Massachusetts Gun Charges — How the Law Changed After Bruen, and How We Win These Cases

A gun charge in Massachusetts carries a mandatory minimum sentence of eighteen months in a house of correction — no exceptions, no discretion, no way around it if you are convicted. For many charges, that minimum is five years in state prison. These are among the most aggressively prosecuted cases in the Commonwealth, and the consequences of losing are severe and immediate.

But the law governing these cases has changed dramatically since 2022, and most defendants — and many of their attorneys — do not understand what changed or how to use it. Erkan & Sullivan does. We have been litigating at the front edge of Massachusetts gun law since the United States Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen reshaped the constitutional landscape, and we have been winning in ways that were not possible before.

This page explains how Massachusetts gun charges work, what Bruen and its Massachusetts aftermath mean for your case, and the specific defense strategies we are currently deploying in courts across Essex and Middlesex Counties — including a theory we have now used to obtain three acquittals that the prosecution never saw coming.

Call First: If you or a family member is facing a Massachusetts firearms charge — whether it is an unlicensed possession charge, a school zone charge, a trafficking allegation, or anything else involving a firearm — call us at (978) 474-0054. The window for effective defense opens the moment you are charged and narrows from there.

Massachusetts Gun Charges: What You are Actually Facing

The primary Massachusetts firearms statute is G.L. c. 269, § 10. It criminalizes a range of conduct and carries mandatory minimum sentences that judges cannot reduce regardless of circumstances. The most common charges:

• Unlicensed possession of a firearm (§ 10(a)) — Mandatory minimum 18 months in a house of correction, or up to 2.5 years in state prison if charged as a felony. This is the charge that appears in the vast majority of gun cases.
• Possession of a loaded firearm without a license (§ 10(n)) — Separate and additional charge, stacked on top of § 10(a).
• Possession of a large capacity feeding device (§ 10(m)) — Minimum five year sentence, and mandatory 18 months; this charge survives Bruen because the SJC has held there is no Second Amendment right to large capacity magazines.
• Possession of a firearm in a school zone (§ 10(j)) — Mandatory minimum 2.5 years in state prison (or 18 months in the house of correction), consecutive to any other sentence. One of the most devastating enhancements in Massachusetts criminal law.
• Trafficking in firearms (§ 10(c)) — Federal and state charges often run in parallel; severe mandatory minimums at both levels.

The mandatory minimum structure means that the single most important decision in a gun case is whether to go to trial. A plea to most of these charges means mandatory incarceration. There is almost no benefit to pleading guilty unless a reduction to a lesser charge is obtained. We try gun cases, and we win them.

What Bruen Changed — and What It Means for Your Defense

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). The decision fundamentally altered Second Amendment law and sent shockwaves through firearms prosecution across the country.

Before Bruen, courts evaluated gun regulations under a means-end balancing test — asking whether a law served a legitimate government interest proportionate to its burden on Second Amendment rights. Bruen abolished that framework entirely. Under Bruen, a firearms regulation is constitutional only if the government can demonstrate it is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country at the time of the Founding. If the government cannot point to a historical analogue — a comparable regulation from around 1791 — the law is unconstitutional.

This is a genuinely demanding standard, and Massachusetts has been fighting to defend its gun laws under it ever since. Some laws have survived. Some have not.

What Survived: The Licensing Requirement Itself

The SJC has upheld Massachusetts’ core requirement that residents obtain a License to Carry (LTC) or Firearms Identification Card (FID) to possess a firearm. In Commonwealth v. Marquis (2025), the SJC upheld the post-Bruen licensing scheme as consistent with historical tradition. The Commonwealth can still require a license. What it cannot do is exercise unbounded discretion in deciding who gets one — the old “may issue” system, under which police chiefs could deny licenses for subjective reasons, is gone.

What Changed: The Licensing Requirement Is Now an Element of the Crime

This is where Bruen’s impact is most acute in criminal practice, and it flows from the SJC’s landmark decision in Commonwealth v. Guardado, 491 Mass. 666 (2023).

