On a second topic - I'm trying to put together my thoughts right now - does anyone have a completed testimony they'd like to share? maybe put it in another thread?
OK, this is going to be long as hell, but hopefully it's helpful to others. This is not completed testimony but it is draft text that I pulled together and turned into a number of separate letters to the committee and its members. The final versions will be one letter for each bill that lists all the bills I oppose at the top, followed by "as just one example..." and then taking apart a specific bill or two, followed by a closing urging them to kill the bill in committee or vote against it and sharing with them my willingness to participate in a Colorado-style punishment at the ballot box should they fail to do so. Anyway, here's all that text mashed together. Feel free everyone to grab and use anything that might be helpful:
Dear Elected Official,
I’m writing to you today as a concerned citizen and voter to ask that you take action on a number of bills currently before the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. Specifically, the following bills will provide no improved protection of public safety for residents of the Commonwealth but will directly negatively impact me and many others I know personally as well as burdening the public with unwarranted costs to the public coffers. These bills are:
House Bill 3282 sponsored by Timothy J. Toomey, Jr. – Should this bill become law, it will make the lawful ownership of firearms for self defense, hunting, and competitive sport unobtainable for myself and many others by pricing us out of our Constitutional rights. As most other homeowners in the Commonwealth, I maintain home owner’s insurance and umbrella insurance coverage which financially protects me and provides for financial compensation should someone be injured on or by my property should that be by a fall on my front steps, a bit from my pug, or any manner of other harm. Requiring additional liability insurance over and above this coverage simply for firearms will cost me hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars each year should there even be an insurance company willing to issue such coverage. That added expense does nothing to protect the public from criminals, it simply grows the bottom-line profits of large insurance companies and burdens law-abiding citizens. Those committing crimes with firearms will not stop to be bothered by insurance (just look at the statistics on uninsured drivers) and I don’t wish to have my rights dictated at the discretion of an insurance underwriter.
Further, it is blatantly discriminatory on its face because it ensures that only the rich can afford to exercise a Constitutional right to self defense and other benefits of firearms ownership. In this way, it is no better than the poll taxes and tests that were used to discriminate against African Americans to deny them the right and power to access the ballot box. Further language in the bill advocating for non-existent “safety” devices (such as fingerprint/voice recognition devices) on guns only makes them more expensive, further ensuring a widening gap between those wealthy enough to be able to afford their Second Amendment right and those who cannot afford it.
For these reasons, I urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
House Bill 3257 sponsored by Kevin J. Murphy – I don’t yet own ten firearms, but my wish list for my personal firearms collection certainly numbers more than ten and I know several people who own more than 10 firearms. My wife and my wallet are adequate limitations on the size of my collection. This bill’s limitation is arbitrary and capricious, set for no purpose other than that it’s a nice round number. It does nothing to improve public safety as most gun violence is committed by the career thug or gang member who not only doesn’t bother with applying for a license from the police chief, but likely only owns a single gun – the handgun he bought from the local drug dealer. All it will do is make instant criminals out of those collectors who may have a safe full of cherished family heirloom guns.
Additionally, this bill, should it be made law, is unenforceable on its face. How do you know how many guns I have or how I choose to store them? Unless the state and local police begin systematic and routine inspections of homes with no probable cause beyond “we want to check to make sure” in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, this bill will serve no purpose beyond a “pile on” charge against someone who has already broken multiple other laws to result in a police search of his or her home. In that case, that person is already a criminal facing other serious charges so there is no need to burden the rest of us with an arbitrary and unenforceable limitation.
For these reasons, I urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
Senate Bill 1120 sponsored by Cynthia Creem – After receiving my firearms license and before I decided on purchasing my first firearm, I went to several local ranges with gun rental programs. There, for a small fee, I was able to take one or more handguns owned by the range into their range to test fire. With the help of friends who are experienced firearms owners, this allowed me to select a first gun that “fit” me best such that I could handle and operate it safely to become proficient with it. Should Cynthia Creem’s bill have been law two years ago, I would not have been able to do that due to the restriction of one purchase/rental per 30 days. That restriction would have made my first purchase a relatively “blind” buy – just imagine buying your next car and only being allowed to test-drive one car per month first.
This illogical restriction does not protect the public from any defined danger – the Colorado movie theatre shooter only used one gun after all and most criminals don’t bother going through legal paperwork at a gun store to buy the single handgun they will use to hold up the convenience store. Instead, this bill impacts law-abiding free citizens by making it illegal for me to purchase a matched set of beautiful display pistols.
For these reasons, I urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
Senate Bill 1116 sponsored by Sonia Chang-Diaz – As with House Bill 3282 above, this bill would not only cost me directly in the form of additional costs for home security systems, but is blatantly discriminatory against those of lower income. By the logic of this bill, only those able to afford an expensive home security system deserve the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Beyond this discriminatory test of financial means, this bill suffers from the same problem as House Bill 3257 in that the home security provision is unenforceable without routine home searches or some form of universal records surveillance that would clearly be in violation of Fourth Amendment protections.
