Should the government be able to impose a test on the free exercise of a Constitutional right?
Although the question wasn't framed just this way, this is what was at the heart of the discussion held in the atrium of the Northern Essex Community College in Lawrence, MA on Tuesday.
This was the 9th stop on the Massachusetts Legislature's so-called Firearms Safety Listening Tour. Hosted and moderated by State Rep. Michael S. Day (D-31st Middlesex), these events follow a familiar formula: Rep. Day gives remarks about his views of current MA gun laws, welcomes fellow politicians in attendance, and then introduces the panelists. There is a pre-set topic of discussion, and the panelists are given time to state their positions on the matter at hand before the floor is opened up for questions and comments from the audience. Ostensibly, this is a chance for the legislators who attend to hear what their constituents think about the topic.
Unlike some of the previous tour events this one featured some direct back and forth debate between the panelists themselves, a welcome break from the traditional "appeal to the audience" style of public meeting. Perhaps this was because there were only two on the panel this time: Jon Green, Director of Education and Training for Gun Owners' Action League (GOAL), and Gregory Gibson, author and gun control activist whose son was murdered in 1992.
The topic of discussion for the evening was "Training and Shooting."
In the interests of full disclosure: I consider Jon Green a friend, a teacher, and one of the people that I respect most in this world.
Green, as he usually does in any setting, established himself right away as a subject matter expert. You would be hard-pressed to find another individual in the Commonwealth with such a ready grasp of the chapter and verse of Massachusetts gun law, a subject that he in fact teaches to law enforcement agencies here. He is articulate and comfortable in front of an audience and, after 25 years as GOAL's Director of Education and Training, has his subject material down cold. An NRA training counselor and regional rep, Green has upwards of a thousand NRA-certified instructors who became instructors under his tutelage, and uncountable numbers of students and citizens have attended his training courses and Massachusetts Gun Law Seminars across the state.
Gregory Gibson is the author of five books, is also a seasoned public speaker and, to be truthful, has a compelling story. In 1992 Gibson's son, eighteen-year-old student Galen, was one of two people killed during a rampage shooting at Simon's Rock college in Great Barrington, MA. The other fatality was a teacher, and four others were wounded. The perpetrator had ordered ammunition from a company in North Carolina and purchased an SKS rifle off the shelf from a local store here in the Commonwealth. After the tragic shooting, Mr. Gibson wrote a memoir Gone Boy: A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder in 1999 and has since authored many op-ed pieces on the topic of gun control.
Although the evening's topic "Training and Shooting" is a generalized one, most of the discussion from the panel and the audience centered around whether training - specifically live fire training - should be required as a condition of owning a gun or getting a License to Carry in Massachusetts.
Mr. Gibson took the position that it should be, appealing to the idea that if it had been harder for the perpetrator to get a gun thirty years ago, his son might still be alive today. "Why wait," he asks, "until bad things happen when you can just enact laws before they happen?"
It's easy to sympathize with Gibson's emotional stance. Most of us, thankfully, will never have to know what it feels like to lose a child to such a meaningless tragedy. This kind of devastation defies the imagination, and yet it does happen - when bad people do bad things. But does this undeniable horror justify imposing blanket restrictions on the rights of law-abiding citizens in the name of "doing something"... particularly if evidence is lacking that the measures would be effective at all?
Current Massachusetts law generally requires that in order to get a Firearms Identification Card or License to Carry a person must successfully complete a state-approved gun safety training course. There are currently twenty-nine such courses approved, but not all of them have a live fire component. In any case, there is no evidence that any of the courses, or any proposed live-fire requirement, would have saved Galen Gibson's life. What would have saved him is for his murderer to have not gone on his rampage in the first place.
For his part, Green maintained a deeply empathetic tone while citing current law and succinctly stating GOAL's position: While moral and ethical gun owners should always seek out training in order to improve their skills, no government-mandated training should be required as a condition of exercising a constitutional right.
