Stun guns aren't legally firearms in Massachusetts unless they look like guns, court rules

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today dismissed a man's conviction on a count of illegal possession of a firearm, because the stun gun police found in his trunk looks nothing like a gun as currently defined by state law.

In practical terms, the ruling does not free Michael Shehadi because, in addition to getting sentenced to two years in prison for possession of the device, he was also sentenced to five years for the two counts of possession of the fentanyl police also found in his car, after waking him up while he was parked at the Squire strip club in Revere early on Aug. 27, 2021. Shehadi had pleaded guilty to the charges but had reserved the right to appeal.

Suffolk County prosecutors argued to keep the illegal-firearms conviction on his record because they charged him under a state law regulating stun guns, which the legislature passed after the Supreme Judicial Court overturned a complete state ban on their possession, ruling that that violated the Second Amendment.

At the center of the legal wrangling in the case was a section of the new law defining the weapons:

[A] stun gun or a pistol, revolver or other weapon of any description, loaded or unloaded, from which a shot or bullet can be discharged and of which the length of the barrel or barrels is less than [sixteen] inches or [eighteen] inches in the case of a shotgun as originally manufactured; provided, however, that the term firearm shall not include any weapon that is: (i) constructed in a shape that does not resemble a handgun, short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun including, but not limited to, covert weapons that resemble key-chains, pens, cigarette-lighters or cigarette packages; or (ii) not detectable as a weapon or potential weapon by x-ray machines commonly used at airports or walk-through metal detectors.

Suffolk County prosecutors tried arguing the definition did not really apply in Shehadi's case "because stun guns are not 'gun-type' or 'bullet-
discharging' weapons," that the legislature only wanted to "exclude covert weapons that are banned altogether in Massachusetts from the firearm regulatory scheme" and that even if you didn't buy that, again, the legislature was only referring to "covert" weapons, and while police had to get a search warrant to find Shehadi's stun gun in his car's trunk, the weapon was not really "covert."

And, prosecutors continued, to think otherwise would be to permit an "absurd result," because the legislature passed the new definition in direct response to, and just four months after, the SJC ruling throwing out the state's complete ban on stun guns, and so the legislature "must have intended to include all types of stun
guns" in its new definition of "firearm."

The appeals court, however, noped out on all of that. The new definition, right down to its placement of semi-colons, is pretty clear, and while the legislature has since amended the firearms law several times since the initial bill passed in response to the court decision, it has never changed the distinction between stun guns that look like traditional handguns and ones that look more like a TV remote or, in the court's phrasing, a "brick."

Case docket, includes links to briefs filed by the DA's office and the defense attorney.