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.