Before Guardado, the absence of a license was an affirmative defense. The defendant had the burden: if you wanted to argue you had a license, you had to come forward with evidence of it. If you did not, the jury never heard about licensure at all.

Guardado reversed this completely. Because Bruen established that carrying a firearm in public is constitutionally protected conduct, the SJC held that the lack of a license is now an essential element of the offense that the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The burden shifted from defendant to prosecution — entirely.

The Guardado Shift: Before Guardado: possession of a firearm was presumptively criminal; having a license was your defense to prove. After Guardado: possession of a firearm is presumptively lawful; lack of a license is an element the Commonwealth must prove at trial. This is a seismic shift that changes trial strategy in every gun case.

How the Commonwealth Tries To Prove Lack of Licensure

The prosecution has two main methods to prove the Guardado element at trial. First, they can present live testimony from a witness with personal knowledge of the firearms licensing database — someone who can testify about how the database works, what search was conducted, and what it returned. Crucially, the SJC in Guardado noted that a mere affidavit or certificate from the licensing agency will not suffice; the Confrontation Clause requires a live, qualified witness subject to cross-examination.

Second — and this is where the most important defense opportunity lies — they can attempt to use the defendant’s own admission. If a defendant told police “I don’t have a license,” the Commonwealth will argue that statement proves the element.

We challenge both methods aggressively. On the database testimony, we cross-examine the witness on the reliability and completeness of the search — wrong date of birth, wrong name variant, missing records from other jurisdictions. On the admission, we have a more fundamental argument.

The Corroboration Argument: Why an Admission Alone is Not Enough

This is the argument we have been developing and litigating in Massachusetts courts, and it has produced results no one else in this market is achieving. It has two distinct prongs, each independently powerful, and together they create a defense framework that applies to a wide range of gun cases where the prosecution’s primary evidence is what the defendant said.

Prong 1: The Forde Corroboration Rule Applied to the License Element

Massachusetts has long recognized the corroboration rule for admissions and confessions: an extrajudicial admission by a defendant cannot alone sustain a conviction without independent corroborating evidence. Commonwealth v. Forde, 392 Mass. 453 (1984). The rule exists because admissions can be false — people confess to crimes they did not commit, cover for others, misunderstand what they are admitting, or make statements under coercive circumstances.

Post-Guardado, the prosecution frequently tries to prove the license element — the essential new element the Commonwealth must establish — through nothing more than the defendant’s statement to police: “I don’t have a license.” Under the Forde corroboration rule, that admission alone cannot carry the Commonwealth’s burden on an essential element of the crime. There must be independent corroborating evidence that the defendant in fact lacked a license.

We have been pressing this argument in motions for required finding of not guilty and as jury instruction challenges. The database evidence the Commonwealth presents is often the only corroboration — and its reliability is itself a subject of cross-examination. When the database testimony is weak or the witness is unprepared, the corroboration may be insufficient and the charge cannot go to the jury.

Prong 2: The Admission of Ownership Does Not Prove Possession

The second prong is doctrinally independent and in some ways even more powerful. It challenges the most fundamental element of the offense — not whether the defendant had a license, but whether the defendant possessed the firearm at all.

In a typical Massachusetts gun case, police find a firearm in a car with multiple occupants, or in a shared residence, or in a space accessible to more than one person. The defendant then tells police: “That’s my gun.” The Commonwealth treats this as a confession to possession. Case closed.

But under Massachusetts law, a defendant’s extrajudicial admission that a gun belongs to them is not sufficient by itself to prove possession beyond a reasonable doubt. Commonwealth v. Forde, supra; Commonwealth v. Leonard, 401 Mass. 470 (1988). The admission proves that the defendant made a statement — it does not prove the statement was true. A defendant may be covering for a partner, a family member, a friend in the vehicle. The admission of ownership is not the same thing as proof of knowing, intentional control of the firearm.

