Ethan Sonneborn says that if he were governor, he would sign gun-reform legislation that is expected to pass the Vermont Senate today after the past week’s debate and more than a month of wrangling with the details. But he would also back an assault weapons ban not included in the bill or any other being considered by the state’s lawmakers.
The eighth-grader, 13 years old, is running as a Democrat in the state’s August primary. He won’t be able to vote for himself, but if enough other Vermonters do, he could be Governor Sonneborn come January because the state has no minimum age for the top post.
As extremely unlikely as that outcome appears, so did some some of the provisions contained in a gun reform bill—S.55—that seems to be headed by day’s end to the current governor for his signature.
As it now stands, the bill already passed by the House would raise the age for gun purchases from 18 to 21 for buying any firearm, set bullet capacity limits on gun magazines, ban bump stocks that allow semi-automatic rifles to be fired more rapidly, and extend background checks to private sales of firearms.
A Republican, Gov. Phil Scott—a champion stock car racer who has served in public life for nearly two decades—has a long record of opposing tighter gun restrictions. However, the Valentine’s Day school massacre in Parkland, Florida, and the arrest of an 18-year-old whom authorities say was plotting to shoot people at Fair Haven Union High School in Rutland, Vermont, have spurred Scott and a handful of other Republican politicians to change their stance against tougher gun laws, at least somewhat:
Shaken by the Fair Haven case, Scott has been open to discussing nearly every viable proposal about gun safety and school security.
"This situation led me to believe that we are not immune to what's happening throughout the country," Scott said.
Hard to tell how much of that change of mind is due simply to rethinking the oppositional stance on their own and how much is due to intense lobbying and other work by activists, especially that of teenagers whose efforts together with that of their adult allies produced last Saturday’s “March for Our Lives” in D.C. and hundreds of other cities. About 2,500 people, many of them students, participated in Vermont’s sister march in Montpelier. They’ve also flooded the state capitol to talk with legislators about the need for tougher laws controlling who can own a firearm and what kind.
If young Sonneborn were to be elected, he says that in addition to the provisions now in S.55, he would like to see an assault weapons ban. This is also a provision of the gun reform manifesto of the editors of the student newspaper—Eagle Eye—at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the Parkland massacre occurred at the hands of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who was armed with an AR-15:
"My generation has been taking an important step in this because we’re the ones were getting shot," Sonneborn said. "This affects us directly and people who say it can’t happen in Vermont, we came this close to it happening in Vermont. It will happen in Vermont if we don’t take action."
Bill Banning High-Capacity Gun Magazines Likely to Pass
Some other gun-reform bills in the Green Mountain State have garnered widespread support in the Democrat-controlled state House and Senate. Bill S.221 would let police seek a court warrant to seize firearms from anyone they view as an “extreme risk” to themselves or others. That bill passed the Vermont Senate unanimously. Bill H.422 would allow officers to remove firearms from a person arrested or cited for domestic assault. Anyone who loses firearms to such a seizure would be guaranteed a court hearing within 72 hours, with the guns returned if a judge determines the person not to be a threat.
S.55, on the other hand, has been deeply divisive, with gun-rights advocates intensely opposed. In large numbers, they lobbied on the opposite side as the students during the past month—and most Republican legislators voted against the bill. Those lawmakers succeeded, with considerable Democratic support, in keeping an assault weapons ban out of the bill.
Such a ban has been exceedingly unpopular among many gun owners and the object of massive opposition ever since a federal ban on such firearms was enacted in 1994 under a Democratic Congress and Democratic president, and allowed to expire in 2004 under a Republican president and Republican Congress. After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, an attempt led by Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California to resurrect the assault weapons ban she also pushed in 1994 was defeated overwhelmingly in the U.S. Senate.
Governor Scott also opposes an assault weapons ban. However, he has come around on limiting the capacity of magazines:
"Having the capacity of a 30-round clip, versus a 10-round clip, is drastic," Scott said Tuesday. "It's three times the size. So you can do a lot of damage with that extra size, I believe."
S.55 in its present form includes two such magazine limitations: 10 rounds for rifles; 15 for pistols.
If that provision had previously been on the books, it would not have stopped Cruz in his killing spree. Each of the magazines he used in the slaughter at Douglas High School only held 10 rounds.
Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are already forbidden for all firearms in California, Connecticut, D.C., Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Colorado and New Jersey limit magazines for all firearms to 15 rounds, and Hawai’i limits magazines to 10 rounds but only for pistols. Five of those states allow people to keep larger-capacity magazines they already owned when the laws passed in their states. But in addition to prohibiting sale, purchase, transfer and lending of larger-capacity magazines, California, D.C., Hawai’i, New Jersey, and New York have also outlawed possession. However, the law in California has not yet taken effect because of litigation.
While gun-rights advocates and the National Rifle Association argue that limiting magazines has no effect on gun violence, a couple of very limited studies seem to indicate otherwise:
In 2011, The Washington Post conducted an analysis of statistics kept by Virginia State Police and found that the percentage of crime-connected guns with large capacity ammunition magazines after the federal ban was enacted fell to 10 percent in 2004, the last year of the federal ban, and then steadily rose after it expired, reaching nearly 22 percent by 2010. In addition, the Los Angeles Police Department recovered 38 large-capacity magazines in 2003 and 151 to 940 each year between 2004 and 2010.
To meet concerns of business, adjustments were made in S.55’s magazine limitation. Vermont-based manufacturers of magazines with a capacity larger than the bill allows will be permitted to continue doing so as long as they sell them out of state. And gun shops will get longer to clear their inventory of the larger capacity magazines.
Attorney General T.J. Donovan is one top elected Democrat who favors S.55 because of the background check provision for private sales, but is unsure about the effectiveness of the magazine limits. Asst. Attorney General David Scherr testified to lawmakers that because the bill allows people who already own larger-capacity magazines to keep them, Donovan believes there will be an enforceability problem. How will police be able tell if someone obtained a larger-capacity magazine before the limit was imposed or afterward?
Vermont has a reputation for loose gun laws. Unlike the other 49 states and D.C., it has never required people to get a permit to carry a concealed firearm. Since 2003, 12 more states have opted for the no-permit-needed approach.
For gun-law reform advocates, the question now is how many other state legislatures with lax laws may choose to enact bills similar to—or tougher than—the one Vermont’s governor appears ready to sign. And whether lawmakers who vote against such gun-reform laws will be hurt by at the polls by their stubbornness in the matter.
What we do know for certain is that the NRA made its greatest inroads in state legislatures, that Republicans—with the assistance of gerrymanders, racist voter suppression, and dark money—have gained control of a large majority of state legislatures and made them quite NRA-friendly. They have, of course, done more damage than merely pass lax gun laws. The fight for sane reform depends in the circumstances of a Republican congressional majority on confronting NRA propaganda directly and building support just the way the gun lobby itself has done intensively since the mid-1980s—one state at a time.