By Layla Penn
Boston University Statehouse Program
When Air Force veteran Kyle Culotta moved from Arizona to Massachusetts in the summer of 2025, he brought along the guns he had legally purchased out West.
A traffic stop shortly after he arrived turned that cargo into criminal charges. Police found several firearms in the car, a pistol in his pocket and a magazine that held more rounds than state law allows, according to court documents reported by The Boston Herald.
Culotta had no Massachusetts license. Two judges found him dangerous under a state law that allows people charged with certain gun crimes to be held without bail for up to 120 days. Three bail requests failed. Culotta spent 125 days in jail before bail was set at $10,000 once the hold expired, said Toby Leary, chair of the group that put a question to repeal updates to the state’s gun laws.
To gun-rights advocates, Culotta is the face of what’s wrong with Chapter 135, the sweeping firearms law Massachusetts voters will decide to keep or repeal on Nov. 3.
“We’ve seen dozens of people who are caught in the crosshairs, you know, pun intended, of this law for technical violations,” said Leary of the Civil Rights Coalition, the group that petitioned to put the repeal on the ballot. “They’re lawful, peaceful people, but they’re now on the wrong side of Chapter 135.”
But Culotta’s case also shows how hard it is to pin outcomes on one law. Carrying a gun without a Massachusetts license was a crime long before 2024, and large-capacity magazines were already restricted.
Even Culotta’s attorney, Dan Hagan, a Springfield lawyer who has worked with the Gun Owners Action League on several cases, says the case would exist without the new law.
“Kyle’s a problem whether 135 is there or not,” Hagan said. “Even under our existing gun laws, he could be charged with those crimes, many of them.”
Some charges, including the large-capacity counts, have since been dismissed, Hagan said, but a judge denied a motion to dismiss the rest. The case is headed to trial, where Culotta faces felony charges that carry mandatory minimum jail time.
That tension runs through the fight over Question 9. Supporters credit the state’s layered gun laws for the some of the lowest gun crime and death rates in the country. Opponents say the newest layer punishes law-abiding owners while missing criminals. And the most recent federal death data, from 2024, mostly predates the law, leaving both sides arguing over a policy the numbers can’t yet grade.
Gov. Maura Healey signed “An Act Modernizing Firearm Laws” on July 25, 2024, a week after the House passed it 124-33 and the Senate 35-5. As gun-rights groups gathered signatures to suspend the law until a vote, Healey signed an emergency preamble that October, putting most of it into effect immediately.
The 116-page law touches nearly every part of gun ownership in the state. It:
- requires serial numbers on almost all guns, including unfinished frames and receivers and 3D-printed “ghost guns,” and requires people who build guns at home to get a state-issued serial number and register them;
- raises the minimum age to own semiautomatic rifles and shotguns to 21;
- allows school administrators and health care providers ask a court for an extreme risk protection order, known as a red flag order, to take guns from someone deemed a danger;
- Treats Glock switches and bump stocks, devices that make a gun fire automatically or nearly as fast, as machine guns;
- bans carrying guns in government buildings, polling places and schools, with some exceptions;
- creates a real-time electronic registration system and a public dashboard of firearm data.
Repeal would not wipe out the state’s older gun rules. Licensing, safety training and the assault weapons ban already in place before 2024 would remain.
For voters, the first hurdle is the ballot itself. Question 9 is the last of nine statewide questions, and its logic runs opposite to what many expect: A “yes” vote keeps the law. A “no” vote repeals it.
Mike Harris, director of public policy for GOAL, the state’s NRA affiliate, says he wrote the initial draft of the referendum. Because the question asks whether to keep the law rather than whether to repeal it, his side is campaigning for a “no” vote.
When gun owners ask him how to read it, he keeps it simple; he tells them each vote answers one question: Do you want to keep the law?
“Yes, we want to keep the law. No, we don’t want to keep it,” Harris said. For people like him who want the law gone, that means voting no.
What bothers him more, he said, is the official language describing each vote, written jointly by Attorney General Andrea Campbell and Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin. It says a yes vote keeps a law that “increases the regulation of firearms, including ghost guns, machine guns, and assault-style weapons.”
“It’s really electioneering on the ballot,” Harris said. He said his group proposed simpler wording, that a yes vote keeps the law and a no vote does not, and was turned down.
