House Democrats kicked off a renewed push for a sweeping overhaul to Massachusetts' gun laws Thursday morning with the release of an "updated" bill and a plan to open a vote by the end of the month.
Amid an unresolved cross-branch procedural dispute that entangled an earlier draft, the House now plans to advance a rewrite of the bill by effectively cutting the Senate out of the initial process.
The House Ways and Means Committee will host a public hearing Tuesday -- an unusual step for a panel that typically does not meet publicly without its Senate counterparts -- about the reform legislation, House Speaker Ron Mariano and his top deputies said Thursday. After that, the House plans to bring the bill to the floor for a vote "later in the month," Mariano said.
Mariano told reporters the latest legislation penned by Judiciary Committee Co-chair Rep. Michael Day is "significantly different" than the version he sought to advance over the summer, when gun owners groups mounted vociferous criticism and some representatives appeared to balk.
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The redraft would still require serialization of firearm parts, update the state's assault weapons ban and limit the ability to carry guns in certain spaces, but each of those provisions has been tweaked from the original bill, Day said.
"I think the chairman and his committee responded to the criticisms they've heard, tempered some of their perceptions, and I think we've arrived at a place which makes the commonwealth safer," Mariano said.
Day, a Stoneham Democrat, filed legislation earlier this year that sought to update the state's licensing laws, crack down on untraceable "ghost guns," and more.
Mariano originally said he wanted the bill -- which never received a public hearing -- to win House approval in the summer, but after a series of private meetings with representatives, he pushed the timeline back to the fall.
Senate Democrats wanted the legislation to be reviewed by a different committee than the House proposed, leaving Day's original proposal in procedural limbo. Senate leadership has said it is working to craft its own gun reform bill, but an aide to Majority Leader Cindy Creem said this week it's unclear when a bill itself would be drafted.
Senate President Karen Spilka on Thursday morning confidently predicted that Gov. Maura Healey will have at least some kind of gun legislation on her desk "definitely before the session's over."
On WBUR's "Radio Boston" Thursday, Spilka said she was "happy" that the House is going to take up its own gun bill, and said "it's a pared down version" of the bill that Mariano had originally hoped to pass in July. She said the Senate has been working on its own gun safety legislation, "like it always does."
"I believe Massachusetts should always have the strongest gun safety laws in the country. We'll make sure that whatever gun safety bill that we pass will continue to make us, and ensure that we stay among, the strongest," the Ashland Democrat said. "And we will pass it and I do believe we will have something on the governor's desk, definitely before the session's over. So I'm looking forward to that."
In a departure from the normal process, House and Senate Democrats are writing up proposed gun laws this session without the benefit of the kind of input that legislators collect at public hearings on bills. Scores of bills proposing new gun law policies have still not been aired at public hearings.
