Massachusetts lawmakers will take on so-called ghost guns — pitting some gun owners against those favoring more regulation.
Just over six months into the year, Springfield has already surpassed its homicide total from all of last year. State Attorney General Andrea Campbell addressed the killings during a visit last week to the city.
"Now, what people want in Springfield and other places is to be safe," Campbell said Wednesday. "They want guns off the street. They want collaboration from law enforcement and government officials — and community-based organizations that play a role in that."
Campbell pointed to legislation to curb ghost guns, which don't have registered serial numbers.
Chris Lisinski of the State House News Service says House Speaker Ron Mariano wants to pass a guns bill this month.
Chris Lisinski, SHNS: This is a huge package. I believe that it totals 140 pages with a really long list of reforms in terms of ghost gun specific reforms. This bill would require receivers and barrels — two individual gun parts that are very often used to manufacture or assemble firearms at home — to be registered and serialized.
That's something that Campbell herself has pointed to as an important way to help law enforcement get a better handle on where ghost guns are proliferating and track the way that they are being used here in Massachusetts. Because, of course, right now ghost guns are not registered and law enforcement isn't able to get a good sense of where they are and what's happening with them.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Do you know if Senate lawmakers are on the same page when it comes to gun legislation?
We don't really know. Senate President Spilka has signaled in the broadest of terms that she wants action on a gun bill this session, but they have not weighed in on this omnibus 140-page bill filed by Judiciary Committee co-chair Rep. Mike Day. We know that there are some other bills that senators have pointed to — I believe Senate Majority Leader Cindy Creem has a ghost guns-related bill.
To kind of tie that all together, we know that they want to do something. We just don't know exactly what it is on the Senate side.
So let's get a budget update now. The House last week passed a supplemental budget. They packed it with funding for many initiatives, including hospitals, collective bargaining agreements and a renegotiated contract for hydroelectric power from Canada. Chris, the price tag on the overall bill is up near $700 million. Hasn't Gov. Healey already signed a supplemental budget? Where did this one come from?
That's right. Gov. Healey already signed a mid-year spending bill back in May when we were still in fiscal year 2023. This one is a lot of different bits and pieces taken from various bills proposed and House initiatives that kind of just emerged from behind closed doors.
Some of the things in this were actually ideas that Gov. Haley herself had filed earlier in the spring that never made it into a bill like some additional money for Department of Transitional Assistance caseworkers to help manage a rise in demand. There's money in there to help cities and towns deal with rising special education costs — that's another Gov. Healey idea.
So it's really kind of a Frankenstein spending bill assembled from bits and pieces that have origins all over the place in the legislative process.
Three months ago, the state began the process of reassessing eligibility on all 2.4 million MassHealth members. So at its core, this is about who the state can help insure and with which government program. You covered this last week in a story. What should we know, now that we're a quarter of the way through?
We still have not seen the real disruptive impact that state health officials have long been forecasting would happen from this year-long process. Part of that is just because it's been a really slow ramp up through three months. MassHealth has started redetermining eligibility for about 330,000 members. That's out of 2.4 million. So the vast majority have not even been subject to the opening of this process to decide if they will remain eligible for the state's combined Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program.
So we're expecting much more to happen in the months to come. I think that officials have said they think July and August is when they'll start to see the first signs in the data of significant reductions in the MassHealth rolls. But a quarter of the way in, it just has not arrived yet.
