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Lawsuit Challenges Mass. Assault Weapons Ban

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(Michel Euler/AP)
(Michel Euler/AP)

The Gun Owners' Action League and other plaintiffs have filed a lawsuit challenging the state's ban on assault weapons. They argue that the ban is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit also involves a directive that Attorney General Maura Healey issued in July that cracks down on copies or duplicates of forbidden guns, where gunmakers alter a weapon slightly to comply with state law. But the tweaks don't limit how lethal the weapons are.

In a conversation with WBUR, she criticized gunmakers, saying, "They made copycat versions of assault weapons. They even went so far as to market on their website that these weapons were 'Massachusetts compliant.' And when we saw that, we said, that's in absolute violation of black and white letter law here in our 1998 ban on the sale of assault weapons and copycat versions of those weapons."

Guest

Nancy Gertner, former Massachusetts federal judge, senior lecturer on law at Harvard Law School and WBUR legal analyst.

This article was originally published on January 24, 2017.

This segment aired on January 24, 2017.

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