A pending Vermont bill purports to be designed to “reduce suicide in Vermont, including mechanisms that reduce access to lethal means.”

Despite the veil of social concern, H.230 is flagrantly aimed at gun rights, not suicide prevention. Constitutional questions relating to personal liberties and the Second Amendment are unavoidable. This effort will not prevent suicides: it instead exploits them to push a political agenda.

John Klar

If Vermont’s progressive supermajority rams H.230 into law, it will almost certainly be struck down as unconstitutional. The right to keep and bear arms is a well-recognized fundamental constitutional protection. Government action that impedes that liberty will be subjected to close scrutiny — as it should. The burden will be on the government, in this case the State of Vermont, to prove in court that its suicide-justified infringements are merited.

H.230, which just passed in the Vermont House last week, would require all guns be held in “safe storage,” expand the availability of Extreme Risk Protection Orders, and institute a 72-hour waiting period. The so-called safe storage and waiting period provisions are particularly offensive to basic Second Amendment laws. It is unclear how Vermont’s attorney general could pervert the language of clear supreme court precedents to approve of H.230, especially after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia specifically identified a trigger lock as a violation in Heller. How much more of a transgression is a requirement to lock guns in cabinets.

The very purpose of a gun is to have it handy — not locked up — in the event of need. In the case of the waiting period requirement of H.230, the argument is that this will prevent suicidal people from buying guns for self-harm. But this ignores the countervailing need for citizens placed suddenly in fear for their safety to obtain a weapon to protect their lives, especially women victims of domestic abuse.

There appears to be no consideration of the rights of self-protection in H.230. Attorney General Charity Clark has endorsed a statute that will prevent women from defending themselves because they had to wait to buy a gun, or had to keep their gun locked up while their psycho-ex broke down the bedroom door. 

Fortunately, the United States Supreme Court protects these women, by protecting them from grossly distorted statutes like H.230. McDonald held that the right to individual self-defense is the “central component” of the Second Amendment; Heller specifically criticized trigger locks (similar to gun safes) as making that core purpose impossible.

The Vermont State Constitution plainly states: “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State—and as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.”

This language is very specific in defining this as an individual, and not merely a militia right, as many on the left seek to limit it. Vermont’s laws are historically very respectful of this right, however ignored by its attorney general. Clearly, H.230 directly violates not just the Vermont Constitution, but U.S. Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment.

In deciding whether a statute such as H.230 is permissible, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bruen set forth the standard that “historical analogical assessment” must be employed to demonstrate that a modern gun regulation was similar to government restrictions in American history:

Much like we use history to determine which modern “arms” are protected by the Second Amendment, so too does history guide our consideration of modern regulations that were unimaginable at the founding. When confronting such present-day firearm regulations, this historical inquiry that courts must conduct will often involve reasoning by analogy. … Therefore, whether modern and historical regulations impose a comparable burden on the right of armed self-defense and whether that burden is comparably justified are “‘central’” considerations when engaging in an analogical inquiry. … Analogical reasoning requires only that the government identify a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin.

There was clearly no analogical reasoning employed by Charity Clark. There are no Vermont precedents for locking weapons in home safes, let alone a “well-established and representative historic analogue.” What stretch of logic will Charity employ – child safety caps on Tylenol bottles? There are, in contrast, ample historical precedents of pastors freely keeping their loaded weapons handy during church services in Vermont. There is no jurisprudential credibility in an attorney general willing to ignore clear law this openly.

Meanwhile, to impose these constraints on home weapons, the government must prove a compelling purpose to protect public safety. But there is no evidence that waiting periods (or gun safes) will prevent suicides, just as there is no evidence of how many women might die if unable to purchase a gun to defend themselves from an assailant, or required to lock them in a box when assaulted in the dark of the night.

As Vermont Federation of Sportsman’s Clubs President Chris Bradley recently explained:

Despite an increase of 376,409 firearms in the hands of Vermonters from 2011-2020, there appears to be no appreciable change to Vermont’s rate of suicide by firearm for that same period. … Testimony before House Judiciary revealed 2 incidents where someone went to a Gun Store, bought a gun, and then used that gun to end their lives. 

Vermont Progressives have opened Vermont for business to drug traffickers, undermined economic growth, caused artificial rises in housing prices due to decades of restrictive land-use legislation, and saturated schoolchildren with terrifying active-shooter drills, climate alarmism, and unproven ideological “theories” regarding race and gender. Anxiety, depression, and suicide have spiked, along with drug overdoses. Injection of fentanyl is a very easy and painless path to suicide — but the leftists undermine the police and help the opioids flow. Many more people are dying from drug overdose than gun suicide. But Vermont progressives want to lock up law-abiding citizens’ guns, while not locking up those who break the laws; to stigmatize guns, while destigmatizing drug needles.

If the sponsors of H.230 truly wanted to help prevent suicide, they would become conservatives. Then they could bolster police, support drug interdiction, boost economic growth and housing, and otherwise give Vermont’s young people a fighting chance. Instead, they are mandating padlocks on gun safes, making no one safer.

What Vermont needs is trigger locks on progressive zealots who ignore fundamental liberties in their zeal to accomplish nothing whatsoever beneficial. 

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2023. All rights reserved.