For this reason, I urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
House Bill 3253 sponsored by David Linsky – As most other firearms owners in the state, I am a member of a local gun club which I like very much. However, I do not like my club so much that I would trust it to keep my firearms as this bill would require. The bank robber Willie Sutton is famously credited for answering “that’s where the money is” when asked why he robbed banks. I believe that, assuming some clubs were crazy enough to take on the expense and liability risk of actually storing the private firearms of members, we would quickly see these buildings broken into by criminals looking for guns because “that’s where the guns are”. Clubs don’t have armed guards 24/7 or massive vaults like banks, they’re community gathering places that this bill would paint with a bright target for theft. Much better to have my firearms stored securely in my own home where I have control over who enters legally and protection from illegal access by not only my home security system but also the relative anonymity of looking exactly like every other house on the block without a big “come get your guns here” sign out front. In this way, not only would House Bill 3253 not do anything meaningful to increase public safety, but it could be argued, it will actually decrease public safety by making it easier for criminals to steal firearms.
This bill will do a further disservice to the people of Massachusetts by discouraging individuals from seeking professional mental health services. I personally know individuals who have accessed mental health services to successfully address issues ranging from eating disorders to grief counseling to schizophrenia. While a law mandating that people give up their medical privacy in order to exercise a Constitutional right might provide the smallest sliver of a fraction of a chance of preventing a person who should not own a firearm from acquiring one, it will certainly discourage many more people who may be helped by mental health care services from seeking it. For fear that they may lose their firearms or their ability to own firearms in the future, people that could receive help will not get it, causing much greater harm to the citizens than the vanishingly small risk supposedly avoided by this bill. The damage here would be further compounded by House Bill 3430 that would require mental health professionals to report case data to law enforcement. Further, this bill would put law enforcement personnel in the difficult situation of having to act as un-licensed and un-trained medical professionals in the sometimes very nebulous realm of mental health as they seek to interpret medical records disclosed under this provision. What chief of police wants or is able to look at medical records for two individuals both being treated for depression and make the decision that one person may be OK to own a firearm and the other not OK based on those records? All this provision does is further institutionalize the stigma and discrimination against mental illness and the mentally ill as a marginalized and disadvantaged population. Section 11 of the bill further compounds it with its insulting verbiage about an appeals hearing that boils down to “prove to us you’re not insane even though we don’t provide a clear standard of what that means”.
Though it should go without saying, I feel I must also repeat here the same objection to required insurance for firearms that I outlined above for House Bill 3282. This requirement is discriminatory and excessively burdensome and places control over my Constitutional rights into the hands of an insurance company while doing nothing to actually improve public safety. Requiring me to carry insurance doesn’t stop the thug from robbing the liquor store with a pistol and the fine for having an uninsured firearm is a meaningless threat to the thug who’s willing to shoot a store clerk to get the cash in the drawer.
To continue, I have a serious problem with Section 6 of this bill. This is a blatant money-grab that does nothing to protect the public while directly economically harming Massachusetts businesses and me as a firearms purchaser. First, criminals who use guns buy them on the black market or steal them, they don’t go to the local gun store, fill out the state paperwork, and show their state license to buy one. These are not like keeping cigarettes out of the hands of children, you can’t keep them from criminals simply by raising the price for law-abiding buyers. Instead, what this bill would do is drive business out of state. A 25% tax on firearms would make the last handgun I purchased approximately $125 more expensive and that was one of the cheaper guns I was looking at. For many gun buyers this would equate to $200 or more in increased cost. The only rational response we could expect to see from such an increase would be people driving out of state to purchase firearms to have them transferred to dealers in Massachusetts for pickup. To use my last gun as an example, I could go to my local gun store and buy it for $450 today. After this tax, I’d be shelling out $575 – much better to spend $20 in gas to drive to New Hampshire or Maine to spend $450, have them ship it to my local gun store, and pay my local gun store a $35 transfer fee. I end up paying $505 and spending a day instead of a couple hours and a local small business loses a $450 sale in exchange for a $35 transfer fee. This hurts the economy, destroys small businesses, discriminates against lower income residents of the commonwealth, and makes no one any safer today than they were last month.
Sections 17 and 23 of this bill have all of the same flaws I outlined above for Senate Bill 1120. For these reasons, I urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
House Bill 47 sponsored by Deval Patrick – This bill contains all of the same flaws, discriminatory practices, rights infringements, and failures to actually address public safety I have outlined in the previous bills above and, out of respect for your time, I will not repeat them here. I simply urge you to oppose this bill in committee and, should it make it out of committee, vote against it so that it does not become law.
![[rofl]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/013.gif "ROFL [rofl]")
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. I dunno, I guess I'm just idealistic, maybe even to a fault, but I'm not ready to admit defeat, I'm just not and honestly, I dont know that I ever will. Foolish, I know, but this is my home, and I refuse to give up my home and let "them" win. I told my father I will die on my feet a free man before I live on my knees a slave, and that is the truest set of words ever to have flowed from my mouth. 
![[thumbsup]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/044.gif "Thumbs Up [thumbsup]")
