Firearms licensing in Massachusetts is administered locally, and most cities and towns publish their own instructions. My Firearms Law Collection has gathered examples from over 225 municipalities. Fifteen ask for a document that G.L. c. 140 does not list, and two departments tell applicants the opposite of what those fifteen do. Whether a department may ask is a harder question than it looks, and the nearest case is thirty-five years old. The landscape around firearms licensing has changed dramatically in recent years, and the language of many municipal applications suggests that cities and towns have not changed with the times.
What was collected
In September 2026, the Firearms Law Collection Project (MassFLC) attempted to capture the public-facing licensing mandates and policies for every Massachusetts municipality. In the end, only around two-thirds of the Commonwealth's municipalities yielded available results.
The entries are published in full, town by town, in the Massachusetts Firearms Law Collection, each with the address it came from, so anyone can review them for themselves. Everything described in this post is available there: if your town is in the collection, you can find it.
Two hundred twenty-nine municipalities publish substantive local instructions. Thirteen publish nothing of their own and route applicants to the state. For roughly thirty more I could not locate a local page, which is not the same as finding that none exists.
What I learned: the bottom line
This post intentionally gets more granular the further you read. Fundamentally, though, municipalities representing over 600,000 of the Commonwealth's residents appear to be requiring firearms applicants to jump through hoops that are not supported by governing law. Good faith debate may exist over whether police departments should be empowered to require references for firearms licensure, but the law itself has moved slowly but surely away from such requirements. At the end of the day, these municipalities may be setting themselves up for legal challenges to their published licensing schemes.
What they ask for
Fifteen departments require letters of recommendation. Most ask for two; some ask for three. Most specify that the writer may not be a relative, and several add conditions about the format of the letter, the signature it must carry, how long the writer must have known the applicant, and the writer's availability to the department afterward.
A smaller group asks for something further: a letter from the applicant explaining why they want to carry. The phrasing varies from department to department, some framing it as the applicant's need and some as their purpose or their reasons. None of it tracks statutory language, because there is no statutory language to track.
What the statute lists
Section 131 of chapter 140 was struck out and replaced effective October 2, 2024 by section 49 of the 2024 act. What remains runs from subsection (a) to subsection (h), and the only document it requires an applicant to submit is a basic firearms safety certificate meeting § 131P.
Section 121F(g) governs the application itself. It provides that the application shall be made in a standard form provided by the commissioner of the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, and that the form requires the applicant to affirm, under the pains and penalties of perjury, that they are not disqualified.
Section 121F(k) governs unsuitability, which is the licensing authority's act to make and to defend. There is no suitability showing for an applicant to pass. A determination of unsuitability must rest on reliable, articulable and credible information that the applicant has exhibited or engaged in behavior suggesting that issuing the license may create a risk to public safety or a risk of danger to themselves or to others, and the licensing authority must then give written notice of the specific reasons.
None of these sections lists letters of recommendation. None asks an applicant to explain why they want a license.
What the Appeals Court has said
The obvious argument is that a department may only require what the statute authorizes. The Appeals Court has addressed something close to it, and the answer went the other way.
In MacNutt v. Police Commissioner of Boston, 30 Mass. App. Ct. 632 (1991), Boston required license renewal applicants to pass a departmental firing test and to pay a range fee. Neither appeared in § 131. The court upheld the firing test. The grant to the commissioner, "without guidelines," of the general power to determine suitability, it held, "necessarily includes any incidental power reasonably related to effectuating the purposes of the granting statute." Id. at 635. Although the statute did not require the licensing authority to ascertain an applicant's skill, it "also does not prohibit a valid test for minimal competency." Id. at 636.
The Supreme Judicial Court has since described MacNutt in exactly those terms, as holding it proper for a licensing authority to condition an unsuitability determination on a test of firearm handling and firing proficiency. Firearms Records Bureau v. Simkin, 466 Mass. 168, 180 (2013).
The standard Simkin was construing has since been rewritten twice. An applicant is not required to prove they are suitable to exercise a constitutional right; the licensing authority must instead establish unsuitability, on reliable, articulable and credible information about behavior the applicant has exhibited.
So a licensing authority was, historically, permitted to impose a condition the statute never mentioned. Anyone arguing that reference letters are beyond a department's power has to deal with that case first, though they have more than recent constitutional change on their side.
The half of MacNutt nobody quotes
The range fee did not survive. Boston's power to charge for services attendant to licensing derived solely from a special act and could be exercised only by ordinance. The fee had been set by the police department instead, and without that authorization it was unlawful. Id. at 637-638.
The same opinion therefore does both things. A condition that operates as an exercise of the licensing judgment may be incidental to the power granted. A condition that is really the exercise of some other power needs its own authorization, and if the department cannot point to one, it fails.
That distinction is worth holding onto, because chapter 140 is specific about who may make rules. The rulemaking grants run to the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, to the colonel of the State Police, to the Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, and to the chief justice of the trial court. None of them runs to a municipal licensing authority. That does not by itself decide anything, and MacNutt shows why: Boston's fee failed not because chapter 140 gave the city no power, but because the power it did have came from a special act exercisable only by ordinance. What the absence does mean is that a department relying on a rule of its own has to be able to say where the rule comes from. And where the Legislature wanted a department to be able to refuse to process an application at all, it said so: § 131P provides that no application for an LTC or FID may be accepted or processed without a basic firearms safety certificate attached. It did the same once more, in § 125, for a dealer-training certificate on a license to sell. Those are the two places in chapter 140 where that power appears, each tied to a single named document.
