A Democrat legislator has proposed a bill requiring mandatory licensing, registration and insurance of firearms in Vermont.

H.520, introduced by Rep. Mike Mrowicki (Democrat of Putney), would require all firearms owners to have a license to possess a firearm and an insurance card indicating that the owner has firearms liability insurance. And it would require that each of the owner’s firearms be registered.

There’s nothing novel about this. The provisions of Mrowicki’s bill undoubtedly have wide acceptance among the gun control activists. This is probably known as the moderate gun control solution, the radical one being a ban on possession of firearms and their progressive confiscation, without compensation, like a harmful substance.

Can you imagine what the Founding Fathers would have thought if, in colonial America, the British overlords had at their disposal a list of every firearm owned by every American.? They would do what they actually tried to do at Lexington and Concord in 1775: send a regiment of soldiers out to seize the weapons and ammunition stored by the patriots to take up when British tyranny became unbearable, as it soon did.

That’s why they installed in our Bill of Rights its Second Amendment, and its Vermont Constitutional counterpart Article 16 – the right to keep and bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state, so the government can’t force the people to disclose where they held their ultimate means of protection against resistance to tyranny.