While the Firearms Policy Coalition’s (FPC’s) recently released State Freedom Index gave the state of Vermont an 81.2% grade, some lawmakers in the Green Mountain State are trying to push that ranking down significantly.
The legislative session in Vermont is quickly winding down, but that’s not stopping anti-gun lawmakers from trying to pass several serious infringements on the Second Amendment rights of lawful gun owners in the state. According to a legislative alert from the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), anti-gun Democrats in Vermont are pushing two omnibus gun bills in an attempt to pass them before the legislature adjourns.
“Last week, Senate Democrats called an emergency meeting of the Rules Committee to suspend the rules in order to introduce S.329, an omnibus gun bill, to join H.606, which is currently pending before the Senate,” the alert stated.
“Earlier in the session, H.606 was heavily amended to remove many of the problematic sections, which NRA has continued to actively oppose. S.329 is a step backward, contemplating many of the previously removed sections and adding another significant policy change to vastly expand gun-free zones in the state, by prohibiting the otherwise lawful carry of firearms in establishments that hold a liquor license.”
H.606 includes sections expanding the list of “prohibited persons,” banning machine gun conversion devices, banning so-called “rapid fire devices,” and creating an FFL and manufacturer liability public nuisance law that would threaten the firearms industry in the state. The liability section was previously amended out, but NRA-ILA said there are ongoing efforts by anti-gun legislators to re-insert the language.
S.329 includes sections expanding the list of “prohibited persons,” banning machine guns and machine gun conversion devices and placing a complete ban on the carrying of firearms in all establishments that serve alcohol for consumption, which would include bars, restaurants and hotels.
To enable members and other gun owners to let their voices be heard on S.329, NRA has provided a “Take Action” button that interested parties can click to send a prewritten letter to their state senator via email.
“S.329 expands the list of prohibited persons under state law to include those who receive outpatient mental health treatment pursuant to a civil court order,” the letter states. “This is out of step with federal prohibited person statutes and removes core constitutional rights from those who present no immediate threat to themselves or others.”
The letter continues: “S.329 also expands unsecured ‘gun-free zones.’ Criminals simply do not discriminate on the locations they choose to target innocent people because of a government gun-free zone sign. These rules do nothing to enhance public safety and only leave peaceable people defenseless. Painting all locations that serve alcohol as places where reckless conduct would occur conflates the issues; there is simply no evidence to support that assumption.”
‘Gun control’ groups are foisting ‘gun control’ on the American public by taking to university campuses to convince law students to pledge to never represent the firearm industry, or its interests, in court.
‘Gun control’ groups are big Shakespeare fans, apparently. They’re taking a page from the famed Elizabethan-era bard’s Henry VI as the next play on foisting ‘gun control’ on the American public.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” Shakespeare wrote in the play.
Two ‘gun control’ groups are putting a 21st Century twist on the line and taking to university campuses to convince law students to pledge to never represent the firearm industry, or its interests, in court.
Call it the long game. ‘gun control’ isn’t satisfied with attacking Second Amendment rights, or even First Amendment rights. Now, they’re targeting Sixth Amendment rights too. That’s the amendment that guarantees the right to be represented by legal counsel.
Giffords Courage to Fight Gun Violence and March for Our Lives, ‘gun control’ groups headed by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords and antigun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, respectively, are canvassing campuses to convince law students to sign a pledge they won’t represent the firearm industry or firearm owners when it comes to protecting and preserving Second Amendment rights. The ‘gun control’ groups’ pledge peddles verifiably false claims to convince the aspiring lawyers that the firearm industry is responsible for violent crime in America.
Not criminals. Not gang violence. Not the illicit drug trade. They’re blaming the industry for crimes committed by violent offenders and ignoring basic legal foundations to sway law students to deny legal services to companies and individuals that follow the law.
Do You Swear?
David Pucino, Giffords’ deputy chief counsel, makes some dubious claims to convince law students that after they earn their juris doctorate, they should sign the ‘gun control’ group’s nonbinding pledge to never represent the legal interests of a Constitutionally-protected industry. First among these misleading claims is that firearms are the leading cause of death for American children.
This is a favorite false talking point among ‘gun control’ groups and antigun politicians, including President Joe Biden. The problem is that it is demonstrably false. The University of Michigan manipulated data sets to include 18 and 19-year-old adults as “children” to boost the figure of childhood deaths to surpass those caused by motor vehicle accidents. When 18 and 19-year-olds are backed out because they’re not children, but in fact adults, that claim falls apart. NSSF demonstrated that here.