The audience of about thirty-five was roughly split between gun owners/trainers, and anti-gun activist groups. Much of the commentary from the floor was in the form of appeal from emotion, with anti-gun folks saying in essence that any restriction on having "those damned things around" can only increase safety, while likening a gun training requirement to the current practice of requiring road tests for driver licenses. Pro-civil rights gun owners, on the other hand, point out that we simply do not have a gun-related accident problem here in the Commonwealth (on average we suffer two accidental deaths per year in a population of seven million people... and we have no way of knowing if those two are even licensed gun owners), and that having a training requirement would clearly do nothing to stop a criminal who has violent intent. What problem, then, are we trying to solve?
There's really only one rationale left in support of blanket mandates: the barrier to entry.
Not so long ago in this country, certain state and local jurisdictions used poll taxes to prevent disfavored populations who couldn't pay from exercising their right to vote. Such taxes were abolished far too late in 1964, with "literacy testing" (another Jim Crow-era roadblock to voting) being abolished the following year.
The parallel seems obvious: state-mandated training and testing create a barrier to entry to a constitutional right. These are regressive and clearly would disproportionately affect the poor and disadvantaged, many of whom live in urban areas where training and practice locations - not to mention guns and ammo - may be remote, hard to find, and expensive to obtain.
Other questions arise: Who would determine how much training is enough training? Who gets to decide how much it should cost and where it must be held? Put another way, what guarantees do free people have that the entities in charge of answering these and other concerns will act in a manner consistent with individual liberty, instead of being driven by party politics?
The constitutional question is simple, too: What other enumerated right would we dream of attaching such costs and restrictions to? The answer is equally simple: None. We do not require "free speech licenses." We would never require that you take a literacy test before you could have access to due process of law. We should never, therefore, demand that people jump through political hoops in order to defend themselves, or hunt, or stand against tyranny, or otherwise enjoy their Second Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court in NYSRPA v. Bruen was focused on "may-issue" licensing regimes, but the Justices also clearly found that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right, and any such arbitrary barriers that would curtail the free exercise thereof are prima facie unconstitutional.
The Massachusetts Legislature has been slow in understanding this. Rep. Day himself, in his opening remarks on Tuesday pointed out how "the Supreme Court tried to overturn our laws" with Bruen. License restrictions, which limited the manner in which a person could possess a handgun in Massachusetts outside their home were finally tossed out after Bruen, but the state has doubled down on the concept of "suitability" - another arbitrary measure of ones' fitness to exercise their rights - and the mandatory training requirement remains in place a year after Bruen.
As far as adding any new requirements to the existing training regime, well, we should all remember that former Governor Charlie Baker seemed to have no problem with shutting down training - and therefore licensing - entirely during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration unilaterally decided that people exercising their enumerated rights was not important, and only lifted the restrictions when threatened with legal action.
Given these facts, we have the right to ask why we should trust the MA Legislature with any of this.
Jim Wallace, GOAL's Executive Director, was in the audience Tuesday and pointed out that there has been a law on the books since 2014 mandating that a portion of the licensing fees the state was already collecting must be used for public service announcements and information promoting gun safety. In the decade since the law's enactment (which GOAL helped to get passed) the state has been religiously continuing to collect that money from hundreds of thousands of gun owners, but not a single one of the promised PSAs or, for that matter, any other training information from the state has ever materialized.
If the state can't even be bothered to use the money they extract from us to produce what they're legally required to produce, Jim points out, then it's abundantly clear to gun owners that the state isn't really interested in training or safety, and we therefore have no reason to trust that the legislature will act in good faith going forward, either. That's a fair evaluation.
GOAL, on the other hand, has relentlessly championed gun safety, training, and responsible gun ownership, all without state money or help, since its inception nearly fifty years ago. Who, then, is the real advocate?
A side note: Jon Green, in typical fashion for him, was prepared to defend every one of his claims - one of my favorite Jon-isms is "We're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own legal citations." He came to the event bearing a pile of printed copies of all of the appropriate training laws and offered them for free to anyone who wished to read up and understand what is actually on the books now. As far as I am aware not a single person - not those citizens who would impose restrictions on us nor the legislators in attendance - took him up on his offer.