A panel of lawmakers hashing out differences between competing proposals to reform Massachusetts’ gun laws opted to move negotiations into a private setting after one legislator said she was concerned about recent threats from a man who previously harassed her family.
Four Democrats carried a vote to move all meetings into executive session. They cited concerns about future legal challenges to any compromise they produce, personal threats, and the generally divisive nature of politics in the United States after the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Sen. Joan Lovely, a Salem Democrat, said she initially supported debating the bill in public but had a change of heart after a man she said previously stalked, harassed, and threatened the life of her daughter “resurfaced.”
“Knowing what he could be capable of because of his mental health status, that’s why I support going into executive session for this particular conference committee. I think it’s just safer for the conferees,” Lovely said.
Lovely said in 2019, both she and her daughter received “gun threats” from a man who lived in Lovely’s Senate district. The man also threatened a police officer, was arrested, and was “seen” at a local district court where Lovely’s daughter worked as an assistant district attorney, according to Lovely.
The man would follow her daughter at the courthouse and sent “hundreds of emails, very threatening emails” to Lovely, the senator said. The man was eventually arrested and held without bail for over a year while “he was examined for his mental health status,” Lovely said.
Lovely said she even sought a license to carry a firearm in 2020 “to protect my family” because of the threats she received.
The man has since made his presence known again, Lovely said.
“He was actually subsequently released and has left the state of Massachusetts but resurfaced just recently threatening another ADA, a local ADA. And I did receive more content from him through social media, through messaging,” Lovely said. “That’s all been turned over to the police as well.”
Both the House and Senate passed firearms proposals this session that largely hit on the same key issues — untraceable homemade guns and the ability to convert a semi-automatic firearm into an automatic one.
But the two branches diverged enough in their approaches that four Democrats and two Republicans were tasked with finding a compromise, a process that typically plays out behind closed doors and can stretch for months on end with few updates.
Talks on the gun bills initially kicked off in the open view of the public, with one top negotiator, Sen. Cindy Creem, telling reporters a decision had not yet been made on whether all meetings would be accessible.
Creem said Wednesday that she “had expected that these meetings would be open” but would support closing them out of concern that allowing the public to hear discussions “could potentially result in litigation somewhere down the road.”
“In my mind, that would be a reason why executive session would be appropriate in this regard,” she said.
Both Republicans on the panel, Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr and Rep. Joseph McKenna of Webster, voted against the motion to move into executive session. Tarr said one way to maintain public trust is “to keep the proceedings open so that folks can witness what we’re discussing.”
“I would suggest that there are many issues, if not the vast majority of issues that we deal with in the Legislature, that could be the subject of litigation. And to suggest that this particular issue should be singled out because of that prospect, I don’t feel is an appropriate reason to close this committee to the public discussions that I’m hoping that we will have,” he said.
Lawmakers could barely be heard when listening through a door to a room where they were meeting. At one point, a boisterous laugh was clearly heard from the hallway outside the hearing room.
An agenda for the Wednesday meeting circulated by Day’s office said lawmakers were expected to discuss areas of the two bills where the House and Senate “closely align,” “broader topics” covered by both proposals, Senate-only ideas, House-only ideas, and a next meeting date.
Rep. Michael Day, a Stoneham Democrat who has spearheaded firearms reforms in the House, declined to say what lawmakers discussed during the meeting as he left, including any specific areas of agreement between the two branches.
“Look at the bills, you can find out the areas that are in agreement. Right?” Day told reporters. “Certain sections are touched on by both chambers. Certain sections of language that’s very close together. Other sections don’t appear in one of the other bills.”
Pressed on the matter, Day said the panel had a “broad discussion on the ones that are close.”