Giffords’ pledge website also claims the firearm industry actively opposes “any effort to pass gun safety laws.” Again, this is demonstrably false. NSSF backed the FIX NICS Act, named for the firearm industry’s FixNICS® initiative to get all states to submit disqualifying records into the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). NSSF changed the laws in 16 states and in Congress to get the background check system to work as intended. In fact, NSSF helped create the instant point-of-sale background check system that would instantly inform a firearm retailer if a customer is prohibited from purchasing a firearm.
Pucino urges law student to never work for firms that represent the firearm industry because, in his estimation, the firearm industry “represent some really reprehensible companies that have done some horrible things.”
Never mind that the firearm industry administers the Real Solutions. Safer Communities® campaign that includes FixNICS and Project ChildSafe®, which partners with over 15,000 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and five U.S. territories to distribute over 40 million free firearm safety kits including locking devices. Real Solutions also includes the partner programs with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to prevent illegal “straw” purchases of firearms through Don’t Lie for the Other Guy™ and Operation Secure Store® to help firearm retailers voluntarily increase security to deter and prevent firearm burglaries and robberies. The firearm industry also partnered with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to provide firearm retailers and ranges kits to encourage a “brave conversation” to prevent suicide tragedies.
Persona Non Grata
Giffords and March for Our Lives think these programs are “reprehensible” enough to demand the ATF not work with the firearm industry on these campaigns that have been proven to save lives. Giffords was among 43 other ‘gun control’ groups that demanded the ATF stop working with the industry it regulates.
“Stop funding, partnering, or co-branding programs with the National Sports Shooting Foundation via the Department of Justice and other Federal Agencies,” the letter said, according to The Reload. “No longer should the ATF hold private briefing and training sessions at NSSF’s annual SHOT SHOW without making their remarks available to the public online.”
NSSF pointed out how “unserious” ‘gun control’ groups are with their demands then. They continue to prove that unseriousness now. These ‘gun control’ groups put special-interest political agendas ahead of real answers to keep the public safe. Their answer isn’t to “do something” as they demand. It is to “do something” to ban guns. And now, apparently, it is also to ban legal representation.
Giffords and March for Our Lives rolled out their “pledge” drive at the University of California – Berkeley School of Law, Cardozo School of Law, City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, Vanderbilt Law School and Yale Law School. Pucino said the drive isn’t limited to those schools. Plans are to make it “broad and national.”
The goal is to encourage the aspiring lawyers to flex their legal muscle, putting pressure on law firms that they’ll miss out on talent because these law school graduates will refuse to assist in any cases defending the firearm industry or Second Amendment rights. It’s a tall order.
“There’s certainly the case that the legal system allows for and encourages for everyone to have representation, of course,” Pucino conceded in an interview with The American Independent.
These ‘gun control’ groups might want to read Shakespeare’s Hamlet and flip forward to the line that reads, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
When Democrat Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear recently vetoed two pro-gun measures, lawful gun owners in the Bluegrass State were hopeful that pro-gun lawmakers in the state legislature could garner enough votes for an override.
Gov. Beshear vetoed House Bill 78, which would provide critical liability protections for firearm industry members against third-party misuse of the products they manufacture and sell, and House Bill 312, which would create a provisional concealed carry permit for lawful young adults ages 18, 19, and 20.
On April 14, the state legislature convened for a veto override session and successfully overrode both measures. The override vote totals for HB 78 were 80-19 in the House and 31-6 in the Senate, while HB 312 was overridden by 81-to-18 and 28-to-9 margins.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) had earlier lambasted Gov. Beshear for his veto of HB 312, saying he was “following an anti-gun-rights party line rather than principle.” After the veto votes were counted, however, CCRKBA quickly applauded the legislators’ efforts.
“We are both delighted and proud of the Kentucky legislators who returned to Frankfort for these important votes,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb said in a news release announcing the override.
“By overriding Gov. Beshear’s vetoes, lawmakers in the Bluegrass State have exercised common sense by rejecting political nonsense, which prefers to penalize a lawful industry for criminal misuse of its products, while also practicing age discrimination against young adults by denying them their full rights of citizenship.
Gottlieb added that gun-ban activists around the country should take note of this important victory in Kentucky.
