Just a few weeks after its passage, gun owners in Massachusetts are already pushing back against the punitive gun control legislation signed into law by Gov. Maura Healey on July 25.

The Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL) has taken the first step to get enough signatures on a petition to put a measure to repeal the new law on the ballot. Unfortunately, it will be 2026 before citizens can vote on the proposal if all requirements are met to put the matter to a statewide vote.

“We started the process in filing a referendum petition to repeal the law,” GOAL Executive Director Jim Wallace told the State House News Service. “This is a flat-out ban on the Second Amendment regardless of what they tell people. Regardless of what you feel about guns, the law as it stands is unenforceable.”

According to Wallace, GOAL won’t be heading up the referendum effort, rather a special campaign committee will do that.

The sweeping 116-page anti-gun measure, H. 4885, makes already restrictive Massachusetts even more unfriendly for lawful gun ownership. In fact, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) called the measure “radical” and one of the “most extreme gun control bills in the country.”

The measure makes a number of changes that will affect gun owners. It raises the age to own a semi-automatic rifle or shotgun to 21 years old, expands definitions for modifications and parts that convert a semi-auto into a full-auto firearm and bans them, prohibits so-called “ghost guns” and also expends the list of places where carrying a firearm is banned to include government buildings, polling places and schools.

The law also adds more firearms to the commonwealth’s banned list of so-called “assault weapons,” makes the state’s “red-flag” law even more unconstitutional enabling more categories of people to report gun owners, requires standardized safety training, including a live fire component, for all firearm license applicants, establishes a worthless commission to study the funding structure for violence prevention services and establishes an equally worthless commission to study the status, feasibility and utility of smart guns and microstamping.

The petition seeks to not only repeal the law, but also to suspend enforcement of the law until the referendum can appear on a statewide ballot.  

The new law is also already the target of at least two lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. Nearly before the ink had dried on Healy’s signature, the National Rifle Association was already planning a lawsuit  to overturn the gross overreach infringing upon Massachusetts gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. GOAL has already filed a lawsuit challenging the law’s new licensing regimes for firearm identification cards and licenses to carry.