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Carolyn Kaster/AP/APTwo years ago, Massachusetts lawmakers passed "an act modernizing firearm laws." The bill was extensive, and it took aim at everything from ghost guns to devices that arguably convert semi-automatic firearms into automatic machine guns. Now, though, voters have a chance to shoot it down. Ballot Question 9 is a referendum on the law, which critics have been calling overkill that overly burdens firearm owners. Advocates, meanwhile, argue the bill modernizes aging gun laws for a new era, while better protecting residents in a state with one of the lowest firearm death rates in the country. -
Josh Landes/WAMCThe Massachusetts Health and Human Services secretary was in Pittsfield on Wednesday to hear from healthcare providers about the community’s needs. As WAMC Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes reports, they had a lot to tell him.
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Voters in Franklin County, Massachusetts, have approved funding for a new technical school building. At the same time, an effort to combine two regional school districts fell short. -
Over the weekend, hundreds of members of the Wisconsin-based Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community made the long trek east to hold a powwow in Lenox, Massachusetts. As WAMC Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes reports, the ongoing return to ancestral homelands comes after centuries of painful waiting. -
On Tuesday, Oct. 6, residents in 19 Western Massachusetts towns will decide whether to fund a new home for the county’s vocational technical school.
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This week, six towns in rural western Massachusetts will decide whether to merge two regional school districts — citing growing costs and declining enrollment. -
In June, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced opioid overdose-related deaths in the Commonwealth had fallen below 1,000 for the first time since 2013. Citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an annual death toll that had risen to almost 2,400 in 2022 was tallied at 978 in 2025. WAMC's Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes visited a Pittsfield support center recently and found a more complicated picture of how addiction is impacting Massachusetts. -
A quartet of rural Berkshire County mahjong ladies weigh in on gas prices, energy costs, and more ahead of midterms. -
In Massachusetts, a proposal to move an additional 20 million gallons of water a day from a reservoir is drawing fierce backlash.The western Mass. towns entrusted with stewarding the Quabbin Reservoir are once again raising questions of equity as state officials collect feedback. -
Centuries ago, the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican people were driven out of their homelands in the Northeast by European colonists. A powwow in Lenox this weekend will continue the community’s work to reestablish millennia-old ties with the region. -
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a press release that there’s evidence that more than 270 clerics in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester abused nearly 1,000 children. -
Nor’easter or not, hundreds of volunteers gathered up and down the Pioneer Valley over the weekend to clean up the waterways that power ecosystems throughout the Northeast.