For sufficiency of the evidence purposes under Commonwealth v. Latimore, 378 Mass. 671 (1979), the question is whether any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements beyond a reasonable doubt. When the only evidence of possession is an uncorroborated admission — with no fingerprints on the weapon, no DNA, no physical evidence linking the defendant to the gun, no independent witness testimony about possession — a required finding of not guilty may be warranted at the close of the Commonwealth’s case.

The Argument We Make at Trial: The prosecution will argue that a defendant’s statement ‘that’s my gun’ is enough to go to the jury. We argue that under Forde, Leonard, and Latimore, an uncorroborated admission of ownership does not establish possession beyond a reasonable doubt when the defendant may have been covering for someone else, and that the Commonwealth must produce independent corroboration of the essential elements it must prove.

This is not theory. It is a track record.

The corroboration argument described above is not a brief we filed and lost. We have won with it — three times in gun cases where the defendant had admitted the gun was theirs. Here is the first of those cases, which Ryan discussed publicly on the Another Not Guilty podcast.

CASE RESULT: Not Guilty — Unlicensed Firearm Possession (“Andy”)

Andy was a young shoe salesman who had been shot six times prior to the events of this case. He faced a charge of unlicensed possession of a firearm carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of 18 months. The Commonwealth’s case rested substantially on Andy’s own admission that the gun was his. We challenged the sufficiency of that admission as proof of both the license element and the possession element, arguing that an uncorroborated statement of ownership does not satisfy the Commonwealth’s burden under Forde, Leonard, and Latimore. We cast doubt on the admission’s reliability and presented the jury with the question of whether the admission alone — without physical corroboration — could establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Result: Not guilty on all charges. Ryan discussed this case on the Another Not Guilty podcast (anothernotguiltypod.com), a national criminal defense podcast. Two additional clients in the following year were acquitted in gun cases presenting the same admission-only fact pattern.

As heard on Another Not Guilty podcast: Ryan Sullivan appeared on the Another Not Guilty podcast — a national criminal defense podcast hosted by LA public defender David Moore — to discuss the Andy case. The episode description: “Defense attorney Ryan Sullivan out of Massachusetts casts doubt on his own client’s confession to win an acquittal on all charges in a gun possession case.” Murat Erkan also appeared in a separate episode discussing the ICE mid-trial abduction case. Find both episodes at anothernotguiltypod.com.

The Full Range of Strategies We Deploy in Gun Cases

Suppression Motions: Keeping the Gun Out Entirely

In most gun cases, the firearm was found during a search — of a vehicle, a residence, a backpack, a person. If that search was unlawful, the firearm and everything the police found with it cannot be used at trial. Without the gun, there is no case.

We have decades of combined experience on both sides of suppression litigation. As prosecutors, Murat and Ryan drafted search warrants and built cases around recovered firearms. As defense attorneys, they use that knowledge to identify exactly where searches went wrong — insufficient probable cause, stale warrants, improper inventory searches, pretextual traffic stops, unlawful extensions of traffic stops under the Terry doctrine.

In Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex Counties, we know the courts, we know the standards different judges apply, and we know which arguments are worth pressing and which are not. A successful suppression motion ends the case before it reaches the jury.

Challenging the Firearm Identification Itself

The Commonwealth must prove the object recovered was a “firearm” as defined by Massachusetts law — a weapon with a barrel under 16 inches, capable of discharging a shot by the action of an explosive. G.L. c. 140, § 121. A ballistics certificate establishing this fact is not automatically admissible; under Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009), the Confrontation Clause requires the Commonwealth to produce the certifying ballistician at trial for cross-examination. We hold the Commonwealth to this obligation.

School Zone Challenges

A school zone enhancement under § 10(j) adds a mandatory consecutive 2.5 years in state prison. The school zone must be established by actual measurement — 300 feet from school property as defined by statute. We challenge the measurement methodology, the definition of the school property boundary, and whether the Commonwealth can establish the location of the alleged possession with sufficient precision to bring it within the zone.

