The NRA, the Gun Owners’ Action League, and several firearm dealers and owners filed suit in a Boston federal court on Monday to overturn Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s unilateral expansion of the state’s “assault weapons” ban, the Boston Globe reports.
In July, AG Healey took it upon herself, without legislative approval or anything else, to effectively rewrite a law passed nearly 20 years earlier to ban what she called “copycat assault weapons.” As she wrote, “If a gun’s operating system is essentially the same as that of a banned weapon, or has components that are interchangeable with those of a banned weapon,” then that gun, too, is banned.
As the lawsuit points out, this decree “retroactively criminalizes decades of legal behavior and transactions” and “exposes the plaintiffs and other gun owners to criminal penalties for exercising their Second Amendment rights.” Therefore, the suit argues, the law should be declared “void and unenforceable.”
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