In Lefty Vermont, Folks Say Take Your Gun Laws and Shove Them

Even Ben and Jerry like their guns

It’s a little known fact that the state with the most liberal guns laws — that is to say, basically no gun laws — is granola crunchy Vermont. That’s in part a holdover from its days as a New England Yankee stronghold (Massachusetts and Connecticut, the historical centers of the U.S. arms industry, have since been flipped by leftist drones) and also in part because if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Vermont has a crime rate near zero and that’s the way the residents of the Green Mountain State would like to keep it:

One of the most liberal states in the country also is one of the most passionate about defending the right to bear arms, a fact that is coming to the fore following proposed legislation to expand background checks and add other gun regulations.

Hundreds of Vermont residents are expected to pack the state House chamber for a public hearing Tuesday night on Senate Bill 31, which would expand background checks from retail to private gun sales, step up reporting about people deemed psychologically unfit to have a gun and add state jurisdiction to what is now just federal enforcement of the ban on convicted felons possessing guns.

The bill has drawn strong opposition from powerful gun-rights groups and from Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat and lifelong hunter.

The AP story, dishonestly, tries to pitch this as yeoman farmers and hunters in flannel shirts and orange caps defending their right to hunt — not to keep and bear arms.

“No more gun control bills,” said Bill Moore of Vermont Traditions Coalition. “We don’t need them in the safest state in the nation.”

There’s widespread concern among gun owners about background checks in general, said Evan Hughes, vice president of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs. “A lot of people in the gun-owning community see every step down the regulatory road eventually leads toward registration and confiscation,” Hughes said.

FBI figures showed Vermont was the safest state in the country in 2013, with 115 violent crimes per 100,000 people. That was less than a third the national rate of 368 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

Vermont, by the way, is 95 percent white. Naturally, the bill is sponsored by “the top three Democrats” in the Vermont state senate.

Democrats: unable to leave well enough alone since Aaron Burr.