Gun owners have taken the first step toward putting before Massachusetts voters a proposal to repeal the firearms law signed on July 25 by Gov. Maura Healey, a statute the governor called the “most significant gun safety legislation in a decade.”

A referendum petition seeking to repeal the law was submitted to the state elections division with the signatures of 10 registered voters, the first step in a process which could land the question on the 2026 ballot.

“We started the process in filing a referendum petition to repeal the law,” Gun Owners’ Action League (GOAL) Executive Director Jim Wallace told the News Service. “This is a flat-out ban on the Second Amendment regardless of what they tell people. Regardless of what you feel about guns, the law as it stands is unenforceable.”

GOAL won’t be organizing the referendum effort, a job that Wallace said will be up to a special campaign committee.

“There’s plenty of people who would be willing to step up and take care of that,” he said.

Among its many provisions, the 82-page law includes new strategies for combating untraceable “ghost guns,” expands the “red flag” law that allows a court to take guns away from someone considered a threat to themselves or others, and adds schools, polling places and government buildings to the list of areas where state law forbids people from carrying firearms.

The petitioners are seeking to repeal the law, which is known as Chapter 135 of the Acts of 2024, and a suspension of the law until the referendum question can appear on a statewide election ballot.

A spokeswoman for Secretary of State William Galvin, who oversees the elections division, confirmed the petition’s filing and said that the attorney general’s office has been asked to prepare a summary for the referendum petitions. Once the petition comes back from the AG’s office, the elections division will have 14 days to provide printed petitions to the petitioners.

Petitioners will need to file 49,716 signatures if they want to suspend the law upon the filing of the petitions, and can’t suspend the law if the governor adds an emergency preamble, according to the elections division. Without suspension, they need at least 37,287 signatures to place the question on the state ballot.