Supporters say the law simply updates the state’s rules for new threats.
“No one policy prevents gun violence; it requires a comprehensive approach that addresses changes in technology and emerging threats facing our communities — that’s what the 2024 law does,” Ruth Zakarin, chair of the Yes on 9 for a Safe Massachusetts campaign, said in a statement. “Eliminating these vital protections would make every Massachusetts resident less safe.”
She rejects the idea that the law takes rights away.
“So no one’s rights to legally own a gun are being taken away,” she told Western Mass News.
The campaign, endorsed by Healey, says it is backed by educators, nurses, law enforcement, survivors, faith groups, labor unions and gun owners. In its official ballot argument, it says the state’s gun death rate is 70% below the national average.
The low rate is real. Massachusetts had the second-lowest gun death rate in the country in 2024, according to CDC data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Massachusetts recorded 287-gun deaths in 2024, according to the Johns Hopkins analysis. Nearly two-thirds, 184, were suicides; 96 were homicides. The overall gun death rate rose 3% from 2023 and is up 27% since 2015. The gun suicide rate climbed 21% in a single year and 44% over the decade.
Early polling favors the yes side. A September MassINC poll found 70% of respondents would keep the law, 18% would repeal it and 11% were undecided.
Opponents say the law’s costs fall on people who were already following the rules.
Leary, who co-owns Cape Gunworks in Hyannis, said instructors he knows have stopped teaching license-to-carry classes because new training rules include live fire and they lack access to a range.
He called “ghost gun” a “made-up propaganda term” for privately made firearms, which Americans have built at home for centuries. The new serial number and registration rules, he argued, reach only hobbyists. “We all know criminals don’t register their guns,” he said.
Zakarian, a former trauma clinician who spent two decades working with survivors of domestic and sexual violence, rejects that argument. “We don’t throw out regulations because some people don’t follow them,” she told GBH.
The official argument against Question 9, which Leary wrote, calls the law a costly bureaucratic overreach. It says the state hasn’t funded the electronic tracking system the law requires and that the rules pull local police away from violent crime.
GOAL’s Harris said gun owners are being charged with possessing restricted firearms they owned before the law’s cutoff dates, often after police seize their guns over an unrelated court order. What could be settled with paperwork when the guns are collected, he said, instead becomes a court case, as authorities “just kind of make people defend themselves after the fact.”
Cases publicized by GOAL cut both ways.
A West Springfield license holder was charged with 12 counts under the new law, including possessing assault-style and untraceable firearms, after officers serving a since-dismissed abuse prevention order found his guns, according to the group. GOAL argues the charges are premature.
Judges have tossed other cases. Charges against a nonresident woman stopped in Palmer with a loaded gun were dismissed after her lawyer argued she fit a travel exception added into Chapter 135. An active-duty airman’s unregistered-firearm charges were dismissed before arraignment, GOAL said. All three were represented by Hagan.
Leary said his coalition sent certified letters to all 11 district attorneys in the state asking how they would enforce the law.
“We didn’t hear back from a single district attorney,” he said.
At least one prosecutor has taken a side. Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden joined join Healey at a Yes on 9 rally in Dorchester, the Herald reported.
“I’d much rather our valuable, limited resources be used to go after the most dangerous element of society,” Leary said, “and not go after the lawful, peaceful segment of society for technical violations.”
The numbers both sides lean on are more complicated than either campaign’s pitch.
Supporters say the law expanded tools to prevent firearm suicide, including broader red flag petitions. Opponents argue the law does little to stop people already willing to break it.
Neither claim can be tested yet. Most of Chapter 135 took effect in October 2024, so that year’s data covers less than three months. The public firearm data dashboard the law created went live in October 2025, but most of its crime and court data starts in 2025, too recent to show a trend.
“We cannot address an issue that we don’t fully understand,” Zakarian told Boston.com.
The state has already spent money putting the law in place. Repeal would force it to suspend or redirect investments in training, licensing systems and technology, according to the official fiscal statement on the ballot question.
Whatever voters decide, the fight over Chapter 135 won’t end on Nov. 3.
Harris said GOAL and allies, including the Second Amendment Foundation, will keep challenging the law in court under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruen decision, which requires gun laws to fit the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
“You can’t really vote away an enumerated right,” Harris said. “We’re not gonna stop. We’re not gonna go away.”
