Posted in: General Discussion | History & Reference

Vermont's firearms history is one of those subjects that makes you rethink a lot of assumptions — particularly the ones about which states "get it" on gun rights and why.

The Green Mountain Boys weren't a militia formed out of ideology. They were armed settlers protecting land titles at gunpoint for five years before the Revolution started. That context matters when you read what came after.

Vermont declared itself an independent republic in January 1777, establishing the Vermont Republic — a functioning sovereign nation that issued its own currency, operated a postal system, and maintained its own military for fourteen years before joining the United States.

Fourteen years as a sovereign republic. People forget that. Vermont wasn't dragged into the constitutional carry conversation by lobbyists in the 1990s — it arrived at statehood already having written its own right-to-bear-arms provision, independently, because that's what the people who built the place believed.

The Vermont Constitution of 1777 — drafted at Windsor during a constitutional convention that met while Burgoyne was invading from the north — contained Chapter I, Article 15, which read: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State." This language predates the Second Amendment by fourteen years.

That's not a footnote — that's the whole argument. The Vermont framers weren't borrowing from federal documents that didn't exist yet. They were writing from experience. When you've spent five years turning back sheriffs and militias at rifle-point to keep your farm, the right to bear arms isn't abstract.

When other states began enacting concealed carry permit systems in the 1980s and 1990s, firearms rights advocates in those states began referring to "Vermont carry" or "constitutional carry" as the standard they were trying to reach. Vermont became, somewhat accidentally, the benchmark for firearms freedom — not because Vermont had done anything, but because it had never done anything restrictive.

This is the part that should stick with every shooter who's ever dealt with a shall-issue bureaucracy or a 30-day wait. Vermont didn't fight for anything — it just never let it get taken. There's a lesson there that doesn't get talked about enough at the counter at any gun shop I've been in.

What it also had — and this is the honest version of the story — was one of the lowest rates of firearms violence in the country. Whether that correlation reflects the constitutional carry tradition, the rural demographics, the relative economic homogeneity, or some combination is a question that firearms researchers have never fully answered.

The article's honest enough to not oversell this, and that's the right call. Low violence numbers in rural states with strong gun cultures get used as talking points by both sides, and neither side is ever fully right about why.

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For those of you who carry or have carried in multiple states — how much does the permit regime in a given state actually change how you think about your carry setup day to day?

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Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team