“What happened in Kentucky should be considered a signal to the anti-rights extremists to stop blaming an entire industry for the country’s violent crime problem,” he continued, “and to also stop restricting the rights of an entire age class, which can serve in the military, start businesses, get married, and run for office.”
Ultimately, Gottlieb said that after his organization chastised Gov. Beshear earlier this month for vetoing HB 312, he’s grateful the legislature responded to that call to action.
While the governor has opposed a ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’ and believes in reforming current law to allow medical marijuana users to retain their Second Amendment rights, he was wrong on these vetoes. We congratulate Kentucky legislators for making things right.”
In a news report about the Kentucky veto, NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) also praised pro-gun legislators for seeing the bills through to the end.
“NRA thanks lead sponsors TJ Roberts, Wade Williams, Savannah Maddox, and Josh Bray, all legislators who supported these bills throughout the session, and all NRA Members and fellow Second Amendment advocates who engaged with legislators this session,” the report stated.
Less than a year after promising they weren’t “coming for anyone’s guns,” Rhode Island lawmakers just filed 18 gun control bills — including one that would criminalize possession of firearms purchased lawfully before their last ban even takes full effect.
Remember last year, when Rhode Island Democrats rammed through a sweeping ban on modern sporting rifles — the ones they love to mislabel “assault weapons” — and swore up and down they weren’t coming for anyone’s guns? They were just regulating future sales, they said. Law-abiding owners had nothing to worry about.
Yeah. About that.
At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, Ocean State lawmakers dropped 18 gun control bills in a single package. Not sales restrictions. Not waiting periods. Full-on possession bans. On firearms Rhode Islanders already own. Legally. Before the prior ban has even fully kicked in.
This is exactly what gun rights advocates have been screaming about for decades. And it’s precisely what the gun control crowd has been telling us would never happen.
What’s actually in the package
The 18-bill slate is a greatest-hits album of every Democrat’s wishlist:
A direct assault on the bipartisan Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) via a “public nuisance” liability scheme — the same unconstitutional trick anti-gunners have been trying to run in half a dozen states, designed to bankrupt the industry through death-by-lawsuit.
Gun rationing (because apparently the Second Amendment comes with a monthly quota).
Background checks on ammunition.
Mandatory training requirements.
Mandatory liability insurance to exercise a constitutional right. Try to imagine them requiring this for voting or speech.
And the headline-grabber: outright possession bans on commonly-owned semiautomatic rifles.
The PLCAA-targeting bill is particularly sneaky. It would force firearms manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to implement vague, undefined “reasonable controls” over how they make, sell, and market lawful products — opening them up to ruinous litigation every time a criminal misuses a gun. Which is precisely what Congress passed PLCAA to prevent.
Here’s the tell. A possession ban isn’t a regulation on commerce. It’s the confiscation of lawfully owned property, full stop.
You followed every law when you bought your rifle. You passed the background check. You filled out the 4473. You did everything they told you to do. And now Rhode Island wants to turn you into a felon for owning the same gun they approved you to buy.
Don’t take our word for it. Here’s Rep. Teresa Tanzi, the bill’s sponsor, telling the House Judiciary Committee exactly what she has in mind for firearms her constituents legally own: “We have defined which is dangerous and we have the right to regulate it into nonexistence.”
That’s not a gun safety policy. That’s an agenda.
And it comes less than a year after Governor Dan McKee signed last year’s ban with explicit assurance that the law “allows lawful owners to possess these firearms.” McKee himself has a track record on this — last year he quietly tried to slip an assault weapons ban into his budget proposal after failing to get one through the legislature the honest way.
Virginia gun owners just got another reminder that when anti-gun politicians talk about “public safety,” what they often mean is more control over peaceable citizens.
Governor Abigail Spanberger has signed HB40 into law, adding Virginia to the growing list of states targeting so-called “ghost guns,” the media-approved label for privately made firearms (PMFs) and unserialized frames or receivers.
Under the bill, the Commonwealth is moving to ban the manufacture, transfer, sale, importation, and eventually even possession of unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers unless they are brought into the government-approved serialization system. Most of the law takes effect January 1, 2027, while the possession ban takes effect July 1, 2027.
For generations, Americans have made their own firearms for lawful personal use. It is part of the country’s history, part of the gun culture, and part of the broader understanding that free citizens do not need government permission to build lawful arms for themselves. HB40 tries to end that.
