On Thursday, August 21, 2025, the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners’ Action League, Pioneer Valley Arms, three NRA members, and another individual filed a complaint challenging Massachusetts’s ban on “assault-style” firearms. Following the filing, John Commerford, NRA-ILA Executive Director, issued the following statement:
“Radical gun grabbers in Massachusetts have run roughshod on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens,” said John Commerford, Executive Director of NRA-ILA. “These extreme and ill-conceived laws have created chaos in the Commonwealth, turning lawful gun owners into felons overnight. Today's lawsuit filed by the NRA seeks to end arbitrary bans on commonly owned firearms and begin the process of restoring the constitutional rights of Bay Staters.”
BACKGROUND:
- The case is named Hanlon v. Campbell, and the complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
- Massachusetts generally prohibits the possession, ownership, offer for sale, sale, or other transfer of any firearm defined as “assault-style.” An “assault-style” firearm is broadly defined and includes a myriad of the nation’s most common semiautomatic handguns, rifles, and shotguns. The definition also includes any “copy or duplicate of any firearm” otherwise qualifying under the Act’s definition of “assault-style.”
- In addition to banning the defined “assault-style” firearms and their “copies,” Massachusetts also bans “any firearm listed on the assault-style firearm roster.” This roster is supposed to be compiled, published, distributed to all FDL holders, and posted online three times per year by the Secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, who also has the authority to amend the roster upon his or her own initiative. But the Secretary has not published the “assault-style” firearms roster, nor announced when such roster may be published or which firearms it will include. The lack of any such roster and the Secretary’s ability to change the roster at any time precludes anyone from knowing whether a firearm is or will become prohibited.
- The complaint alleges that Massachusetts’s law violates the Second Amendment, because it bans firearms that are commonly used for lawful purposes, and the Fifth Amendment, because an ordinary person cannot understand what firearms qualify as “assault-style.”
