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LITTLETON — The former elastic mill in this small town northwest of Boston looks like a relic, a labyrinth of creaking hallways, staircases, and dead-ends, badly in need of a paint job.
But to gun enthusiasts, “The Mill” is a Shangri-La; the place where you can find just about anything among the scores of gun vendors inside, from ordinary pistols to flamethrowers and World War I antiques — and, especially, all manner of ways around the state’s strict gun laws.
Massachusetts banned assault weapons in 1998, but you’d never know it on a visit there. Some vendors sell decades-old military-style rifles and large-capacity magazines that were grandfathered in by the ban, while others offer newer assault weapons, which they say are modified to make them legal. It’s also easy to buy all the parts to assemble an AR-15 at home.
And the place is growing like gangbusters. The number of gun vendors in the Mill has soared from three to at least 80 in just the last eight years, becoming the single largest collection of federally licensed gun manufacturers and dealers in the country.
Seemingly overnight, the Littleton Mill becomes a Second Amendment Shangri-La
In 2014, the Mill had only a handful of gun tenants. Then the building manager started actively recruiting fellow Second Amendment enthusiasts online. As word spread, more and more came to set up shop at the Mill. Only a handful reported significant in-person firearm sales last year, but combined, Littleton had the 5th-highest number of transactions in the state.
A ramshackle old mill in a Boston suburb is the nation’s top gun hub
A former elastic mill at 410 Great Road in Littleton, Mass. houses the largest cluster of businesses and individuals licensed to manufacture and sell firearms in the nation. The zip codes with the next-highest number of licensees are in Montana and Arizona, but the licensees are spread out, not all in the same building like in Littleton.
Gun industry experts point to the Mill as proof that despite the state’s gun laws, with so many loopholes and so little enforcement just about anyone can get their hands on an assault weapon.
“How easy is it to buy an assault weapon in Massachusetts? The answer is pretty easy. You can literally do it right now,” said Jason Guida, an attorney who specializes in firearms cases and previously served as director of the state Firearms Records Bureau.
Attorney General Maura Healey announced plans for stepped-up enforcement of the assault weapons ban in 2016, promising to target some of the very sales tactics the Mill’s dealers are using now.
But so far, Healey has yet to charge a dealer anywhere in the state for violating the ban, a spokesperson confirmed. She is finishing her second term as attorney general and is
the Democratic nominee in the race for governor.
Many of the dealers at the Mill are openly defiant of Healey. The longtime property manager, Jack Lorenz, even
has a saying: “Healey language is not spoken at the Mill.”
The Globe found 25 dealers who had displayed or posted ads online for weapons and parts that seemed to go against Healey’s directives on assault weapons, which
forbid the sale of their core parts to the general public and hold that cosmetic modifications to the weapons don’t put them in compliance with Massachusetts law.
“It is an open and brazen challenge to the attorney general,” said Guida.
Healey declined to speak to the Globe for this story. Her spokesperson said her office is aware of the Mill, but would not comment on it further.
For their part, gun dealers there said they take great care to follow all laws, and insisted the attorney general’s directives on assault weapons are merely her opinion and are unenforceable without a change in state law.
Dan Landry, a 49-year-old Army vet and owner of Forgotten Bastard Guns at the Mill, said everything in his shop is above-board, despite the dozen partially assembled AR-15s displayed on the wall. Landry explained that he does not sell AR-15s to the public; he only sells customers the parts to assemble them.
“If what we were doing here wasn’t legal, the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] would have shut us down years ago,” Landry said. “But they’re here every year, and the local police are here every year, and nothing has ever happened.”
The sprawling 19th-century industrial building is certainly an unexpected center of gun culture. Littleton is in one of the
deepest-blue parts of Massachusetts, and until recently, the Mill’s anchor tenant was a well-loved community theater.
But around 2014, Lorenz, 87, a cantankerous, liberal-hating machine gun dealer, started actively recruiting gun tenants on the forum
Northeastshooters.com, where he goes by “one-eyed Jack.”
Interest in the space ramped up in 2016, when Healey announced her crackdown on assault weapons.
That year, Jim Finnerty, a product manager at a manufacturing company, set up shop at the Mill, as he was organizing opposition to Healey on behalf of the Gun Owners Action League of Massachusetts. He was soon elected to serve a term as the group’s president, while at the Mill he helped recruit more tenants. Some say he is now master leaseholder to half the gun tenants there, a claim he did not dispute.
By August of this year, 80 tenants with licenses from ATF to manufacture and sell firearms were operating at the Mill. The ZIP codes with the next-highest number of such license-holders were in Kalispell, Mont., with 57, followed by Queen Creek, Ariz., with 52, but they are mostly spread out, not in a single building like in Littleton, according to the Globe’s analysis of ATF data.
Some Mill dealers are crammed a dozen to a room, with little more than a cubical-sized space as their state-mandated “place of business,” no website, and hours by appointment only. Others run full-fledged gun shops with lines out the door on Saturdays.
Combined, last year they reported to the state that they had made nearly 5,000 in-person gun sales. But that doesn’t include what multiple Mill dealers explained is a common type of transaction there: the sale of parts that can be built into guns that would otherwise be banned by the state, either because they qualify as assault weapons, or because they are not on the list of
approved pistols.
The Globe identified 20 dealers at the Mill who displayed or advertised for sale core parts of assault weapons. Dealers also told the Globe that it’s common for dealers to disassemble a banned gun for a customer, then sell the customer some of the parts and enlist a second dealer to sell the remaining parts.
“They’re all in the same room, and they’re all working together, but they’re technically different legal entities,” said Guida, who has represented Mill dealers and customers.
Some dealers insisted this practice is perfectly legal because the state’s gun laws don’t apply to gun parts; they only apply to weapons
that can fire a bullet. Nonetheless, Guida said, he advises against such sales because they could still be prosecuted under other legal doctrines.
Healey has thus far initiated no such prosecution. But a spokesperson for her office said the state assault weapons ban does apply to the core part of the firearm, just as the now-expired federal ban it was based on did.
Littleton Police Chief Matthew Pinard said just a handful of Mill dealers reported substantial sales. The rest, by his assessment, are only there “to skirt the law so that they can possess and shoot weapons that are on the weapons ban.” Licensed manufacturers and dealers are afforded numerous exemptions to state gun laws.
“It’s an expensive hobby, but they can afford the expensive hobby,” he said.
Indeed, the Globe found many Mill dealers have high-paying day jobs: doctors, heads of IT, researchers, financiers, and lawyers at some of the area’s most prestigious firms and institutions.
Clarence Edgar Floyd, a retired military signal intelligence analyst who runs a small shop at the Mill, suggested the place is as much a social club as a business.
“There is a sense of community at the Mill, because we’re all there for the same reason. We all love guns, and this place is our little haven,” he said.
Floyd specializes in machine guns, a niche business because they typically cost $10,000 to $20,000 and few people are licensed to sell and own them in Massachusetts.
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