BRATTLEBORO — David Van Deusen: With any due respect, I call BS on your lies.
The vast majority of Vermonters, including gun owners, want, even demand, sensible gun control, including background checks, a ban on military-grade weapons, and appropriate waiting periods for potential gun owners. Half of Vermonters support restrictions on open-carry.
You are engaging, under the pretense of representing “leftist” views, in the exact same lies and fear tactics employed by the NRA, Trump, and the GOP as they attempt to flood this nation with deadly weapons for only two reasons: profit for and political support from the gun industry. (Incidentally, I have great respect for Senator Bernie Sanders, but he has been wrong about gun control and needs to step up to support the majority of Vermonters.)
You go on about the “minuscule murder rate” here. One murder is one too many. Just days ago, a plan, by another 18 year old, to carry out a massacre at Fair Haven Union High School was thwarted, thanks to a tip-off by a friend.
Vermont could very easily have been the next site for what is an abominable, and preventable, tragedy. Every country on Earth that has adopted strict gun control has seen a sharp and then sustained drop in gun deaths.
We can do this. We must do this.
Your argument to make Vermont an exception is breathtakingly absurd. Anyone with a particle of common sense knows gun control and banning military-grade weapons can work only if it is enacted on a federal level.
You can package it any way you like. If you value owning, without restriction, weapons designed only to kill over our lives, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness at school, at church, at the movies, at a nightclub, in neighborhood parks and on neighborhood streets, and at concerts, you are part of the problem.
Again, I call BS.