The Bartley-Fox Law was co-sponsored by, and named after, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives David M. Bartley and retired judge J. John Fox.
[7] The law was originally intended to come into effect in January 1975, but Bartley led an effort to delay it until April 1 to ensure that the state's citizens were fully aware of the significant penalties.
"[10][11] Despite these efforts, newspapers reported in April that authorities were "swamped" with individuals trying to obtain the legally required gun licenses and firearm identification cards.
[13] Still, a 1981 Gallup opinion poll indicated that 62% of Americans would support state-level legislation like Bartley-Fox, although 58% would oppose any law that would ban handguns—including Massachusetts, which in the same year rejected such a measure for the seventh straight time.
King removed what they called "unfriendly" signs on Massachusetts state borders that advertised the Bartley-Fox Law, in an effort to increase tourism.
In May 1975, one month after Bartley-Fox went into effect, The New York Times reported that year-over-year gun violence was down for April—a "fragmentary kind of statistic, the sort of preliminary number from which it is dangerous to generalize," in the paper's view, but Massachusetts officials saw it as the "first faint suggestion that the tough new legislation may work.
[10][19] Another 1977 study by Deutsch and Alt reported that the law was associated with a decline in gun assaults and armed robberies,[20] though this finding has been challenged by other researchers.
[27][28] In 1989, the Globe noted that crime had increased significantly in the lower-income neighborhoods of Boston, leading "some public officials to question whether Bartley-Fox has lived up to its promise."
"[29] One year later, the Globe reported that increased enforcement of the law had resulted in a reduction in the number of pending cases working through Boston's legal system, from 86 to 8.