crime

Does progressive Vermont have the nation’s craziest gun laws? That’s certainly what liberals outside of the state seem to think.

The state’s better-known Senator, Bernie Sanders, found himself under fire from his fellow candidates during the 2016 Democrat primary for the crime of having “only” a D- rating from the NRA. In particular, Sanders found himself defending a completely rational vote of his: when in 2005 he voted in favor of legislation granting gun manufacturers legal immunity from being sued by gun victims (just like how we don’t hold General Motors liable for car fatalities).

Despite being one of the most liberal states, if not the most liberal, Vermont surprisingly has a gun culture. 

Then-Democrat primary rival Hillary Clinton specifically attacked Vermont’s lax gun laws (in an attempt at attacking Sanders) as fueling gun problems in other states, but she never went into the specifics of Vermont’s gun laws—or gun crime in the state. Among the criticisms Vermont has received from anti-gun groups includes:

• In 2009, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said that Vermont’s gun laws are the “worst in the nation,” which “lead to the illegal trade of firearms” and that they “put children at risk.”
• The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gives Vermont an “F” on its gun control scorecard.
• Vermont gets a few honorable mentions in a Washington Post article on the “6 Craziest State Gun Laws,” which reports that you can conceal and carry a firearm at age sixteen in the state without a license. The state also has no minimum age to own a rifle or shotgun.
• The Trace (a website started with funding by “Every Town for Gun Safety”) chided Vermont as a “gun rights paradise,” quoting one gun-rights activist as saying that “Vermont, for over 220 years, has never had permits, has never had registration, and has never had any serious gun control laws.”

Vermont sounds like a scene out of Mad Max when described by the anti-gun lobby, but the state’s residents would probably laugh at the characterization. Vermont was the safest state in the nation in 2016, 2017, and 2018, second safest in 2019 and 2020, and the safest in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 

The pattern here is clear – and especially surprising considering how crime-plagued any place run by leftists usually are. 

Gun violence in particular is almost non-existent. According to the Vermont Department of Health, they had only seven gun homicides a year every year from 2011 to 2014. In 2015 the state had twelve, but that fell back to seven in 2016. In a state of 620,000, that’s a rate of 1.12 firearm homicides per 100,000 people in a typical year.

The FBI statistics report only two gun homicides in Vermont in 2012, for a firearm homicide rate of 0.3 per 100,000.

For comparison, the 2021-2022 FBI crime statistics report a gun homicide rate of 66.7 per 100,000 people for St. Louis. The stats for other cities per 100,000 are 61.3 for Birmingham, 49.3 for Portsmouth, 44 for Detroit, 42.4 for Memphis, 37,7 for Milwaukee – and the list goes on. All have among the strongest gun control laws in the nation. 

Some liberals have tried to counter reality by pointing out that Vermont’s gun homicide has risen as of late by a massive percent – but it’s a massive percent of a microscopic number. As per the Associated Press: 

Overall the country had a 6% decrease in national firearms homicides between 2021 and 2022, but Vermont saw a 185% jump, according to Vermont State Police Capt. Shawn Loan.

“So we went from seven firearms deaths in 2021 to 20 in 2022,” he said, adding that he did not have the current total for this year.

It says a lot when you can have a 185% jump in gun homicides – and still have the fewest gun homicides per-capita in the entire country. 

It’s no wonder liberals are quick to criticize Vermont’s gun laws—but never seem to talk about Vermont’s gun violence.

In one of the most incredible attempts at questioning reality itself, USA Today’s Daniel Funke turned criminologist and tried to cast doubt on the obvious link between the “defund the police” movement and rising crime.

Funke ironically framed his ignorance as a fact check of conservatives pointing out that all of the most dangerous cities in America are run by Democrats, questioning that this is because “That is what happens when you defund the police.”

Funke acknowledges in his article that that “Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. recorded its highest increase in the national homicide rate in modern history. And in 2021, 12 cities did break their annual homicide records,” while glossing over that it’s also true that those 12 cities have Democrat mayors. The only point that Funke refutes is that not all 12 cities defunded the police, which he then uses to justify titling his article “No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases.”

Yet, every single city without exception that did defund their police during the insanity of the summer of 2020 and the George Floyd riots did see an increase in crime. Funke pointing out that other Democrat run cities that were weak on crime for reasons other than defunding police does nothing to further his point.

While the homicide rate rose nearly 30% in 2020, the largest year-over-year increase since at least 1905, the gain was even more pronounced in many of the major cities that defunded police, including Portland, which saw a 530% increase in their murder rate, Austin (74% increase), New York (56%), and Chicago’s (54%). While Funke’s “fact check” is specific to police defunding, there are cities that didn’t defund the police but had their police departments crippled by so-called “progressive prosecutors,” which was another major factor in the national crime wave we’re experiencing. Many refer to these prosecutors as the “George Soros DAs” for their tendency to have taken large sums of cash from the far-left billionaire.  

Further destroying what was left of his credibility, Funke also calls into question whether police help that much at all in reducing crime.

He quotes one criminologist at the University of California-Irvine who told him that she’s not aware of any data that illustrates the effect of reducing the police on homicide rates, and that older research suggests there isn’t a definitive conclusion.

There’s a reason Funke only quoted one person’s opinion – and that’s because the fact that police reduce crime is just about the most replicated finding in the field of criminology.

To quote a brief summary of the existing literature:

• In a 2005 paper, Jonathan Glick and Alex Tabarrok found a clever instrument to measure the effects of officer increases through the terrorism “alert levels” that were a feature of the early to mid-aughts. During high-alert periods, the Washington, DC, police force would mobilize extra officers, especially in and around the capital’s core, centered on the National Mall. Using daily crime data, they found that the level of crime decreased significantly on high-alert days, and the decrease was especially concentrated on the National Mall.
• Stephen Mello of Princeton University assessed the Obama-era increase in federal police funding. Thanks to the stimulus bill, funding for Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program surged from about $20 million a year in the late-Bush era to $1 billion in 2009. The program design allowed Mello to assess some quasi-random variation in which cities got grants. The data shows that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower. This is an important finding because not only does it show that more police officers leads to less crime, but that actual American cities are not currently policed at a level where there are diminishing returns.
• A larger historical survey by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary looked at a large set of police and crime data for midsize to large cities from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that every $1 spent on extra policing generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily through fewer murders.

Contrary to the sort-of “police state” rhetoric the left will often deploy, even before the “defund the police” trend, the U.S. employed 35% fewer police per-capita than the world average. In 2018 the U.S. employed 238 cops per 100,000 people, while France employed 429 per 100k, Italy 456 per 100k, Russia 515 per 100k, and Germany 388 per 100k.

We could use a heck of a lot more police – because they reduce crime.