Democrat politicians in Massachusetts have been touting the supposed public safety benefits of the state's latest gun control law ever since it was rammed through the legislature with little chance for the public to weigh in. Gov. Maura Healey, for instance, called Chapter 135 "the right move we need to make in the state to make it safer."  

Seven months after Healey made that statement, however, statistics show that the city of Boston is actually a more dangerous place than it was a year ago. 

So far this year, gun violence numbers are on pace to rebound, though they still remain near historic lows. This year, 43 people have been shot in the city, including a man experiencing a mental health crisis who allegedly took an officer’s gun and shot himself in the foot near Mass General Hospital Tuesday morning. Eight of those shooting victims have died. At this point in 2024, 29 people had been shot, including four who died.

Gun-related homicides in Boston are up 100% compared to this time in 2024, and non-fatal shootings have increased by about 48%. 

That rise has taken place after Gov. Healey signed Chapter 135 into law, and after she belatedly attached an emergency preamble putting the law into effect immediately. It's true that the governor then delayed implementation of many aspects of Chapter 135, but the areas of enforcement that were pushed back all revolve around legal, licensed gun owners; new training standards for licenses to carry, new testing requirements for firearms approved for sale, and the like. Violent criminals don't care about those provisions, nor would they be affected by them if they were actively being enforced right now. 

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and other city officials are now rolling out their "summer safety plan", with an emphasis on high-risk offenders. 

[Director of the Boston Public Health Commission’s Office of Violence Prevention Isaac] Yablo said the city’s gun violence prevention strategy is centered on “100% engagement with individuals that are most likely to shoot or be shot.” A large part of that work is proactive, through building relationships with at-risk people before a violent incident. And after a shooting, the city uses those relationships to immediately contact victims, connect them with social services and interrupt cycles of retaliation, Yablo said. 

... Bisola Ojikutu, the city’s Commissioner of Public Health, said she considers violence and the legacies of trauma it leaves behind to be a public health priority.

“We still have violent events. We still have this sense of instability sometimes within our neighborhoods,” Ojikutu said. “We want to get to the roots of that. We want to actually fix this problem.”

Note that city officials aren't mentioning Chapter 135 or more longstanding restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms as part of their crime fighting efforts, even though Democrats like Mayor Wu are fully supportive of the crusade to turn the right to keep and bear arms into a privilege. 

And honestly, I doubt many Massachusetts gun owners are opposed to a crime reduction strategy that focuses on those "most likely to shoot or be shot". The problem is that the anti-gun Democrats in Boston (at both the statehouse and City Hall) aren't actually centering their efforts around high-risk offenders or getting to the root causes of violent crime. Instead, they're trying to reduce the number of legal gun owners by blaming the Second Amendment for the actions of violent criminals in places like Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. 

Chapter 135 isn't the public safety success story Healey and others predicted it would be. At a time when violent crime and homicides are plunging in most U.S. cities the numbers are trending in the wrong direction in Boston. I suspect that fact won't result in a change of heart for Democratic lawmakers, but it's something The Civil Rights Coalition and others working to repeal Chapter 135 at the ballot box next fall should be highlighting in their outreach to voters... including those who don't own a gun but have bought into the lie that Chapter 135 will make the state a safer place.