Question 9 is the last of nine questions on the November 3 ballot, and it is the only one where a yes vote changes nothing. It asks whether Massachusetts should keep the firearms law the Legislature passed and Governor Healey signed in July 2024. Yes keeps it. No repeals it. Both campaigns spend much of their money explaining that sentence.
We downloaded the Office of Campaign and Political Finance’s ballot question donor file and added up every contribution to both committees. The result is not the story that has been told about this race. Through the end of 2025, the side trying to repeal the gun law had raised slightly more money than the side defending it, and had done so from fourteen times as many people.
This is a full account of what the law does, who is paying for each side, and where the race actually stands.
What you are voting on
Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024, filed as H.4885, signed July 25, 2024. It is a veto referendum under Article 48 of the Amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution, which lets voters overturn a law the Legislature has already passed.
One procedural point matters more than any other and is widely misunderstood. The law is in force right now and has been since October 2, 2024. A referendum petition ordinarily suspends a law until the vote, but Chapter 135 was enacted with an emergency preamble, which prevents suspension. Everything in it is enforceable today, and conduct that violates it is chargeable today, whatever happens in November.
The principal provisions:
It replaces the term “assault weapon” with “assault-style firearm” and defines it by function, using a checklist of features with separate lists for rifles, pistols and shotguns. A semiautomatic weapon with two or more listed features qualifies.
It rewrites the definition of a firearm to capture untraceable weapons, removing exclusions that had kept some self-assembled guns outside the licensing scheme.
It expands the extreme risk protection order law, often called the red flag law, by widening the list of people who may petition a court to remove firearms from someone found to pose a risk. School administrators and licensed health care providers are added to the list.
It adds schools, polling places and government administrative buildings to the places where carrying is prohibited.
It imposes new duties on dealers, including confiscating and reporting expired and suspended licenses and maintaining transaction records accessible to police.
Who is behind the repeal
The Gun Owners’ Action League, the state’s largest firearms owners organization, announced the referendum on August 12, 2024, three weeks after the law was signed. The ballot committee is registered as The Civil Rights Coalition.
The signature drive was not close. The coalition filed 93,229 signatures and 78,707 were certified, against a requirement of 37,287. That is more than double the threshold, and the Secretary of the Commonwealth certified the question for the 2026 ballot on November 22, 2024.
The money is where the conventional account has gone wrong. The single largest reported donation to the repeal effort is $50,000 from Smith & Wesson, given roughly two years ago when the campaign launched, according to CommonWealth Beacon. That is the fact most often cited, and it carries an irony worth stating: Smith & Wesson moved its headquarters out of Springfield, where it had operated since the nineteenth century, to Tennessee in 2023.
But in calendar year 2025, the picture looks nothing like a corporate operation. Our tally of the OCPF file shows The Civil Rights Coalition received 1,050 contributions totaling $144,519.64. The average was $137.64. The median was $50. Sixty-five percent of contributions were under $100. Only thirty were $1,000 or more, and the ten largest together accounted for a third of the money.
The largest 2025 contributions were $21,776 from the Gun Owners’ Action League itself and $10,552.63 from the Old Colony Sportsmen’s Association in Pembroke. Beyond those, the file is a long list of retirees, firefighters, engineers and small businesses giving fifty and a hundred dollars at a time, many of them repeatedly. One Taunton retiree appears eight times in a single year at $1,041.98 each. Hornady Manufacturing, an ammunition maker in Nebraska, gave $1,000.
Who is behind keeping the law
The committee is Yes for a Safe Massachusetts. Its 2025 receipts, by our count of the same file, were $131,639.75 across 74 contributions. The average was $1,778.92. The ten largest contributions made up 85 percent of everything the committee raised.
The largest was $39,900 from the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, with a further $653.10 later in the year. Below that: $10,000 each from AFT Massachusetts AFL-CIO, from former Dunkin’ chief executive Nigel Travis, from Eastern Bank’s Robert Rivers, and from a Waban individual donor. The Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence gave $8,980 and the Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action $8,495. SEIU Local 509, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and SEIU 32BJ each gave $5,000. Giffords gave $1,180.
Then there is the contribution that has defined the coverage. The Massachusetts Teachers Association has given $500,000 to Yes for a Safe Massachusetts, reported by CommonWealth Beacon and the New Boston Post, after MTA delegates voted to back the law at their annual meeting in May. The Boston Teachers Union has endorsed a yes vote.
