Three Progressive city councilors representing Burlington’s Old North End are urging state lawmakers to pass charter changes that would allow the city to remove guns from individuals suspected of domestic violence, prohibit guns at establishments with liquor licenses and require firearms to be locked and safely stored.
The charter changes, approved by Burlington residents in 2014, have languished in the Legislature, which, along with the governor, must sign off on them before they are enacted.
“We, as local policymakers, call on state and federal officials to join us in acting to prevent further loss and suffering,” Councilors Perri Freeman, P-Central District; Gene Bergman, P-Ward 2; and Joe Magee, P-Ward 3, said in a statement. “At a minimum, the State Legislature should move in the next session to pass Burlington’s 2014 gun safety charter changes.”
The councilors released the call to action on Tuesday, one day after the fatal shooting of Kayla Noonan, a 22-year-old University of Vermont student. Police said Mikal Dixon, a 27-year-old who previously attended UVM, killed Noonan at a North Winooski Avenue apartment and gravely injured another person before fatally shooting himself.
Earlier this month, 21-year-old Hussein Mubarak was shot and killed in the same neighborhood. According to police, there have been 18 incidents involving gunfire in Burlington since the start of the year.
Burlington voters approved the charter changes by a 2-1 margin at a time when Vermont had some of the most lax gun laws in the country. In 2015, the House Committee on Government Operations voted 7-1 against advancing the charter changes. Another push in 2016 also failed.
In an email statement to VTDigger, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger expressed support for charter change and emphasized his initial support for the change in 2014.
“That said, having spent many years in Montpelier advocating for gun violence reforms, I have found Montpelier far more open to statewide reforms than new local regulation,” he said. “I intend to work closely with other mayors, advocates, legislative leaders and our Council to secure new statewide gun violence laws.”
Legally, because the change has already been approved by Burlington voters, it could be reintroduced in the Legislature as soon as next session, according to Magee.
But, Magee cautioned, “the longer (charter changes) sit, the less impact they have in terms of the urgency that legislators would feel to actually enact those changes.”
Before the 2023 legislative session begins in January, the three councilors who released the statement plan to speak with state lawmakers representing Burlington and work to ensure the charter changes “are in the best possible position” to be brought before state legislators again, Magee said.
A prominent argument against the charter changes was that they conflicted with a part of state law called the Sportsman’s Bill of Rights, which asserts that only state government can pass regulations related to hunting and fishing or “the possession, ownership, transportation, transfer, sale, purchase, carrying licensing, or registration of traps, firearms, ammunition, or components of firearms or ammunition.”
The political climate surrounding gun regulation has dramatically changed since lawmakers last contemplated Burlington’s charter changes, however.
Following a school shooting threat about 90 minutes south of Burlington at Fair Haven Union High School in 2018, Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, signed three bills into law regulating guns in Vermont. Together, the new laws expanded background checks, banned bump stocks, raised the legal age of purchase to 21, set limits on magazines, permitted law enforcement to seize guns from a person deemed an “extreme risk” and authorized the confiscation of firearms in instances of domestic violence.
The laws allowing for confiscation of firearms in cases of domestic violence or extreme risk addressed part of what Burlington officials were trying to achieve with the charter changes.
But according to Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden, the current state law contains a problematic loophole. In instances of domestic violence — “which in this case, unfortunately, was the reality behind (Monday’s) murder,” Ram Hinsdale said, given that police have said Dixon and Noonan had a relationship going back years — suspects of domestic violence can argue before a judge to have a family member take the weapon rather than have it confiscated.
Ram Hinsdale says this loophole does not always give survivors peace of mind. “Families can unfortunately be enablers,” she said.
Officers have confiscated weapons at the scene of a domestic disturbance only “a couple times” since the Vermont law was ratified in 2018, according to Deputy Chief Wade Labrecque.
“We are, I guess, fortunate in some ways that a lot of the domestic violence calls that we go to, there’s not a firearm involved,” he said. Courts also sometimes order weapons to be turned over to police in cases involving restraining orders.
According to Bergman, it is too early in the latest discussion to know whether the charter change committee will push for the charter changes to be readdressed in the Legislature or if it will decide to draft new charter changes that would then undergo another citywide vote.
“We need to look at what changes the state has made in relationship to our charter change that we proposed and we need to think about what is the best and most appropriate way to basically reduce the number of guns out on the street,” Bergman said. He said he has already begun preliminary conversations with Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, P/D-Burlington, in the wake of increased gun violence.
Mulvaney-Stanak said that legislative action will not completely solve Vermont’s gun problems but that “it’s a critical piece for starting to claw back the very dangerous and violent culture for which many things have contributed toward.”
She said she believes the stricter gun legislation passed in 2018 only because of the Fair Haven threat and that communities should not need to come “razor-thin close” to tragedy for there to be legislative action.
Vermont House Speaker Jill Krowinski, a Democrat who represents the part of Burlington where the recent shootings took place, said in an email that she “appreciated some of the ideas” brought forward by Burlington city councilors.
“The proposed solutions from the council members were helpful, but I believe we need to go beyond that and think of a robust policy initiative to keep our communities safe,” she said in an email to VTDigger.
Ram Hinsdale said she has received many emails from constituents asking that the Legislature take action. An especially “heartbreaking” one came from one of Noonan’s professors.
“We do have to weigh whether or not a patchwork of laws and a patchwork of policies makes people more or less safe,” Ram Hinsdale said. “I think we’ll have to review all of the charter changes, again, to see which kind of makes sense for Burlington to go out in front on and which should be considered for potential statewide law,” expecting the latter would go before the House judiciary committee instead of government operations.
The Progressive city councilors are also seeking to address individual and community obstacles that may be leading to the increased gun violence.
“This violence is a national epidemic and a public health emergency, and needs to be treated as such,” they said in their statement. “We must pass anti-poverty measures and address the ongoing lack of adequate, state funded mental health, domestic violence, and substance use resources. Further, we must invest in racial and social equity measures such that everyone in our community can fully thrive.”