Why MacNutt may not carry over
The case rests on a description of the licensing power as granted "without guidelines." That was accurate in 1991. It is not a description of the current framework.
There is a second limit in the opinion itself. The court approved the firing test "especially where the applicant's firing of a handgun reasonably can be anticipated from the statement of purpose submitted in support of an application to carry," and expressly reserved the question for licenses sought for a limited purpose unlikely to involve firing. Id. at 636. The statement of purpose is gone. St. 2022, c. 175 removed both the good reason to fear injury element and the licensing authority's power to restrict a license, so the fact the court leaned on no longer exists.
Today § 121F(g) prescribes a statewide standard form. Section 121F(j) enumerates the disqualifying conditions. Section 121F(k) confines unsuitability to behavior the applicant has exhibited or engaged in. And § 131(d) now provides that the licensing authority shall issue a license "only if" the applicant is neither a prohibited person nor determined to be unsuitable, where the pre-2024 text had said "if." Guidelines are what the Legislature has spent two acts supplying.
There is also Simkin, where the court thought an unsuitability determination more vulnerable to arbitrary-and-capricious attack because the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security had promulgated no regulations defining suitability, leaving applicants little guidance on what the standard meant. 466 Mass. at 182. The point there was about the state agency that holds the rulemaking power. But it suggests something about a requirement that lives on a web page and nowhere else: an applicant has no more notice of it, and no more way to test it, than of a rule that was never written down.
What I am not saying
I am not saying these fifteen departments are acting unlawfully. I have found no Massachusetts appellate decision applying MacNutt's reasoning to the current framework, and there are real arguments the other way that anyone relying on this should hear first.
The strongest is Godfrey v. Chief of Police of Wellesley, 35 Mass. App. Ct. 42 (1993), where a revocation was upheld after the licensee refused to cooperate with a police investigation. The court accepted that he might have been within his rights to decline, and held that the remedy for that was not reinstatement of his license. Id. at 47-48. An applicant who simply refuses to produce what a chief asks for should understand that this is the nearest authority, and that it runs against them. Two things about it are worth noting, though. Godfrey concerned a licensee whose license was revoked rather than an applicant, and the investigation was a criminal one into random shootings, not an inquiry into a license application. It was also decided under the open-ended suitable person test that the 2015 amendments replaced.
Section 121F(e) is sometimes offered as a general investigative power. It is narrower than that: it directs the licensing authority to make inquiries of three named state officials, the commissioner of criminal justice information services, the commissioner of probation, and the commissioner of mental health, and in one defined circumstance of the agency that filed a report. The subsection does address one kind of applicant material, the affidavit of a physician or clinical psychologist that an applicant may submit for consideration, and it closes by requiring those officials to cooperate "in any investigation of the applicant." That last phrase is the department's best textual foothold: if the authority conducts an investigation, letters might be called inputs to it. The closed list of addressees cuts the other way. Neither reading has been tested.
And § 131(d) requires a personal interview on an initial application, which shows the Legislature did contemplate individualized process beyond a form.
Two departments read it the other way
Of the 229, two publish the opposite instruction, telling applicants that it wants references identified on the form and does not want written letters. Another department's current guidelines state that the references listed on its application form are not required.
Those departments operate under the same statute as the fifteen. That divergence does not decide anything, but it does show that the stricter reading is not compelled by the text.
If your department asks for something the statute does not list
The practical answer is usually to provide it. Refusing converts a question about paperwork into a delay, and Godfrey is a reminder that non-cooperation can itself become the department's answer.
Keep a record while you do. Save your department's published requirements as they read on the day you applied, note what you were asked for and by whom, and keep the dates. Municipal pages are revised without notice and without any marker that anything changed, which is why the captures behind this post carry dates.
If you are told your application cannot be accepted until you produce something, consider asking for that in writing.
You can check your own department against the statute in the collection: find your town, then read § 131 and § 121F alongside it.
Do not wait indefinitely
There is a clock, and it is the thing most often missed. Section 121F(a) gives a licensing authority 40 days from receipt of a completed application either to approve it or to deny it in writing. Section 121F(v)(2) then allows an aggrieved applicant to petition the District Court within 90 days of notice of a denial, or within 90 days after the expiration of the time limit during which the authority was required to respond.
A department that will not treat an application as complete may argue that the 40-day clock never began, and because the 90-day window is measured from the expiry of that same 40 days, the two questions are tangled together. The safe course is to treat the clock as running from day 41 and to file within the 90 days rather than to litigate later about when it started.
There is a further question the statute does not answer cleanly. Section 121F(v)(2) is written for a person aggrieved by a denial, revocation or suspension, and pure inaction is none of those three. Whether it reaches a department that simply never acts has not been settled, and an applicant in that position may need to consider certiorari or mandamus as well. What is clear is that waiting quietly for a decision that never comes is the one response with no upside.
If your application has been denied, or your department will not act on it until you produce material you do not think it can require, I offer a confidential initial consultation. The record you build before a decision is made is usually worth more than the argument you make afterward.
For a consultation, call (617) 313-3482 or contact the office.