Maine and Vermont boast the two lowest violent crime rates in the nation, and they tie for second lowest murder rate.
The two rural, northern New England states have something else in common: lax gun laws, including the lack of any license requirement to purchase a firearm; no background check requirement for private firearms sales; and no permit requirement to carry a firearm, either openly or concealed.
As Bernie Sanders challenges Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator has been fighting back against claims from Clinton and her allies that his voting record on gun control is less than stellar.
Sanders’ rebuttal sounds a lot like one that could come from a Maine politician. He holds up his home state and its culture of gun safety as a model. “I think the people of Vermont and I have understood for many years that what guns are about in Vermont are not what guns are about in Chicago, Los Angeles or New York, where they’re used not for hunting or target practice but to kill people,” he told NPR in April 2015.
While Sanders has voted for a range of federal gun control measures — and against others — during his time in Congress, he’s indicated that gun control, at least to some extent, should be left to individual states.
The difficulty with that position, of course, is that one state’s relaxed gun laws — especially those related to the purchase of firearms — don’t exist in a vacuum.
While Vermont and Maine have some of the nation’s loosest gun control laws, they’re located close to states with substantially tighter controls governing the purchase, possession and carrying of firearms. So it’s no coincidence that law enforcement authorities in those nearby states — Massachusetts and New York — commonly recover guns whose origins they trace to Maine and Vermont. The gun flow rarely goes the other way.
One example, the Ruger P95 Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev used to kill an MIT security officer and wound an MBTA officer in 2013 four nights after the bombing was purchased outside Portland.
In 2014, law enforcement authorities in Massachusetts recovered 85 crime guns with Maine origins and 25 with Vermont origins. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives traced the origin of 55 crime guns recovered in New York to neighboring Vermont.
New York and Massachusetts have some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. They have license requirements to own a gun, and they require background checks for private sales. It’s no coincidence that Massachusetts and New York respectively have the second and third lowest rates of gun deaths in the country. (Maine and Vermont have gun death rates more than triple the Massachusetts rate and more than double the New York rate.)
But it’s easy enough to purchase a gun in Vermont or Maine, get in a car and drive it to Massachusetts or New York. The fact that nearby states make it much easier to purchase a firearm helps to undermine the full effectiveness New York’s and Massachusetts’ gun purchase restrictions.
To be sure, Maine and Vermont pale in comparison to some southern states as the places of origin for the nation’s problem guns. But the Maine and Vermont examples highlight the difficult balance Sanders would try to strike in advocating for some measure of federal gun control while leaving other decisions to the states, such as waiting periods on gun purchases.
Several aspects of gun control are legitimate issues to decide on a state-by-state basis — the conditions surrounding open and concealed carry of firearms, for example. But the laws surrounding gun purchases should be more uniform.
At a minimum, a Massachusetts resident needs a firearm identification card from his or her local police department in order to purchase and possess a rifle or shotgun. If that resident wants to purchase a handgun, he or she must also obtain a temporary “permit to purchase, rent or lease.” Maine requires no such licenses.
The result of this patchwork of gun laws is that states seeking to address gun violence within their borders are subject to the whims — and often inaction — of every other state.
