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[thesquanderer]

106. The point is that whatever MA did 10 years ago...

...would ultimately be trumped by whichever way the federal laws and supreme court went. That's what answered your question, "were they legal in Massachusetts and illegal elsewhere?"

But as to your other point, I agree. NYC has strict gun control laws right now, for example. This really gets back to a fundamental argument about states' rights. You could have made the same argument about the Affordable Care Act. i.e. a federal approach was not necessary, because nothing was preventing states from implementing better health insurance regulation if they wanted to. Indeed, states like New York and California already had laws that provided many of the same protections that Obamacare brought to the rest of the country. Or for a more extreme example, was federal anti-slavery required? After all, states were free to outlaw slavery on their own, if they wanted to. The question in these cases is then whether there is an over-riding benefit in forcing the "lagging" states to catch up to the more "progressive" states. Sometimes there is, sometimes not. So now we're talking about whether gun control falls into that category or not.