grant licensing authorities broad discretion to deny someone a license even if they can pass a background check, have taken all of the state’s mandated training, and jumped through every hoop required by anti-gun lawmakers. 

There are about fifteen separate challenges to suitability denials taking place across the state, and Gun Owners Action League executive director Jim Wallace says they’re necessary because officials “still do not regard the Second Amendment as a civil right.”

Attorney General Andrea Campbell has opposed the challenges, saying in a statement to the Globe that the state’s strong gun laws protect the public and are consistent with the Second Amendment.

“My office will continue to defend them against any challenge in order to keep our communities and our Commonwealth safe,” Campbell said. 

… Second Amendment advocates in Massachusetts argue police chiefs still have too much power to decide the “suitability” of who can and cannot carry a gun. GOAL said it has sponsored three lawsuits brought by gun owners whose licenses were denied, and another 12 cases have similarly reached the Superior Court level on their own. In several of those cases, District Court judges have agreed with gun owners, finding the “suitability” standard that police chiefs continue to follow is unconstitutional.

The discretion that police chiefs have to deny licenses in Massachusetts is “anathema to all of the most basic Constitutional norms,” wrote William Smith, a Princeton, Mass.-based Second Amendment attorney.

“Bruen warned that this right is no longer to be treated as a second-class one,” Smith wrote in an email. “It shocks the conscience that it continues to be so treated.”

Last May, Holyoke District Court Judge William Hadley ordered the city’s Police Department to grant a license to a man it had deemed unsuitable because of years-old drug and domestic violence allegations. In August, a Boston Municipal Court judge cited Bruen and ordered Police Commissioner Michael Cox to grant a license to an East Boston man, who said he needed to carry a gun for his job at a security company but was denied because of a past report of suicidality. That case is now in Suffolk Superior Court, where Campbell’s office has filed to defend the law.

And in July, a District Court judge ruled that Belchertown Police Chief Kevin Pacunas was “arbitrary and capricious” when he denied a license to a man who allegedly fired his gun by accident in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant in Chicopee. The judge also found the state’s licensing law unconstitutional.

I doubt that the state’s Supreme Judicial Court will ever agree that the licensing scheme itself is unconstitutional, and it remains to be seen if the judges on the state’s highest court will decide that the subjective “suitability” loophole could ever violate the Second Amendent. That court has already declared that out-of-state residents must obtain a Massachusetts carry license in order to exercise their right to bear arms once they cross the border, and in that same decision the SJC dubiously claimed that post-Bruen gun laws that are now in place are objective enough in nature to be considered “shall issue” and comport with the national tradition of gun ownership.

If someone can be denied their basic rights because a chief believes that a mere allegation of criminal activity makes them unsuitable, and if a chief in a neighboring town can conclude that those past allegations shouldn’t stand in the way of issuing a permit, I’d say it’s pretty clear that the “suitability” language is absolutely subjective in nature and a violation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen. 

Wallace says GOAL is just getting started in its fight to overturn these unconstitutional laws, but admits that it will be a lengthy process. And unfortunately, while the fight continues an untold number of Massachusetts residents are being deprived of a fundamental civil right because their local police chief says so.