April 30, 2018
by John McClaughry
Stephen Halbrook is probably the nation’s leading authority on the role of firearms in Western history. During the passage of the regrettable gun control bill in Montpelier, I was boning up on the views of the early Vermonters on firearms, and I came across Halbrook’s article “The Right to Bear Arms in the First State Bills of Rights: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Vermont, and Massachusetts”. It can be found in volume 10 of the Vermont Law Review that appeared in 1985.
After describing the debates in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Halbrook turns to Vermont, whose founding fathers put Article 16 into Chapter I of the early republic’s constitution. That’s the article in the Bill of Rights that says that Vermonters have the right “to keep and bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State.”
Here’s a quote: “The legacy of Ira Allen, founding father of Vermont, symbolizes the understanding of the right to keep and bear arms in the early republic. This legacy included his constant exercise of this right by carrying pistols for self-protection, his participation in the adoption of the Declaration of Rights which explicitly recognized this right, and his purchase and eventual distribution of 20,000 muskets to the populace. Pistols in the pocket and an arsenal at home were options available to every free citizen of the Green Mountain State.”
There is no doubt that the right of armed self defense was foremost in the minds of this state’s founders. What they would say to Gov. Scott about limiting the number of shells a citizen can defend himself with probably couldn’t be printed in today’s papers.
— John McClaughry is the vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute
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Good one John. Phil Scott and those other idiots were reacting to a unfortunate incidence and not thinking clearly about our true rights. Perhaps they shouldn’t be in public office, if they can’t think more clearly than that.