Constructive Possession Challenges

When a gun is found in a shared space — a car with multiple occupants, a bedroom in a shared apartment, a common area — the Commonwealth must prove the defendant had knowing, intentional control of the firearm, not merely that they were nearby it. Presence alone is not enough. Commonwealth v. Romero, 464 Mass. 648 (2013). The presence must be augmented by additional inculpatory evidence. In multi-occupant vehicle cases especially, this requirement creates real doubt — and combined with our corroboration argument, it becomes a powerful basis for acquittal.

Bruen-Based Constitutional Challenges

The post-Bruen landscape is still developing, and we are actively litigating challenges to specific aspects of Massachusetts firearms law as applied to our clients. The historical tradition test requires the Commonwealth to produce historical analogues for every firearms restriction it seeks to enforce. For charges involving weapons types, licensing schemes, or possession restrictions for which the historical record is thin, we are pressing these arguments in the trial courts and preserving them for appeal.

The SJC has recently addressed challenges to the nonresident licensing scheme, the under-21 possession restriction, and the suitability standard. Each ruling shapes the landscape for the next challenge. We follow this litigation closely, appear in it where appropriate, and apply its lessons immediately in our trial court practice.

Questions People Facing Gun Charges Ask Us

Is it true there is a mandatory minimum sentence for a gun charge in Massachusetts?

Yes. For unlicensed possession under § 10(a), the mandatory minimum is 18 months in a house of correction or 2.5 years in state prison — meaning a judge cannot sentence you to less than that if you are convicted. For possession in a school zone, the mandatory minimum is 2.5 years in state prison or 18 months in the house of correction, consecutive to any other sentence. These minimums apply regardless of your background, your circumstances, or any mitigating factors. There is no probation, no suspended sentence, no alternative disposition if you are convicted. This is why going to trial with the strongest possible defense is so often the only rational choice.

The police found a gun in a car I was in. Can I still be charged?

Yes — and this is one of the most common fact patterns we see. You can be charged even if the gun was not on your person, if the Commonwealth can argue you had constructive possession: knowledge of the gun and the ability and intent to control it. But presence in a vehicle where a gun is found, without more, is not enough to prove possession. If you told police the gun was yours, that is the admission we challenge with our corroboration argument. If you said nothing, the Commonwealth’s task is even harder.

I admitted the gun was mine. Is my case hopeless?

No — and this is exactly the situation where our corroboration argument applies. We have obtained acquittals in cases where the defendant admitted the gun was theirs. An admission is not a conviction. We argue that an uncorroborated admission of ownership does not prove possession beyond a reasonable doubt — especially when you may have been covering for someone else, when you were in a shared space, or when the circumstances suggest the admission’s reliability is questionable. Call us before concluding your case is lost.

Can the Second Amendment help me beat a gun charge?

Potentially, depending on the charge and the facts. Post-Bruen, any firearms restriction must be consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Commonwealth’s ability to require a license has been upheld, but the Guardado shift means how it proves lack of licensure at trial has changed entirely. For specific charge types — certain weapon regulations, restrictions tied to status characteristics that lack historical support — we are actively developing and litigating Bruen-based arguments. These are worth exploring in every case.

Can a gun charge be dismissed in Massachusetts?

Yes. A successful suppression motion removes the firearm from evidence, and without the gun the case is typically dismissed. A required finding of not guilty at the close of the Commonwealth’s case — which we pursue where the corroboration argument is strong — results in an acquittal that bars retrial. Trials produce acquittals — we have delivered them in gun cases that looked difficult from the outside.

Talk to Erkan & Sullivan

Massachusetts gun charges are not cases where you can afford to wait or to settle for a lawyer who is not current on the law. The mandatory minimum structure means the stakes are binary: acquittal or incarceration. The post-Bruen shift in how these cases are litigated means there are defense arguments available now that did not exist two years ago. And the corroboration argument we have developed and won with is not something you will find widely deployed elsewhere in this market.

Murat Erkan and Ryan Sullivan have tried gun cases from both sides of the courtroom for decades. They know how these cases are built and how they are taken apart. They are actively litigating the cutting edge of post-Bruen Massachusetts firearms law in courts across the Commonwealth right now.

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