If we're going to be accused of quibbling, the text of Chapter 140 129B reads "and receives such firearm, rifle, shotgun or machine gun,
within the commonwealth shall within seven days after receiving such firearm, rifle, shotgun or machine gun, report, ...". It seems that there are two possibly reasonable interpretations of this text.
- The words "within the commonwealth" are without any meaning, simply thrown in to add to the length of the statute and make it seem more impressive to the uninitiated. In this case, the statute means than if at any time someone brings a firearm into the commonwealth, one is required to have registered that gun within 7 days of originally receiving it. Thus, it would seem that you could only move here and bring guns that you purchased in another state years ago if you had anticipated your future move by registering them with Massachusetts within 7 days of their original purchase (sort of like California's Assault Weapon registration).
- The text means what most of us have always thought it does, namely that firearms must be registered within 7 days of bringing them into the Commonwealth.
Not being a lawyer, I won't venture an opinion as to which one is correct. After all, this is the People's Democratic Republic of Massachusetts.
LenS, while I might take a similar position, since when do written opinions from the FRB carry any more legal weight than one from my barber? Haven't they been repeatedly chastised for issuing such opinions in the past on the grounds that it's nor part of their job?
Ken
Well, I’ve never been very good at quibbling, but if I were to take up the sport, I’d make the following observation.
Section 128B – which we can all admit at the outset is not a model of clarity in the use of the English language – contains two operative conditions, in the disjunctive. One of them appears to be:
“Any resident of the commonwealth who purchases or obtains a firearm, rifle or shotgun or machine gun from any source within or without the commonwealth, other than from a licensee under section one hundred and twenty-two or a person authorized to sell firearms under section one hundred and twenty-eightA,”
and the other of which appears to be:
“any nonresident of the commonwealth who purchases or obtains a firearm, rifle, shotgun or machine gun from any source within or without the commonwealth, other than such a licensee or person, and receives such firearm, rifle, shotgun or machine gun, within the commonwealth . . . .”
(Note that while explicitly stated conjunctively (“and”), these conditions operate disjunctively (that is to say, the requirement of reporting applies to anyone who meets either condition).
Now the phrase of interest (“within the commonwealth”) necessarily modifies “and receives such firearm.” As a result, the question is whether “and receives such firearm” applies to both the first condition or to both conditions.
Under the rules of English grammar, the relation back of a qualifier that follows a list (i.e., does it apply to the whole list or only the last member?) would be signified by whether it was set off by a grammatical pause (a comma). Thus, “A or B, within the commonwealth” differs from “A or B within the commonwealth” because given the former construct, “within the commonwealth” applies to both A and B, while the latter construct signifies that it applies only to B. The problem here is that the phrase in question is immediately preceded by an appositive (“other than such a licensee or person”) and that appositive, though intended to be restrictive, is itself set off in commas (which normally indicates a non-restrictive modifier). So we cannot tell by literal inspection whether the comma immediately before “and receives such firearm” was intended to effect a relation back or merely to close the appositive (which shouldn’t have been preceded by a comma in any event, but was).
How the statute should have been drafted, perhaps, is “Any resident who purchases or obtains . . . and receives within the commonwealth, and any non-resident who purchases or obtains . . . and receives within the commonwealth, shall . . . .” But it wasn’t.
Now the fact of the matter is that the statute may have been drafted as it was because its author envisioned only two scenarios: (a) a resident gets a gun somehow in the commonwealth from a non-licensed source (say, a face-to-face private sale) and (b) a non-resident acquires a firearm outside the Commonwealth and brings it here. If this supposition is accurate, our stalwart draftsman forgot to contemplate a resident of the Commonwealth traveling elsewhere, acquiring a firearm, and then returning home. But, as the Court has said many times, it is not the job of the Courts to supply missing thoughts. And, as noted in the other thread with Len, it is competent for the Commonwealth to require its residents to report actions that they take outside the Commonwealth without violating prescripts against extraterritoriality, in which case the inapplicability to Condition A of the qualifier at the foot of Condition B can be taken to make perfect sense.
Thus, I agree that the words of the statute do not start the running of the 7-day clock against a non-resident until the non-resident brings the firearm into Massachusetts, a result that Massachusetts has no choice in because it has no power over a non-resident until the non-resident does something in Massachusetts. Those words do not, however, compel the same result as to a resident, nor is Massachusetts subject to the same compulsion to hold off until the resident brings the firearm here. Nor is the coin exactly on the edge, since if we parse the awful sentence by dropping the apposition, we necessarily have to drop the commas that enclose it, in which case "and receives" literally applies only to the non-resident.
But then, as I said, I’m not much of a quibbler.
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