In July, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey issued a statement in which she announced her unilateral ban on “assault weapons,” including “copycat assault weapons.”
On Thursday, the Washington Free Beacon reports, “the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the largest trade association in the firearms industry, in conjunction with four Massachusetts gun dealers filed the suit against Attorney General Maura Healey (D.) in response to her attempt to redefine the state’s assault weapons ban.”
The Washington Free Beacon continues:
Healey announced on July 20 that she was officially reinterpreting the language of the state’s decades-old ban. She said she would be vastly expanding what constitutes a so-called “copycat” of guns that are explicitly banned under the statute and accused the gun industry of skirting the law for years.“The gun industry has openly defied our laws here in Massachusetts for nearly two decades,” Healey said in her announcement. “That ends today. We have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that combat-style weapons are off our streets and out of the hands of those who would use them to kill innocent people.”
For its part, The NSSF said “the changes are overly broad, vague, and unconstitutional.”
“Attorney General Maura Healey’s actions were unconstitutional. Firearms retailers in Massachusetts cannot determine the meaning or scope of the Attorney General’s Enforcement Notice and subsequent explanations,” Larry Keane, NSSF Senior Vice President, said in a statement on the suit. “Because criminal penalties can result due to Attorney General Healey’s unilateral reinterpretation of a state statute done without administrative process or input from affected parties, her office exceeded its lawful authority and retailers were deprived of their due process protections under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.”“In addition, if the Attorney General’s Enforcement Notice is understood as applying to all semi-automatic firearms, it violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to keep and bear arms because it bans the manufacture, sale, and possession of a broad range of firearms in common use by the citizens of Massachusetts,” Keane continued.
The full complaint can be read here.
Watch Healey explain her “assault weapon” ban . . . . against a backdrop of Massachusetts’ citizens lining up at their local gun store.
Healey has previously used consumer protection law to attack Glock and Remington (Glock doesn’t even sell firearms to private citizens in Massachusetts).
In response to Healey’s ongoing anti-Second Amendment crusade, the Second Amendment Foundation’s Alan Gottlieb noted, “Attorney General Healey has declared war on guns. Her goal is to eliminate gun ownership. What we need is a ban on assault politicians who do not respect constitutional rights.”
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