The ritual of power has its theatre, but so does the argument over who may hold a weapon, and on a screen somewhere in Massachusetts this week a congressman opens two cardboard boxes and begins, piece by piece, to put a rifle together. The man at the table is Jake Auchincloss, a Newton Democrat and former Marine Corps captain who led infantry in Afghanistan in 2012, and the unfolding of the rifle is itself the message: as the Boston Globe reported, he has put his own campaign cash behind a 30-second ad, financed by a five-figure buy and aimed at social media before Election Day, urging voters to vote “yes” on Question 9 and keep a sweeping 2024 gun control law in place.
In the ad, Auchincloss pulls the parts of a replica rifle from the boxes and assembles it in real time. “As a dad of three, I order lots of stuff online: Clothes, school supplies, you name it. But you can also order the parts to build an untraceable gun,” he says. “As a Marine, I know that firearms demand training, accountability and responsibility. ‘Yes on 9’ keeps protections against ghost guns and assault weapons in place and helps police solve crimes.”
The long road to the ballot
The law at stake is the one Governor Maura Healey signed two years ago, a wide-ranging statute that barred carrying guns into polling places and government buildings, raised the minimum age for buying semiautomatic rifles and shotguns from 18 to 21, regulated the untraceable “ghost guns” assembled at home, often from 3-D printed parts, and widened the state’s red flag law so that school administrators and licensed health care providers can ask a court to temporarily remove weapons from someone judged a danger to themselves or others. This week the state’s highest court ruled that the provision barring those under 21 from obtaining a license to carry large capacity firearms is constitutional.
It was gun rights activists who pushed the referendum onto the ballot, hoping to repeal the statute. They argue that it tramples the constitutional rights of lawful owners and burdens them unfairly, and they warn that it could leave local police departments enforcing a “confusing patchwork of vague rules.”
There is already a formal campaign on the other side — “Vote Yes for a Safe Massachusetts” — bankrolled by hundreds of dollars in donations, including from the Massachusetts Teachers Association. What is unusual is a sitting member of Congress wielding a weapon in an advertisement for tighter gun rules, and paying for the privilege out of his own campaign account. Auchincloss, first elected in 2020, has made the issue a signature: in 2024 he rebranded his leadership PAC as the Beyond Thoughts and Prayers PAC, dedicated to electing Democrats who would carry gun control legislation in Congress.
The veteran’s arithmetic
Auchincloss said he threw himself into the fight because of what he is — a father and a combat veteran — and because of what he believes the question has become: another front in the wider war over President Trump’s agenda. “Trump’s gun policies are on the ballot in Massachusetts with the ‘No on 9’ campaign,” he said.
Of the weapon he assembles on camera, he speaks with the flat authority of a man who carried one. “I fired these weapons,” he said in an interview. “I know the damage that they can do. An assault weapon is designed to kill humans at range and scale. It’s not a hunting weapon.”
There is a particular figure who appears in every long debate over arms: the soldier who has used them and come home unimpressed by the romance. He is inconvenient to both camps — too familiar with guns to be dismissed as a fearful civilian, too testimony-laden to be waved off by the enthusiasts. Whether his testimony moves Massachusetts remains to be counted. A Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll released Tuesday found just over 57 percent of voters surveyed planning to vote “yes.”