What I am is a very unhappy gun owner, who is faced with the prospect of moving from north Georgia to Mass, most likely Boston. Its a great move for the family and jobs, but a crappy move for my business and my hobby.
Do not move to Boston. I live here in the city, and I'm telling you, there's no reason for it. You can move to any number of towns in Eastern Mass that are very commutable (to varying extents) where you will find a much more gun-friendly atmosphere. I believe you've said in the past that NH is not an option, but I would carefully consider this if you are serious about not dealing with the current legal situation in the Commonwealth.
I'm trying to find a silver lining in all of this, but clearly there is none to be found.
As for chilling - how can you be chill, when faced with this?
Everyone here understands and shares your frustration. But dying an early death from stupid-law-induced hypertension is not the answer. That doesn't mean you can't/shouldn't take steps to make things better for the next guy who moves into MA.
Also, there is this huge red flag where GOAL are concerned. Having looked over the GOAL web site, I don't see any vested interest in them getting the laws changed. The ultimate goal of GOAL should be constitutional carry - no license or training requirement to purchase, posses or carry any firearm regardless of magazine capacity, type, date of manufacture etc. However, a big part of GOAL seems to be providing the training required to get a license. I am assuming they aren't offering this training for free so where is their incentive to eliminate this?
Until you eliminate the training requirement, the requirement for a permit of some sort stays. See what I am getting at?
GOAL does a lot of good work, and much of what they do is heavily dependent upon volunteer labor—people aren't getting rich off of donations/training proceeds. This is not the NRA, which whores itself to any and everyone that wants to sell its members something; from what I can tell GOAL lives very much hand-to-mouth.
Also, bear in mind that there is only so much that can be done with Mass Legislature as it is currently composed, and thus GOAL often has to be content with simply preventing things from getting any worse than they already are. I, for one, am grateful for this.
Probably their most important contribution is helping put a responsible, human face on the gun ownership movement for the sheep. We simply do not have the numbers to make change on a macroscopic level in MA, but eventually we might if we continue to show people that the number of gun owners that are bloodthirsty lunatics is very, very small.
As it happens, this is a "good" time to be a gun owner in MA, because there are a lot of reasons to have hope that there will be meaningful change in the medium-term future. Anyone who has been wanting to make a difference, now is their chance to contribute.
The point that I am finally coming to is that the people here on this forum are, as far as I can tell, on your side. I haven't been around for much longer than you have, but that has been evident to me from the get-go. Yes, things are bad and should never have been allowed to get that way, but if you come in here and act like we all fell asleep at the wheel and have no one to blame but ourselves for the current state of affairs, and demand to see the detailed battle plans, things are going to get ugly.
Stick around. Things are about to get interesting.