Massachusetts is not the gun-control beacon it once was

NEVER BEFORE had your correspondent been forcibly escorted out of a shop. But when sellers at the Littleton Mill, America’s largest cluster of federally licensed gun dealers, realised they had a reporter in their midst they swiftly kicked her out. Just 45 minutes’ drive north-west of Boston, the old textile mill has operated—in a county that Joe Biden won by a 45-point margin in 2020—for a decade. But tucked behind a fast road, with no signs visible from the street, most locals did not know it existed. That changed when the Boston Globe published an article on it in September. Five months later the Feds raided the place, following the arrest of a 28-year-old dealer for selling guns to a straw buyer that were traced to the scene of a South Boston shooting.