Virginia’s new law goes well beyond banning guns that anti-gun politicians love to talk about. It creates a new section of law targeting unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers.
The bill makes it unlawful to knowingly import, purchase, sell, transfer, manufacture, or assemble covered items without a valid serial number, and it separately makes possession of an unserialized firearm or covered frame or receiver unlawful once the delayed possession provision takes effect. The bill also lays out a process under which a federal firearms licensee can imprint a serial number and retain transaction records.
The political sales pitch is “traceability.” The practical effect is forced serialization, mandatory paper trails, and another step toward turning a traditionally private activity into one that passes through a regulated intermediary. In plain English, Virginia is telling gun owners that if they want to keep a privately made firearm, it has to be registered in a system the government can inspect and track.
Forced serialization is not really about engraving numbers on metal. It is about forcing privately made firearms into a government-legible system.
Once the state knows what you have and where it is, confiscation becomes much easier to enforce. That is why gun owners have long viewed registration schemes not as harmless bureaucracy, but as the foundation for future confiscation.
What makes this law especially dangerous is that it does not truly grandfather in the older, privately made firearms that law-abiding Virginians already own.
Rather than leaving existing guns alone, the state is forcing owners of those firearms into a serialization and record keeping scheme if they want to remain on the right side of the law. That means this is not just a ban on future conduct.
It is a retroactive-style crackdown on possession, with only a narrow set of exceptions for antiques, certain pre-1968 firearms, some nonresidents, law enforcement, and new residents who comply within 90 days.
Under the Supreme Court’s modern Second Amendment framework, the government cannot wave around public-safety talking points and call it a day.
If the plain text covers the conduct, the burden shifts to the government to show a historical tradition of analogous regulation. That is where Virginia has a real problem.
The right to keep and bear arms necessarily assumes a right to acquire arms. And acquisition is not limited to buying from a store. Americans acquire firearms in a few obvious ways: they buy them, inherit them, or make them. A law that directly burdens the lawful making of firearms for personal use is burdening conduct that sits very close to the core of the right itself.
The state will now have to explain where, exactly, this Nation has a historical tradition of forcing peaceable citizens to serialize personally made firearms and place them into a recordkeeping system simply to keep them lawfully in the home. That is a steep hill to climb.
As Mark Smith of the Four Boxes Diner highlighted in his latest video, Virginia’s law also collides with the deeper American tradition of private gunmaking. As Joseph Greenlee explains in the NRA’s amicus brief in Bondi v. VanDerStok, early Americans were not treated like suspects for making their own arms. Private gunmaking was widespread, lawful, and often encouraged in a nation that understood an armed citizenry had to be capable of acquiring arms independently.
That history cuts directly against modern laws that force homemade firearms into a serialized and traceable government-readable system. In other words, Virginia is not preserving an American tradition here. It is breaking with one.
The immediate takeaway is simple: this bad law is on the books, but the key compliance dates are still ahead.
That gives gun-rights groups, affected gun owners, and potentially the Department of Justice time to decide whether and how to challenge it. Gov. Spanberger announced the signing on April 10, and the law’s staged effective dates mean the legal fight may start before the possession ban fully kicks in.
Virginia Democrats are not just regulating criminal misuse. They are targeting the idea that a free American can still make a lawful firearm outside a state-managed chain of custody.
Once the government gets the power to demand serialization and records for homemade firearms, nobody should pretend the fight ends there. The same political faction that says it only wants “untraceable guns” off the street has already shown, over and over again, that it is willing to push through any gun control it can when it has the votes.
Virginia’s HB40 is not just a “ghost gun” bill. It is a challenge to the tradition of private firearms manufacture in America and another example of lawmakers treating the Second Amendment like a regulated privilege instead of a constitutional guarantee.
Gun owners should pay close attention to what comes next, because this law is exactly the kind of measure that could become a serious Bruen test case.
And if the courts are willing to apply the Second Amendment as written instead of as hostile politicians wish it read, Virginia may have a hard time defending this one.
About Duncan Johnson:
Duncan Johnson is a lifelong firearms enthusiast and unwavering defender of the Second Amendment—where “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says. A graduate of George Mason University, he enjoys competing in local USPSA and multi-gun competitions whenever he’s not covering the latest in gun rights and firearm policy. Duncan is a regular contributor to AmmoLand News and serves as part of the editorial team responsible for AmmoLand’s daily gun-rights reporting and industry coverage.