That gift is not in the file we analyzed, because OCPF’s donor chart covers calendar 2025 and no 2026 chart has been published. It is a 2026 contribution. And it is larger than everything both committees raised in all of 2025 put together, which came to $276,159.39.
What the numbers actually show
Two different kinds of campaign.
The repeal side is a membership operation. Fourteen times as many contributions, a median gift of fifty dollars, two thirds of donations under a hundred dollars, and a donor base that looks like a mailing list of sportsmen’s clubs. That is what a motivated constituency looks like in a campaign finance file, and it is consistent with a signature drive that cleared its threshold twice over.
The keep side is an institutional coalition. Seventy-four contributions, most of the money from ten sources, and those sources are national gun safety organizations, labor unions, and a handful of wealthy individuals. Then a single half-million dollar check from a teachers union in 2026 that changes the arithmetic entirely.
Neither picture is discreditable. They are simply different theories of how to win a ballot question, and the second one is generally the correct theory, because statewide persuasion in Massachusetts is bought in television time rather than raised in fifty dollar increments.
Where the race stands
Badly for the repeal side, on the only public polling we have found. A UMass Amherst survey of 800 registered voters conducted August 5 through 12, 2026, found 70 percent would vote to uphold the law, 22 percent to repeal it, and 5 percent undecided, with a margin of error of 4.4 points.
A 48-point margin seven weeks out is very difficult to close, and the structure of the question compounds the problem. A campaign whose voters must be persuaded to vote no on a question about gun safety, on the ninth line of a nine-question ballot, after most voters have already worked through eight other decisions, is carrying an unusual amount of explanatory weight.
Ballot question polling also moves late and can move hard once advertising starts, and a well funded yes campaign has every incentive to spend rather than coast. The MTA money suggests the yes side is not treating 70 percent as safe.
What happens either way
If yes prevails, Chapter 135 remains law and nothing changes, because it is already in effect.
If no prevails, the law is repealed. What that leaves behind is not the absence of gun regulation but the prior statutory scheme, which was itself among the most restrictive in the country. The pre-2024 assault weapons ban, the licensing structure, and the original red flag law enacted in 2018 would remain. Repeal removes the 2024 additions: the reworked assault-style firearm definition, the ghost gun provisions, the expanded list of red flag petitioners, and the new carry restrictions.
A repeal would also raise questions the referendum itself does not answer, including the status of conduct charged under Chapter 135 between October 2024 and November 2026. That is a real issue precisely because the emergency preamble kept the law operative throughout, and it is the kind of question that produces appellate litigation rather than a clean answer on election night.
Common questions
Does a yes vote keep or repeal the gun law?
Yes keeps Chapter 135 in force. No repeals it. Question 9 is a veto referendum, so the usual intuition is reversed.
Is the law in effect now?
Yes, since October 2, 2024. The referendum did not suspend it because the law was enacted with an emergency preamble.
Who is funding the repeal?
The Gun Owners’ Action League through a committee called The Civil Rights Coalition. Its largest reported single donation is $50,000 from Smith & Wesson at launch. In 2025 it raised $144,519.64 from 1,050 contributions, with a median gift of $50.
Who is funding the effort to keep it?
Yes for a Safe Massachusetts, whose 2025 receipts were $131,639.75 from 74 contributions, led by $39,900 from the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund. The Massachusetts Teachers Association has since given $500,000, reported in 2026.
What does polling show?
A UMass Amherst poll of 800 registered voters taken August 5 to 12, 2026 found 70 percent for upholding the law and 22 percent for repeal, with a 4.4 point margin of error.
Contribution totals, counts, averages, medians and distributions for both committees were calculated by this publication from the Office of Campaign and Political Finance’s 2025 ballot question donor file, covering contributions made in calendar year 2025 and excluding in-kind contributions. OCPF has not yet published a 2026 donor file, so 2026 contributions including the reported Massachusetts Teachers Association gift are not in our tally. The $500,000 MTA figure and the $50,000 Smith & Wesson figure are as reported by CommonWealth Beacon and the New Boston Post and were not independently verified. Signature figures from the Secretary of the Commonwealth as reported. Polling from the UMass Amherst Poll, August 5 to 12, 2026. Provisions of Chapter 135 summarized from the session law and contemporaneous reporting. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice.