Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Good morning. It is fiscal second with

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: the head of the Senate Judiciary. We have Eric Hayes Patrick, who led counsel to do

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: a walkthrough on H-six zero six.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Morning. Eric Espectra from the Office of Legislative Counsel here to talk with the committee about House Bill number six zero six, which has been activating to firearms procedures. No, that's sort of the general nature of the title, that it's several different discrete procedures related to firearms, not all in one thing. Four different sections in the bill, two of them are related. So there's basically three different firearms related issues going on in the bill. So I'll walk the committee through each one, give you a description of what's proposed in each of the sections. And that will, should give you

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: a good introductory walkthrough. Are you looking at draft 1.2? Is that what we're walking through right now?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Nope. We're walking through 8,606 as passed the house. Okay.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Think we've got a proposed amendment in front of us. I think Emery's gonna ask pass by the

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: house. Okay.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: While he's working on that, since we already got started, is the first section?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: First section is the most straightforward one in the bill, I probably can explain it a little bit before we even look at the language. First section has to do with, sort of stepping back for a second, I think everyone remembers on the District Committee that it has to do with property crimes. And in Vermont, remember that the distinction between felonies and misdemeanors with property crimes is monetary. So it all depends whether the amount of property stolen or the amount of property embezzled or amount of property that is subject to the crime is either $900 or more or less than, or sorry, it's $900 or less or more than $900 of course. If the amount of property is $900 or less, it's a misdemeanor, right? If it's more than $900 it's a felony. So a person steals property that's worth more than $900 that's probably a felony. But less than $900 it's a misdemeanor. So with that knowledge in mind, the proposal that in section one has to do with the grand larceny stench. As I said, whether it's felony or misdemeanor depends, and this is a phrase from existing law, depends on whether the money or other property stolen exceeds $900 in value. So the proposal is that if it's a firearm that's stolen, then it's a failure, regardless of the value of the firearm. So you wouldn't have that $900 demarcation between felony and misdemeanor with respect to a firearm. If the property is a firearm, then it's gonna

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: be felony

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: regardless of how much it's worth. So appreciate your vote, actually, on the first section.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: I do have one quick question there. When you say a firearm, do all the loaders come at the plate here?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: No, actually, because you have to recall that firearms define and model out two different ways. Sometimes it includes antiques like a muzzleloader and sometimes it doesn't. For purposes of this provision, it uses the federal firearms definition which doesn't include antiques and muzzleloader. No. Well a lot of

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: them are not antiques, no. I know that you can get rifles, they're still a fellow can possess one

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: and use it. Yeah, think the underlying idea behind the proposal was that, know, you're ever, generally speaking, that the firearm's gonna be just, would only be done for some by a criminal purpose, but that probably wouldn't be the case if someone was speak with someone's murder. So that's why they do not exceed that for the purposes of that change. I can pause for a moment

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: so you can see the way

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: that everyone has the bill now, right? So if you look at page one, lines 14 through 16, that is what I just described in language. So you see, generally speaking, line 14, whether it's a boundary of histamine or depends on the $900 value, or it's a tender felony if the property stone is a firearm of any value. So it doesn't matter about the $900 Although, as you just mentioned, Santa Claus that wouldn't sweep in puzzle loaders and geeks, that sort of thing. So that's section one. Move on. All right, section two, this deals with, actually sections two and three both deal a concept known as prohibited persons or sometimes referred to as Prohibitors. That's categories of people that are prohibited from possessing firearms. All 50 states have Prohibitor Statutes. Vermont has a couple of Prohibitor Statutes. The federal government, Congress, has prohibitor statutes, not an unusual concept at all. And the fact that constitutionally, that's been long held that this general approach is constituted. I'm gonna read you just a phrase from of Columbia versus Heller decision in 2008, which has also been repeated since then in the Bruin decision, which we've talked about a lot in this committee about how it is analyzed by our statute to determine whether they're constitutional or not. So the phrase from BC Hour case has been repeated by lower court at all time, as well as subsequent Supreme Court decisions. And so Heller recognized this Second Amendment right to possess a firearm herself, sorry, personal right that articulated in Heller for the first time. And said that recognizing the right to keep bearers for self defense, quote, does not cast out longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill. So it does not cast out a longstanding prohibition on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill. So recognizing this idea that that's two categories, two prohibitors right there that were recognized in that other case. People who've been convicted of certain violent crimes and people who had mental illness or a mental health issue. So those two categories are are being dealt with in sections two. Section two, we'll take a look at that for background. So look at section two now. That's going be the first category. This is a statute, you look at it, it starts at the very bottom of page one. This is Vermont's, provided with better term felons and possession statutes are often called that, but it really has to do with Vermont has used the term convicted of a violent crime that was passed back in 2015, and that's when Vermont put this statute in a place that says, if you've been convicted certain type of violent crime, you can't possess firearms. Prohibition is unlawful. You turn over on the page, top of page two, and you'll see that the language that's existing law, top of page two, lines one and two, cannot possess a fire unless the person has been convicted of violent crime. Violent crime isn't defined later in statute. And what's the penalty? And that's all that this section gives. It doesn't change this provision of law other than with respect to what the penalty is. Current penalty, you see there, page two, lines four and five, it's a two year misdemeanor. Two years in prison, dollars 1,000 maximum value. Disdemeanor, because two years is terms of veritable decree misdemeanor and felony. What's the proposal? This has to do with second or subsequent offenses. So right now, it doesn't matter whether it's your second, third, fourth, fifth conviction, whatever. It's always the same penalty, two year misdemeanor. The proposal is, if you

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: get convicted of this for

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: a second or subsequent time, in other words, you were already convicted once of possessing a firearm after you've been convicted of one of these violent crimes, so you weren't supposed to have them. You get convicted of that again, then it becomes a three year old. That is on line six and seven for each of them. And that's the only change between that and category of inhibitors. Prohibitors being versus prohibitor. Prohibitor. Of their one. None of rest would check for definitions. Exactly, it's important to include it in context so that your definition, because it really depends on the definition of filing of your eyes,

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: what firearms are included.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: And Senator Norris was given at this, If you look at page two, line 11, Senator Norris, that's the definition of firearm that is based on federal law. As you see, line 16 does not include an antique. And again, not always an antique these days, but the way it's defined is to include matchlock, footlock, similar types of ignition system over on top of page three. And these other muzzleloaders are down on line eight, supply powder, that sort of thing. So all those sorts of firearms you're talking about are not. Of course, you could still possess something or indicate that the first section was a penalty. It's not a felony, the All right, so that's in section two. Section three, which we'll move from a second. Section three deals with a different category of prohibited persons. The other one that I mentioned, that rule passage I quoted from the D. C. Versus Heller opinion, referred to the violence. Person from criminal community will be judged with that. Section three is that second category, people who are prohibited from possessing firearms because of their mental health insurance. That also exists in all 50 states and under federal law, underpass out a handy Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives Chief that defined the federal prohibition. This is helpful to understand because the way the proposed language is structured and the way the law interacts with federal law on this is going be necessary to understand if you're going have to pay how this proposal works. So if you look at the federal law first, this is, and there's an extra there if I can actually All right, so I can say, first of all, that the federal law was written in 1968 and it uses language that everyone would agree is offensive and archaic and it's not used anymore, but I need to repeat it because that's what the law says in federal language. I won't be phrasing it that way otherwise, but I just wanted to put that out there so that everyone can understand and apply strategic terminology. The federal law says that under 18 U. C. Nine twenty two(four) any person who has been adjudicated as a mental defector or committed to immense mental institution is prohibited from possessing firearms under federal law. So that's the term that the federal statute uses. The federal regulations then define, well, what do those terms really mean? You look at the first one, this is within the box of the handout that I passed out, adjudicated as a mental defective. A court board commissioner of local authority has made a determination that the person, as a result of market and subnormal intelligence, mental illness, incompetency, condition or disease, is either danger to himself or others, lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs, was found insane by a court in a criminal case or found in a common denominator, not gonna be very reasonable, that's Sandy, by the end the COVID-nineteen So this is actually related to the bill that the committee just looked at, the forensic facility bill. The same concepts are actually crucial to understanding what's going on here. Because remember, when we talked about the Forensic Facility Bill, the committee was talking a lot about not guilty by reason of insanity and incompetence to stand trial life, competency, stand in front of me. And the procedure, if you remember, is that if the court finds either one of those things, NGRI or lack of competence, that has that here to determine whether or not you're in danger to self or others, are found in danger to self or others, you get committed to the Department of Mental Health. That happens through the criminal process forensically. It can also happen in the civil process in the family division. Person, an interested person can bring a case in the family division if they think you're a danger to yourself or others. As a result of a mental illness, you can get committed through the civil process as well as through the criminal. And important to understand, because remember, in Vermont that that requires impetus to be committed to mental illness or endanger itself or others. This federal statute for who's prohibited from possessing a firearm is broader than that. It's not just mental illness, it's not

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: a normal

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: intelligence, condition or disease. And it's not just dangerousness. That's only one of the reasons that getting granted it on the federal law. Dangerous, lacks mental capacity to contract or manage your own affairs. That could be, for example, someone who's subject to a guardianship, involuntary guardianship. Not necessarily dangerous at all, but it could be a family member who has a great guardianship condition who can't manage your own affairs. So it's broader than who have to be, can be committed under federal law, sorry, under state law. Additionally, one thing to remember about this federal prohibition is that it's permanent, right? If one of these things has happened to you, you've been adjudicated by a court, that's either a date of yourself or others, you don't have a passive contract, etcetera, then you're permanently barred and possessing firearms under federal law. There's an exception there, you sort of look down, three quarters of the way down the page under affirmative defenses, there's an exception if you are able to file an admission in court and get what's known as relief from disabilities. And that means you demonstrate to the court that you no longer should be prohibited from possessing a firearm because you're needing mental health status. Recover, maybe you've got good treatment, maybe you're not dangerous anymore, whatever it might be, you have an opportunity. And we have that in state law as well. It was also passed in 2015 at the same time that this prohibition that we were just talking about, the criminal history law was passed. So, that's federal law. State law right now, this category based on mental health, is not an prohibited category. Now, you're still prohibited under federal law if you fell into that group that I just described. Not that you could possess a firearm lawfully, but you couldn't be prosecuted by a Vermont state attorney and a Vermont state group because it's not a Vermont violation.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: To clarify, so it would be any court, state or federal, makes a finding that somebody is a danger to themselves or others that would prohibit them on a federal level. Exactly. So that's even without this bill. Correct.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: That's the current law. Yep, that's the current law. And another thing, part of current law in Vermont, that was passed in, where he passed the So if you look on page six zero six, sorry, as it passed the House, and you look at page seven, slide four and six, Vermont does have this relief from disability process under current law of 2015. So in other words, if you had, Senator Hashim, as you were just mentioning, if you were committed under the current Vermont, committed for either because you're not covered by reason insanity for perhaps, or maybe it happens at the Family Division, however it happens. If you're committed to the Department of Mental Health custody, you would be prohibited under federal law permanently to put the desceased fire key. But there is this opportunity under Vermont law, also passed in 2015, that you can, within the Family Division, file for a relief from firearm visibility, showing you shouldn't be subject to that anymore, your firearms rights should be restored. So that option is there. Actually, as I said, passed in 2015 when Windham Act first passed its law of prohibiting presented by the House

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: of people convicted of the

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: crimes to provide evidence necessary for the science because in order to qualify for grants, there was a federal firearms law requiring that the states do it off that if they wanted to qualify for those grants. Vermont does require that even though people are not prohibited, this category, the non illness category doesn't exist in Vermont, Vermont does have these statutes requiring that the report names to Nets with National Against the Criminal Background Check. So if you have been committed either forensically through the criminal system, guilty of representing sanity, not to stand up, or the family division, danger to self or others, then the court has to report those names to so that even though it's not prohibited in category in Vermont, still the names have to be sent to Nicks so that they can be included on the federal database of people who can't address the slab.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Then what this really creates, it doesn't create necessarily a new category of people who could be prohibited, but rather it creates a state enforcement mechanism for prohibited persons.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yes, I think that's exactly right. It doesn't create a new category in terms of people who aren't already prohibited. They are under federal law. It does create a new category for purposes of state law. So yes, it would allow the state's attorney in Vermont to bring in charge of the state court that the settlement was prohibited by Vermont law for possessing a firearm.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: If I remember right, that 2015 bill had a section that did something similar the federal law to make it easier for state authorities to be prosecuted and not have to wait for ATF or anything.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yes, the whole section that we just looked at, section two about violent crimes, that was all, Those folks were already prohibited under federal law, but that was exactly getting them to allow that prosecution to be brought in state court by Vermont State Supreme Court.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Senator Wilson? So, two questions, I'm sorry that I'm a little late. Don't know how to say this. This bill essentially is kind of aligned state law. Would that go on this issue?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yes. Although it does in the sense that these folks who are prohibited from possessing in this bill are already prohibited under federal law. Only qualification I would add to that is where it gets a little into the weeds. This is only a subset. Remember, as I just mentioned earlier, when I packed out this federal, federal prohibition is much broader than what your quote is in the H-six zero six. And it's also much broader than what you already have in law. Remember I said under Vermont law already names have to be reported? Those are only the names of people who have been found danger to themselves or others and committed to the Department of Mental Health, either through the criminal system or through the Family Division. But as we just looked at in the street from the VEDS, that's only a small portion of people there, but it is under federal law. That was intentional.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Okay. Well, and then that sort of brings me to my next question. So we have this ability for people to regain their ability to possess a firearm. Yes. That doesn't exist in the federal law. We have a narrower subset. So how does that work with federal law? If someone is prohibited under federal law from having a firearm, how can we, the state, say, actually, that's fine.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: The federal law specifically says if you go through an approved state rehabilitation process, you're not very good at the federal law either. The feds do have a preparerable provision. They also have this. Oh, okay. Yeah. Was

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: remember if that was

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: passed in 2015 either, or was that over originally created? But in any event, the Fed law does say even on machine advances, not just the federal or an approved state process. Yeah. See, so this is three quarters of way down under the affirmative defenses. You're not prohibited if you receive for receive relief from the federal provision, that's the first one, or a proper federal or state authority under a relief permissibility according to the requirements of the next ruling act in the Senate. That was the one that had the federal law that said, you have to have reliefs if you're gonna qualify for this federal grant money to improve your reporting system. So if you get your firearm restored under state provision, which for my opinion, then you also would be permitted to pay rent.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Okay. Well that doesn't answer the sort of larger question of our prohibited list being so much narrower than the federal list. Under the way we're putting it forward under state law, you'd be okay to have some people might be okay to have a firearm, but they would

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: be breaking federal law. Correct. Exactly.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Yeah. Section 48.2, that's what encompasses ONH's and the borders of hospital.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Through the criminal process. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what we were looking at quite a bit in the forensic facility. Coming through that process, then Whether or not they're getting a little bit more to leave, this is also an even narrower subsection of who's gonna be covered by vermantil, because unless it's a violent crime, which we just looked at in sanction to evangelical solicit violent crimes, if it's not a violent crime, then you're only prohibited, this is line six, sorry, line 17 to eight six, then the prohibition only lasts as long as the commitment order was. So if you haven't been, if you're not convicted of a violent crime, that's not the subject of offense in the birthplace of your commitment to the Department of Mental Health, because remember, it could be, and Siegel's ID, It guilty of deprivation of insanity or incompetent to stand trial. It's not necessarily a violent crime. It could be any events, and the court is still funding for her neighbors, the self, or others in community. So it might not be one of those violent crimes. And if that's the case, once you come out, which would presumably only happen when you're, I think as you heard from the Department of Mental Health, great detail, or no good distention once you're not in need of that sort of treatment either because you're not dangerous, you don't have a mental health condition anymore, you're not necessarily gonna be maintaining the DMH best of you. If that's the case, then your virus prohibition goes away as well. It only lasts as long as you're committed for

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: seven months. So Eric, you're the discussion about the mental health issue. So I look forward to the health break up any discussion on PTS or how they may or may not have done some of

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: the ability to possess firearm? Specifically, no. No, I think the idea was that you know, that kind of mental health condition that might impact somebody's ability to possess a firearm depends on the underlying procedure. You could be found incompetent standard out because of PTSD. That's certainly possible. And if that was the case and if that's what got you committed to the Department of Mental Health, then you qualify for this just like any other medical condition would necessarily protect it. So I think that's it. Well, just over on page seven now. Also, this is the same concept that I discussed in section two. This is the idea that subsequent offenses for violation by a prohibited person, currently it's a two year misdemeanor. So it's proposing a city lines ten and eleven, page seven, saying that if the second of subsequent offense becomes a felony for this other group of prohibited persons as well. That's pretty much section three. Can I pause there for a second or we'll go on to section four? Alright. At section four, it's another case. Senator Vyhovsky, you've mentioned this concept earlier, is making Vermont law parallel to federal law. This is also happening at section four with respect to machine guns. Machine So guns right now, under current law, generally prohibited under federal law. Not a specific machine gun provision in Vermont law currently. So the proposal is to add one, but it's to parallel federal law on how possession of machine guns is prohibited. So if you look at page eight, the new language is subdivision two, which is line six through 16. So line six through 12, that's just pretty much the veto definition of machine gun. Any weapon that shoots or is designed to shoot or can be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger. They don't have to call the bigger one plus That's the federal debtor. Starting on line 30, the last sentence. The term does not include any weapon or other weapon that is registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Regiment maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or that is otherwise not subject to that registration requirement. So what that means is under federal law, there are some machine guns that are still permitted. Two most common examples are machine guns that were manufactured before 1986. That was the year that the federal prohibition went into effect. That was a grandfather clause. So if you properly possessed your machine gun as of the date that that came effective in 'eighty six, then it would still be effective and okay going forward.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: And also for military law enforcement,

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: that kind of thing is also an exception for that. However, say you robbery possess a machine gun, Japanese speaking has to be registered. So what I just mentioned, that registry that's maintained by ATF, not requiring registration transfer records, so it has to be registered, serial number and

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: that sort of thing. There's a

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: couple of exceptions to that, that's why the last clause there, or that is otherwise subject to the registration required. Some items that are made for research and development don't necessarily have to be registered. And also ATF has this process where they can sometimes make a technical determination that a weapon isn't actually a machine. And if that's the case, then it's not required to do that. So those technical determinations and research and development are kind of parallel. They're tracked here so that if you're not required to be registered under federal law, possession's not illegal federal, and we're to be able to go under the state position as well. This

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: may not be a question for you, but I'm curious how that sort of inspection, perhaps like that determination process worked, that someone can inspect the weapon in question? Like how does how does that work?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Good question and you're right I'm gonna defer to some of the people who have to make sure that way. Exactly.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: I'm gonna be part of the registration process, right? Somebody would have

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: to Maybe so. Maybe someone would say, I shouldn't have to register this, or maybe they make a technical difference from spec training. But, you know, maybe they look at it and say, this doesn't actually be part of the definition that we'll hear about any frame or receiver of the weapon, etcetera, etcetera. That is ranked speculation.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: But this section is just an alignment with federal Correct. That's the

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: The legal under federal law already, again, you have this language in place, then a Vermont state's attorney could bring a criminal charge in a Vermont state court to possession of the machine gun, which couldn't be done now because it's

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: not a violation of state law. But if you had a 90, you would be violating the law.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Awesome. Yes. And that brings us to the end. I think that's the end of the walkthrough. Has an effective date of on passage. But, of course, I think that covers everything that I wanted to mention.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Curious about some things that are actually current laws.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: I ask you a question, Bob? Yes. Yeah.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Eric, I know that the House eliminated several provisions that were in the as in tributes. Can you tell us what those were?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: I can do my best to recall what they were. I remember that one of them was auto seers. So in addition to the machine gun prohibition, was also, and included a prohibition on certain other types of devices that can functionally make a semi automatic weapon operate as an automatic machine gun type of equipment, including autoseers. And I think it was broad. It went through several different iterations. Autoseers is one specific type of component that could be added to semiautomatic, this is a firearm that may cause defective like a machin gun. I think there might have been general angioepidosis and any other item that could be added that could have that result. So that was in the house merchant for a while, or it was eliminated. You. Yes, exactly. There was the nuisance language in a sense. Several states had this. It was recently the subject of a big Second Circuit case, challenging the must be found in New York's corporate responsibility nuisance statute. That allows people to bring lawsuits for damages against firearms companies. When people want the weapons they manufacture or use criminal offenses on the basis of a nuisance theory, which is the common law theory that something including interferes with substance abuse.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: So,

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: yeah, that provision was in the house bill as of yours as well.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thank you. Yeah. So, Eric, I'm looking at page five, line 17. Says that a person shall not assess a firearm then it listens all of the provisions as well as the quote language. And then I'm looking at the general definition where it says a person is prohibited from shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing. So theoretically is somebody able to purchase a firearm but then not possess it if they're a prohibited person?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: I think that the view at the time was that you would, if you tried to purchase it, then you would possess it. So then it would sweep you in without having to, not that you couldn't enumerate that if you wanted to, but I think that was the idea.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: And if somebody is, I'm thinking of the shipping or the transportation aspect of it, if somebody is a prohibited person and they're sitting in a car, somebody else who's in possession of a firearm and they're transporting that firearm or they're just driving, would they be swept up in this as it violated the statute? You mean if the prohibited person, let's say,

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: was a passenger in the car that had the firearm? Or

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Well, yeah. Let's say there's a firearm in the trunk and maybe it's not on the person who's driving. Right. Right. Transporting the firearm somewhere.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: How what what are your thoughts on that? It's an interesting question. I think it's possible because that brings up the whole issue of constructive possession. Right? So it's not necessarily that it's actual possession. I think it generally viewed as within your wingspan. Constructive possession, it's it's something that you sort of have dominion or control over. For example, you can be in possession of something that's in your house, but it's upstairs. It's not actually on you as a person. We've talked about that before in this committee as well. So it is possible. I don't want to give a legal opinion on the top of my head as to the exact way that that would play out in court. But yes, it's possible, particularly in the trunk of a car. I think that possession is generally due to spirit With respect to vehicles in particular, the trunk can constitute possession. But again, even how that question is resolved in practice often depends on the particular facts and circumstances. But it could be constructive possession. Certainly it can include situations where you might be in your car, might be in another room of your house, might be some other way that you are exercising control over the object even if it's not necessarily happening in the object of the person. And

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: the other question I have is, and this is current law, if you remember the background, the context of this page six, slide four, this person against whom charges are pending, Why is that pending rather than federal?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yes. That is also a catch on. The reason for that is that federal law prohibits possession by anyone under indictment for a felony in addition to the conviction. So there's the conviction stuff, that's a whole separate category. If you're convicted of any one of those crimes under federal law, you're prohibited. Also, federal law has a separate provision for under indictment. So these people also are already prohibited under federal law that list of free events up there. Here again, charges are pending. The reason those three particular offenses or theirs actually relates to the crime by juvenile's law that he passed a few years back. I remember. It was a long back and forth between the Senate and the House about whether to expand the Big 12 juvenile offenses, went back and forth, and it happened to include some other related criminal justice provisions and data prevention, sort of, part of the back and forth between the Senate and House was, let's see, two of those pieces, B and C, drug trafficking and human trafficking, were also fences that got added into a particular event, juvenile justice. Part of that compromise between the Senate and the House, that those three were added here so that they would be prohibited on the basis of heavy turnifices.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thank you.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Didn't hear the first part of Let's go

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: back for some clarification

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: on that.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: By seventeenth March, the month is best. I'm wondering if, and I know we don't like to use it knowingly standard, but if I'm borrowing somebody's car and I'm a felon and the firearm is in the trunk of the car, would me not have acknowledged that? How often would that, how broad would that be as far as me being in possession of that firearm, of going to his door?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yeah, that's a very good question. As knowingly isn't included in the current language. Whereas some of the other firearms statutes you may recall that the legislature has packed over the last several years, for example, possession in a hospital building, possession in a pool in place, those do include crime. Specifically talked about that he didn't want to cover a situation where a person, he wanted them to know both that they had it and that they were in the location where the fire was prohibited. So the fact that it's not included here, at least at first blush, does seem to at least rate the possibility that someone might, conviction might happen whether or not they knew it. But I don't know how the language had been interpreted. Maybe because it's a strict possession, it would require, courts have interpreted to require a knowing possession because generally speaking, courts don't want to create strict liability crimes without some sort of knowledge, some sort of science or misery. But I don't know that for sure, but I will look into it. It's very close.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: I can also buy into, there's a long arm in the back seat of the car, which, like you, but the longer container at the trunk of a vehicle, it made it a bit harder to pull out.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yeah. I I can tell you,

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: sharing details is what you do if you are driving a car and you don't

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: know there's a firearm on the front and you can't pull over, you are going to get charged

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: with the incarcerated person. I've seen that a few times.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Does it make any difference if it's your car or it's your car?

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Makes a difference. It can make a difference. Mean, all of the

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: things can take into consideration if it's

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: if you're if it's your car

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: You probably shouldn't have that was

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Yeah. If you're borrowing a car and it's just you,

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: you're probably still getting charged for it. Okay.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Possibilities are of getting convicted? What are the possibilities of getting convicted of that if you're borrowing somebody else's car? I think it's very possible.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: That's

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: what Senator Hashim is. I've never seen that. I don't know about the picture part

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: because they got charged. My answer is it depends.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: The confidential being charged clearly longer would be a productive solution. Right. So maybe the fact that the person

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: that presented facts and evidence that they wasn't there entirely, they borrowed it, they had no idea, maybe the better chance that they pleaded out or succeeded.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Did Yeah. You say that the courts would default those who knowingly standards even though it's not?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: No, not necessarily. I just know that sometimes, know, gives courts that in case our courts have sometimes talked about what they're they don't want to create strict liability offenses. It is clear that's the whole legislature wants to do. In other words, they can convicted of something criminally without any criminal act. That's that's hateable. It's it's not a It's hateable. Don't know how they would have delivered it here in this case. That's what I'd want me to get to.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Any other questions?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: All right. Any other questions, let me know. Thank you. Yes.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Okay.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Good morning. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm Deb McDonough, Superintendent Parkinson's, of attorneys, and attorneys. We are on H606. Overall, our department supports this bill. There are two sections of the bill that were part of our 10 priorities that we presented to you all at the beginning of the year. The first section has one of our priorities, which is creating a felony for the theft of firearms. I believe in the left house side, one of the gun rights advocates said it best to say, this section is going after the behavior, the behavior that we want to prevent, the and do that, even though that person in support, the bill philosophically, they supported that this was focused on the behavior of the person. We have seen an uptick in firearm related crimes in Vermont, We very much believe that this will help our initiatives toward public safety to, no matter what the value is of the firearm, be considered a felony to steal a firearm. We support section one. Section two was not part of our initiatives, but we support the concepts that, again, focused on behavior. This is our second offense. Possessing a prohibited firearm, whether under Section 4,017 for having someone mixed in of a violent crime, or 4,017, any other person is prohibited. If you've committed the offense once, then you committed the offense twice, the intersection offense would be considered a penalty. It's part of section two. Section three. Section three was the other part of our firearms initiative. Our department very much wanted to see that we added to the person's prohibited analogous to the federal prohibition of persons who have, through various issues, have wound up in court, and been found to be in need of treatment. Their behavior has, again, focused on behavior. Their behavior has brought them to court, either through criminal activity or a civil issue or concern, and the court has deemed them making need of treatment. Therefore, we're concerned about that person having a firearm or access to a firearm. Our language, the state's attorney's language, state's attorney's and sheriff's language presented, as seen in the bill as introduced, is broader than what the House passed. We understand that the House was concerned that the language that we had suggested, which was simply that a person not possess a firearm, if the court has found that the person is in need of treatment person is section 4,822, or has been the subject of a hospitalization order or

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: a

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: non hospitalization order, we kept it simple there, as we felt that was most analogous to federal law. As she also explained, we used different terminology in Vermont. We wanted to use our Vermont terminology, not the federal language. We felt that was closest to what federal law prohibits. There was concern on the House side that that would sweep up too many individuals. The conversation went, I think unfortunately a little off track. Folks were talking about individuals getting outpatient treatment but not coming back to the fact that this was a court determination. I think folks were concerned that anyone with a mental health diagnosis would be part of this prohibition and that A, it was not our intent and B, it is not within language that we had suggested, again, which is broader than what's in the version you have, but not as broad as the federal language, that would not sweep up those individuals. So we appreciate what the House passed, and if you feel it needs to be that limited, we understand that. We think it doesn't meet the needs that we have seen in the community for those who should not have access to firearms. Specifically, if you look at page six, and starting at line 11, and again, is the language that I've passed out of the house. The lines alone and quilt is what was in our recommendation. That court has found a person in need of treatment. The house then qualified that and added and, So you need to find the need of treatment and then not guilty of reason of insanity or be found in common there. As this committee has heard over days and dates with the forensic facility, there is a tremendous amount of time that goes by between the concerning behavior and whether somebody is then eventually found not guilty by reason of obscenity or incompetent. If this language remains the end, meaning those final amends, we would have individuals who we have great concerns for their mental stability, And they would be allowed to have access to firearms until one of those two qualifying events occurred or one of the other subsections occurring.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: So what you're talking about, how does it intersect with our red flag laws? Because we also have laws allowing police to remove and the court to hold firearms in instances where there is you there's an intersection here, and I'm just not quite sure what it is.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: There is. And I'm very happy that Carolyn Hansen is in the wings. Okay. The wings. No. No. No. And and so a little bit of an answer, and then absolutely defer to Carolyn on the deep dive to the emergency note of We moved. Lost. That is definitely in play here. The scenario that concerns our department is, again, as you heard through your forensic facility conversations, when a person has been found in need of treatment, there's a ninety day revolving clock, right? And the Department of Mental Health can renew that ninety days or may decide that per their definition, sports and is no no longer subject to them. If if the state's attorney's office is up to date on that ninety day, communication is very clear, we would be able to file an IRFO and then go that route if we haven't already. Our concern is that it's very easy for these things to slip through without us having the timely information, if we're being just fine on that timeliness, and that there could be, again, windows where we don't have the IRPO yet, but somebody is no longer subject to these conditions. We like the simpler language that we presented. Again, we understand if the legislature prefers to have this tighter, we just have reservations about that. We wanted to just make clear to you all this,

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: of course, is a policy decision. Kim, if I could ask you,

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: so as it stands in this draft, it has been found by the court to be a person in need of pretreatment pursuant to section four eight two two and and then list a series of other things that you need one of them to add to being in need of treatment. What is your sense of how many uses that would come out What kind of numbers did we start? In other words, going from your original language to this, does it render it utterly ineffective? Does it just cut it

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: in half?

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: There wasn't a case. Hold on. Something doesn't make it ineffective, and it would be hard to practice you with numbers.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Wondering about that.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: More the concern of the timing, the potential windows there.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Okay.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Our preference would be to just instead of end is to add an or there. Court has found this person to be in need of treatment. So from that moment, that person is no longer brought to be in possession. Or later on, they've been found guilty by reason of insanity. We would just we think that would capture, especially just thinking of the somebody has been again, this is coming from the criminal lens. Right? Or the other section that is where it's the civil route. If someone's been accused of a crime, there's already great stress in their life, we're catching them at, catching them stable moment. If they are out on bail.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yeah.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: And you know we're, again, you've heard one year, two year, we're just concerned. And then Senator Bahram is absolutely right. There are other mechanisms that are just concerned that we're gonna let some incidents slip through that could be quite, that we've seen to be quite dangerous.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: And just a clarification on in need of treatment. What could that include? That finding, who would that include?

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: So the definition, Jane, I'm going to hand this to you. In section 4,822, it's subsection 17. The definition for a person in need of treatment means a person who has a mental illness and as a result of that mental illness, his or her capacity to exercise self control, judgment or discretion in the conduct of his or her affairs and social relations is so lessened that he or she poses the danger of harm to himself, to herself, or to others. And then it goes on to explain what a danger of harm can be established by. So the court has found someone to be in such a state that they pose a danger to himself or or others, we believe at that moment, a person should not be allowed to possess or have access or purchase a firearm, especially since the Vermont statute has the petition section. So if a finding's been made, you're prohibited from having a firearm after that decision has been made, there is a mechanism to go back to be allowed once things have stabilized and you've shown with hope that you're no longer branch yourself for others, we believe that provision would nullify any concerns that somebody who shouldn't be in this category somehow had quote swept up into it. We think that, and again, because of the calm coming back into court, court being able to assess what's going on, where things are, being able to make

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: a decision. And I assume the court is working with clinicians to assess both the legal aspect clinical aspect.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Yes, exactly. The board is asking others for those that may come in.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Before we move on, there was also a conversation earlier on us.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: We're on page five, line 17. And the mens well, there isn't any mens rea for a person who shall not conduct firearm. And there was also a point raised about if there was a knowingly standard or it should be a knowingly standard. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: I believe the language is exactly the same on board seventeen and forty seventeen A. Yeah. Person shall not possess. I believe that, as always, this is decision for you all. I believe the logic behind that, as you know, for anything that is crime? It is the legislature has seen something that is so relevant

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: that just

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: cannot is that do not need to put into the ventral section. That is forced. And then that it's clear that that's your intent. From our point of view, we appreciate that. You either you have it or you don't have it.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: It.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: I

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: think some of the some of the context of why we were talking about Mens Raya was in the situations where somebody may be passenger in a vehicle, vehicle being driven by somebody who has firearms in the front row. They get pulled over. Passenger gets charged for being a constructive as that.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Well, if you were a passenger, I mean, it's usually the driver. It's it's fully responsible for the contents of the vehicle, not the passenger. So, mean, it would, there needs to be more, a little bit more detail there

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Is it

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: the passenger, but the weapons and the you know, like, would there need to be more information there? An unlikely scenario?

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: The example we were talking about was the person bar of the car and was driving.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Argument against that. Yeah. Would be across the guitorial discretion. Yes. Okay.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: So that was. Yeah. Here we go.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: I know you have a recall of people. Section four, from a public safety standpoint, we have no issue with the addition of machine gun language. Bledge counsel stated it's analogous to the federal language. I would suggest calling in some members of law enforcement. I'm not sure. I had some brief conversations, but I was not able to do any sort of deep dive survey of whether law enforcement have weaponry that would fall under this definition and whether or not there's a law enforcement exception. Currently, they're not in the statute or whether there's we would need to have one and or whether they're certified to all law enforcement. I do not have that answer for you. I just wanna raise it as a potential issue that you might wanna hear directly from law enforcement whether this is an issue for other departments.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Thanks. Any other questions for Tim? Thank

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: you so much. Well, I'm excited to sit down. But before I begin, I just wanted to ask for clarification because I listened to Eric's excellent walkthrough and the piece that I am planning to talk to you all about today. You see there. So do you all have

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: a copy?

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: So you're talking about the relinquishment amendment? Yes. Is that yes. So,

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: I may have

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: just wanna make sure that your

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: rose is going be cut in line on that text. So yes, we do have that amendment in front of us.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Okay. I just wanted to make sure that so good morning. Good morning. I'm Carolyn Hudson with the Attorney General's Office and I'm here to talk to you just about one small piece of this which is new to the new to the bill but not new to the discussion I don't think. And it goes back to a recommendation that the Vitality Review Commission made to look at the fact that we don't really have a compliance process in Vermont.

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: So we've done

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: a lot of talking this morning about people who

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: are prohibited from having firearms and the fact that we're making sure that there's a court process that protects their rights and also protects the public in determining whether or not someone should have that privilege to have a firearm revoked temporarily in some cases, which is mostly what I'm thinking about, which is like a relief or abuse order or did you brought Senator Ervo or in more permanent circumstances where they've been convicted of a crime, all those situations that Eric went through. And the same with someone who has been on a hospitalization or something like that. That's a temporary type of suspension. So what we don't have and what the battalion review is interested in bringing to your attention is the process to find out where is the fire right now? Did you surrender it to someone and do you believe? And to make sure that that's done in a safe way, because we have had instances in Vermont where somebody said, I'm gonna leave the gun with my parents or my parents have the gun or my family member has the gun. And that is not a secure setting and person is able to gain access to the firearm and it has some full consequences. So it's a really important thing to look at And in the last session you all were kind enough to create a working group which was housed through my office. It was the Fire Surrender Compliance Working Group. It was made up of a very broad spectrum of folks. Kim was on it. Folks from the network were on it. An FFL owner was on it. State police were on it. I can give you a whole list, but it was a really broad but not too large group of 10 people. And then there were a whole list of folks that we were consulting with. And so we reached out to them and also asked for their input and got input from some of them. So what we were looking at is the compliance process. What can we do to move that forward? And the purpose, I'll tell you what the purpose is. So that was Act 64 in 2025. The purpose was to create a uniform process to ensure compliance with court orders to surrender firearms. The working group shall examine the statutory or policy changes necessary to create a uniform process to monitor compliance, support entities charged with storing and returning surrendered firearms pursuant to court orders, and identify a stable and reliable funding source for any additional resources needed to monitor compliance. So our goal was to create a workable statewide compliance model that would work in family court and in criminal court and that makes sure that there is accountability of the respondents and defendants and also addresses the safety needs of plaintiffs and victims and the public. And it also wants to look at proper storage of firearms to make sure that they're taken care of and secured and recommendation for any legislative changes needed. So that was our charge and we began meeting right after it passed in July and you authorized us to meet six times. We actually had time to meet five times. And we produced a report which was required to be submitted to you in November 2025. And you have that report. I think it was emailed to all of you. Feel like you have that in front of you. But that contains the recommendations that I'm going to talk about today. And specifically the thing that I'm, that you're recommending that this bill now contains is language to change some of the provisions in '20 BSA 2,307 and what that is is only back in I'm to remember my notes back in 2013 you all created that statute and it had to do with surrendered firearms and how it would work. Unfortunately it never really took off the ground. The idea was to have a partnership between private entities like FFLs that have room and the capacity and the knowledge to store things in a careful way and law enforcement. And there were just some things like right out of the gate that didn't work well. And I will tell you a couple of what those things were. Go ahead.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Sorry to interrupt. I'm just wondering procedurally, did this go before the House?

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: It has not, yeah. Was there a reason for that? In other

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: words, just wondering if your report was issued back

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: Yeah. I don't know, I kind of have the same questions. I'm really happy to be here today and I feel like it's like it's a small thing but it's a really important thing and I don't really know the policy reasons or decisions behind where things are. Error probably does.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: You probably have a better background than I do. Yeah, to respond to Senator Baruth's question, it was purely fine. It didn't introduce such a shortfall. And then things got really backed up. And then drafting deadline passed, so there wasn't time to get it fully vetted prior to the six zero six coming down here. So that was the only reason.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: So just wanted to know if there was any kind of record in the house with regard to

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: No, wasn't even discussed yet. Okay, thank you.

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: But I'm happy to answer any questions you have about it today. Anyway, some of the issues back in 2013, they didn't contemplate at the time. It was thought that like individuals would store their firearms with FFLs. It wasn't really contemplated that police might want to use that storage. So the bill wasn't really dealing with that in mind. And as it turns out, I mean, we're gonna address the perennial problem with these kinds of non evidentiary firearms being collected by police agencies is they are just so pressed for storage anywhere. And so that creates sort of a disincentive to collect the firearm, you know as you can imagine. Not that they don't want to do their jobs but it's just hard when you don't have anywhere to put them. So part of what this does is to make sure that it's transparent that police agencies themselves can use this as long as it's communicated to the defendant so they know where the firearm is stored and they know upfront that they're going to be responsible for storage costs. So what we're trying to avoid here is the state having to you know build some kind of new storage facility because if you do that it's not only expensive but there's a lot of federal regulations around taking in and releasing firearms. And the FFLs, they cut that down. They do it all day long. So if we can partner with them and make that partnership work, we can help with the small departments that just don't have the capacity to store firearms and remove the concern they have when they go, for instance, to serve an IRFO and the person has 30 guns. We can remove the concern that they have of like, oh my god now what am I going to do with these guns? Because they can't really put it in their place where they store evidence because there's a lot of tracking kind of stuff you have

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: to do with

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: your evidence. They're going to take good care of them but you just don't want people kind of going in and out of evidence either. So it is important that police figure out what they're going to do with non evidentiary firearms. The other thing is the bill back in 2013 it had immunity for law enforcement for acting in the regular course of business. Not they acted engaged in like gross negligence. They

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: had immunity for them. Didn't have immunity for

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: the FMOs. And so that was sort of right out of the gate, a little bit of a non starter for them to feel like part of the program. And the proceeds, in the event that somebody never comes to get these firearms, that they're holding temporarily, the proceeds they could deduct like whatever cost they incurred for storage, but then they had to somehow find this owner who had never showed up because the rest of any other leftover proceeds from the sale of these guns had to go to that person who never showed up

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: to pick them up. Just to clarify, I'm looking

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: at the immunity on page 11 and it is immunity. So if they have a firearm that they're storing for somebody and that person never comes to get the firearm, they disappear and years pass and the FFL wants to sell the firearm, that's what

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: the immunity is for? It involves around the sale, but also just in the process itself. So they can't be sued because somebody, I don't know, I mean, people come up with reasons to sue people, right? So they have no protection if they took in a firearm and treated it appropriately. They had no protections from that. So I don't know if I'm answering your question exactly, I'm trying.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: So this is just blanket civil criminal immunity from the sale of all firearms?

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: No, no, no. Just the sale of firearms they've taken in for this purpose.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Okay, that's one And as

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: long as they follow the process in the statute. So it's not just like any firearm they happen to have and it's also not that they can just take it in and then do whatever they want. If they follow the statute then they can't be randomly sued by someone. Because even if somebody doesn't have a good claim, I'm sure you know, lawsuits are expensive. And so you end up causing these businesses to have to contend with lawsuits and costs. So we don't want to add to that as long as they are treating them properly and following the process. And then there was also a problem with the fact that we decided policy wise that we thought it would be appropriate for the defendants to store their firearms with a third party but you all added language that's currently in a statute that says unless the court finds that the relinquishment to the other person will not adequately protect the safety of the victim. So that was good except that there was no process around that. So a lot of times if police were asking about a firearm, police would say, Oh, my brother has them. And then the court was like, Well, there's nothing for me to do. The brother already has them. How do I know anything about this? I didn't authorize that. So this creates a process where what should have been happening happens, which is law enforcement or an FFL has the firearm until the court can have a hearing at which they determine whether or not that third party is even eligible for firearms. I mean there was no background check, was no verification that they even had it. So this creates a process where that, which is what should have been done from the beginning, that it needs to occur in court. And there's also a provision in there that it doesn't delay the court proceedings because we've got RFAs, relief from abuse orders and fixed and IRPOs, extreme risk protection orders. We want those to move forward a back away as they can possibly. But we don't want those hearings delayed because the defendant doesn't have the third party in court today. So it does say if you don't have somebody approved right there at court either because they don't have time or you don't have the proof to present, it won't delay the court moving forward with the final order but you can still present your person. You just have to do it at another time. So that's kind of built in there just to make sure there is a delay. So before I move into the substantive changes I also just wanted to emphasize a very important point which is quite different than the other things you've been looking at this morning. This is no new firearms restrictions. We want to make sure that everybody's really clear about that. This is not taking any additional guns that were not already authorized by the court to be taken. There is no additional regulation here. This is really a process piece to this bill. It's not really a virus piece. It doesn't expand anything. And I thought I would move now to what's the changes are to 20 BSA, twenty three zero seven. But please stop me if you have questions. Our printer wasn't working this morning, all I have are my comments. I don't know how they got me in the bill and all that stuff so you have to help me if you ask about a particular So piece of we talked about the fact that it clarifies, the first thing it does is clarify that a hearing is required in order for a third party to hold firearms. And that the hearing, it's

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: approval of

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: that third party, it's not a basis to delay the hearing itself, but it just sets up a process for it. And it explains that the third party does have to undergo a background check because the court can't run a background check. So the court needs somebody who comes in and says, I'd like to pull this person's firearms. They need somebody to run that background check, law enforcement or an FFL, and allow the court to see that this person who's telling them that they'd like to pull the firearms tag since the elders will hold them. Another change is originally ammunition was included in the bill as something that could be held by the police and we heard from police agencies and we also heard from FFLs that the ammunition just doesn't make a lot of sense because, couple of reasons. It's not regulatable the way firearms are, so you can walk into a fire store and buy ammunition, so it's not really providing any additional safety there. And it creates a burden because somebody can have a lot of ammunition and it's heavy and they just didn't want to be charged with storing it. And from the state police perspective, they explained that ammunition is actually hazardous waste. So it entails a lot of difficulty in disposing of it. So for all those reasons ammunition was just taken out to make this workable for the people who are going to be doing the work. It creates an acknowledgement form and this is really important so that when a defendant is given an ERPO and told they can't possess firearms or given a relief and abuse order and told they can't possess firearms there is a form that they will indicate where the firearm is. Either that they have firearms, they don't have firearms. If they have firearms, where is the firearm? It lets the court know that the defendant has surrendered it to someone and it just creates a record that we can track that way and provide some accountability. And it's really important for people in court to know that the court's gonna ask about that. Because if think about it, the court's just up there saying, you can't do this now, see you later. And the person's there saying, well I have three firearms and the judge is like not responding in any way to that. It doesn't send a very good message. We want people to know that we do care that they surrender their firearms and we expect to know where the firearms are surrendered. So that's a process that would be worked on with the court. It also clarifies that law enforcement agencies, and I mentioned this earlier, that they can store firearms with an FFL. If you're a department with three officers and no storage, very small department, you don't have to create storage for firearms. You can partner with your FFL and have them provide that storage for units. Is that only for non evidentiary? Yes, yes, absolutely. No evidentiary firearms can go there. And

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: you're probably gonna get here. I'm wondering, this is all dependent on voluntary participation by FFLs. Yes. So I see on page 12 that ABS would have to adopt a policy that encourages FFLs to do this.

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: Yes.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: But did the committee take testimony from enough FLs?

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: We had an FFL owner on the committee, Henry Perro, and a lot of his handiwork is a lot and some of that you'll see. And he gathered information from other people. He told me that lots of other FFLs actually called him when they had questions around things because he happens to have one of the bigger shops around. So if you all wanted to hear from Henry I'm sure

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: we'd Well be

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: just specifically I was wondering did you have data that would suggest that this would be successful? Because I could see an FFL saying, I don't want to be a part of taking or holding somebody's guns, I don't believe in them, so I'm not gonna do it. We have like five eighty Depakka pills. Do you have any sense of how many might voluntarily? Because if they don't, none of this will Well,

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: we have I think eight or nine right now that have been participating. So part of what's on the state police website, because this program has been ongoing since 2013, is an interactive map. And that's relatively new. It's a terrific thing to state police to create a map. You don't have to call someone up call 10 different places. You can look at this map and see a place that's agreed to store firearm, how to contact them, what their phone number is. We're hoping to add to that. I mean they made an effort a couple of years ago to reach out to fire, like each lieutenant at their barracks. They would have somebody reach out to their local FFL and encourage them to participate. And a lot of the time they would say I don't want to do that because of X. And it was usually the things we've addressed in this bill that we've tried to address which is like the immunity issue. The fact that the proceeds had to be, they couldn't keep the proceeds. They had to try to find somebody that they hadn't had any contact with. So kind of from the get go they had a lot of objectives to it and we did our best to remove those objections. But I think that it's still an open question as to how successful this partnership will be. Mean a lot's going to depend on the Department of Public Safety working on rebuilding that relationship because I think when people feel like it wasn't good to start with, it takes some time. And I think having Henry participate in this and giving them a voice, I hope that they feel heard by that and that I hope we've met their concerns. And if we haven't, I hope they'll speak up now and let us know if there's something we missed. Alright, talked about the acknowledgement form. We talked about the fact that it clarifies that law enforcement agencies can store with an FFL. We want to make sure that that's very clear provided that the defendant knows about the transfer. We don't want defendants thinking that Colchester PD has their firearms when really they're with Henry Perro. So there is a process that we created where they would be notified of that. They'll also be notified if you want to have the court consider a third party to hold your firearms who might, for instance, hold it for you for free, family member or someone like that. There's a process in place for them to come forward. I mean, fees are pretty minimal. You all set them. We reverse them with this bill and there's no changes to those. But for some folks that can be prohibitive too. So there is a process for them to come to the court and ask that a third party be approved to hold the firearm. We just want to make sure that it's someone who has the capacity and willingness to hold a firearm for them. Know, FFLs can't be asked to hold a firearm if the order is just a temporary order. And the reason that is because when you all first did the storage law, it said that you can't be charged any storage fees until the order becomes final. And so we didn't want, we wanted to acknowledge that fact that we don't want these agencies for instance using an FFL to hold firearms in a temporary order situation and then have the final order get dismissed and they don't get reimbursed for their fees. So we've just changed it to say that they are not required to hold a firearm, well not required anyway, but they can't hold a firearm for a law enforcement agency until it's a final order. So they will just have to figure out a way to exist for those ten days until it's a final order. However, it's clear in there, an exception in there, that if the defendant wants from the get go, they want their gun stored with an FFL, They can certainly do that. They just have to agree to pay the storage fee. So, you know, it's not that they use it, it's just that it has to be their choice to use it at that stage. And this is a really important part of this too. So we added provision that at least twenty four hours in advance of the release of the firearm, because like I said, these are situations where it's a temporary thing, You know, it's for as long as the order exists, as long as the court has authorized the IRFRA to last, as long as the court has authorized the relief of the abuse order to last. When that ends, the firearms are going to be released and we want to make sure that the victim receives notification that that's gonna happen at least twenty four hours in advance. And so law enforcement will be providing that notice. The next piece has to do with just kind of squaring things up. Originally it said something like the firearms have to be returned within three days consistent with federal law. And the FFL owner pointed out to us that they thought that that could create a situation where they were expected to give a gun back when they weren't actually able to give it back under federal law. It was complicated so we just changed it to say that there is a seventy two hour window in which the firearm should be returned after the background check is complete And that's the way they do it right now with and provides with federal law and they just wanted to make sure that this law in terms of releasing firearms was consistent with that, with the way they do business now under federal law. If the owner does fail to collect their firearms, they can be sold and the proceeds kept by the storing agency. And this is done in some other places around the country and I've actually heard from some police departments that they had, this has been a source of revenue for them and sometimes allowed them to purchase like some equipment that they otherwise weren't able to, that didn't fit within their contract or what have you. So we're hoping that by allowing them to keep the proceeds that maybe we'll build in some incentive, like you were saying, to participate in the program and also make this more workable for law enforcement. And we've already talked about the immunity, it makes the same, the FFLs get the same kind of immunity that law enforcement gets for restoring the firearms. Just making that consistent collaborative effort.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Sorry, just a question building off on the answer you get to my last one. So if I heard you correctly, you said you currently have eight or 10 FFLs that have a three H. How did the committee find those eight or 10? Did they? You have the We

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: did. That was all DPS. I mean, DPS, when they were handed this program to administer, they collected data and then I think they've done a little bit of reach out to make sure that the FFLs were aware of this and to try to get them signed up. And then it's just a matter of making sure that they want to continue to participate. So the ones that are there, there was only maybe like two or three for a number of years. And then about two years ago there was a major at the state police who took real interest in this and I worked with him and we did some kind of reach out to some of the FFLs and he made sure that each barracks reached out to the people that knew them and asked if they'd be willing to participate in this. And I think a lot of business owners, they want to be a positive presence in the community and do something as long as it's not gonna burn them down the road. So that's basically what we're trying to do then. So I think there needs to be more reach out. I think there needs to be regular reach out and I think there's probably some folks that could assist. I mean this is just me, this department of Public Safety can decide how they want to go about this, but there may be folks that are at the Department of Health, for instance, who could assist with some of that type of work.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: And I guess where I'm going is if DPS reached out to all five eighty something and 80 said yes, that's a data point that's very important because it's a very low percentage and you have big geographical businesses that people might have to travel to make sure that their gun lines up where it should. So as we go forward, I just don't want us to lose sight of the fact that it's all built on voluntary participation, which at least so far is not yielding a lot of cooperation. And maybe a bit I

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: more agree with you. No, I like that you're pointing that out, and I agree with you, and I think the reason I'm optimistic is that this was not crafted appropriately the first time in life. And I think we've made real effort to try to craft it appropriately. I think you also have to keep in mind that even though we have that many gun sellers, many of those don't have any ability to store. They're just little mom and mom kind of places. So I'm not exactly sure what the number looks like of the ones who actually have storage capacity, but it is a much smaller number. And I just hope that by showing them and actually putting it into the statute that they would be supported and encouraged to participate that we kind of set the tone for making this work. I think originally there were a lot of regulations because the state just wanted to make sure they had everything. I don't want to speak to them. There's people here who can speak with them. But there was a lot, the regulations were pretty hefty that the FFLs had to be able to follow and they cut those down a lot, made them much simpler. So I think we're moving in the right direction. And I think that we're just going to have to hope we build this and it works. And if it doesn't work, we'll come back and try to fix what doesn't work about it. I don't want to take up too much more of your time. Let me see if there's anything else. So we talked about the immunity, including immunity per se. A law enforcement didn't have that immunity before, so this creates it. If they follow this process and they sell the guns because the person's never responded. They can't come back and sue them and say, Oh, I thought you may have them three years later. This may

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: be directly in there,

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: but what's the timeline for that? At what point do they decide the guns best to happen? It's in statute but it's I think it's ninety days that they have. If they haven't paying the storage fee and the FFL or the law enforcement agency has to send a certified letter to their last name and address. It's stated to the defendant, the defendant has to keep them apprised of an address or a way to contact them. So it's built in that there are steps to make sure that they know that their guns are eligible to be picked up and it's just if they ignore that and I believe the period in the statute right now is ninety days. Seven times. I don't want to be touched upon

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: it, say there's

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: $500 in storage piece and gets to the point after the ninety days and you sell $3,000 worth of guns, does the FFL or law enforcement get to keep that 3,000 or do they have to only retain the amount that historic fees cover and then maybe costs associated with the sale?

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: They need to keep the 3,000. Okay, okay. It's all the proceeds from it. So that's a change on the statute. And there's a new section at the end that creates a model policy. So not us creating it, law enforcement themselves through the Law Enforcement Advisory Board would create this model policy and that would make sure that law enforcement understands a couple of really important things. That they understand their legal removal of firearms from the scene of a domestic violence incident, how to do that legally. Steps for inquiring so when they serve an order that they don't just hand a person the order and say okay just tell us you can't be 100 feet. That they go over the firearm part of it as well and they ask about the firearms when they're serving the order and creating sort of a process for how they would do that. A process to notify the plaintiff about the service of the order and the relinquishment of firearms. So making sure that when they do surrender firearms that they're told that the firearms have been surrendered so they can factor that into their safety. Trying to speed up. I know how much was to be done now. And then there's some part in there about law enforcement thinking about how they're to collect data around this to make sure that we are able to monitor that of the number and the type of firearms that are collected. And also provision this, there's a whole separate section that was basically kind of copied from this section I've been talking about that deals with her post and that's in thirteenth VSA four fifty nine. And basically it cuts out most of that statute. It just says refer to 20 BSA 2,307 for the process of making sure that firearms are surrendered in a proposed situation. So it just aligns the two things so we don't have two different statutes with potentially differences between them. I think I've covered everything. Any questions?

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Other questions? Thanks for the questions here. In reference to the FFLs and law enforcement once the court's

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: guns? Made in order. Who brings

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Does the FFL come and pick them up as long as they transport them? Because if they do, you're talking about the tracking system mechanism here, you know, the database that everyone on the system now has to

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: go to state law enforcement. I don't

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: think only too hard to set up a database, and all this happened is made the entries in there. Yeah. And then I felt the known by law enforcement wanted back to go, was released or I don't think I can agree to all

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: of it. I think I'm wrong on your question but please tell me if I don't answer it all the way. So the first part about would the defendant take it there or no? No, law enforcement. Law enforcement will take it there. Yes, not the defendant's.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Good, we're

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: in agreement on that. So the law enforcement would collect it and then if they're playing short with an FFL they would transport it to the FFL. Then what was the next part?

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: You said they were to

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: have a problem with actually tracking the the guns as far as releasing whatever arrest that law enforcement brings it there. They're all on the same system now, so they simply set the data.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: And I'm not telling them there's

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: a multitude here. It's as simple as setting up a database, and then the pet that thought would notify law enforcement when, in fact, figure out what's released and it seems like it's something for us and it's here but maybe there's more to it than we see how I hear something.

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: Yeah you know we got into a pretty long discussion and our committee about VALCOR and this information of course when law enforcement goes out on a call something goes into VALCORT but that doesn't mean you can pull it out or that you can connect it with the order. So there's also a service process form that law enforcement fills out that goes back to the court. There's already some questions on that now like did you collect any firearms? So figuring out a way that we can mesh those two together, I mean, I think there may be a way possibly a way to have this information available, and retrievable if it's captured on the service of process form. But I think that there needs to be more work done around that. People raised some very good concerns about being able to access that data and how they would track that data. So basically this is just saying that we want it done and then figuring out whether VACOR can provide that vehicle or the court documents by that vehicle. I think that's still a question that meets requirements.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Thank you.

[Carolyn Hanson, Assistant Attorney General (Vermont)]: You're welcome. Thank you. I appreciate the time.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I'm going grab the Larry's over here. Skip over from Quantum and then move back. John, say that's alright. Waiting for a response. Mr.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Chair. I'm just wondering, I have an amendment myself and I'm wondering what word are

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: you writing for sound? We can do that towards the end so we can get through our witnesses.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: My mind's what it would make. Jaws. Because I think you need a bigger boat. You know? All the people in here. Now it tends to happen that with these kind of bills. Anyway, I'm not the leader. I'm the defendant general. And I'm gonna basically tell you the same story I said in the house. I have, you know, dogged in spite. It but what I am going to try to do was explain to the community that the bill is passed as it is. And one of these cases came up in our office how we would fight it. Okay? Sure. As you know, probably had a bunch of people already talked to you about the, you know, the primary constitutional right that bear arms of the both the Vermont and US Constitution since it's no different than a right to free speech or any other right that is, you know, in the in our constitution. So that's wild. And and regularly around the edges of it, You have to be very careful and very narrow in the way you approach firearms and limitations that you put on those rights.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: The

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: I I will say first that I really have have no no comment on that. Section one, it all involving verdict, adding a crime verdict. I had this problem that went to this. You know, I wonder about the I always wonder about, like, proportionalities and sentencing. You know, when you have, you know, a ten year felony for stealing a firearm, which could be more than, like, manslaughter. But you can do it with just, you know, sometimes the proportionality of penalties regarding fines. You might want to think about that. Obviously, kind of the guts of the bill are the portions on page six

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: and seven. Before you before you get to page six and seven, I want to go back to section two, page two, and then the new felony offense therapy. I know we we hear this at least with drug offenses and property crimes that that increasing penalties for felonizing certain offenses doesn't necessarily deter the conduct. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, do you think do you foresee this deterring possession or just having a harsher penalty for it after it happens?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: I mean, there's no evidence of the criminal law to present that. So it's certainly it's no different with this than anything else. You can quantitize the case of the egg. What is the current value of 17 next to zero? I mean, there are studies like this all over the nation. This is about showing the public that you're serious about it. This is about, for those who, in certain instances, perhaps sex offenders or murderers or the like, where you have to isolate them and take them off the street so that that in and of itself creates public safety. The penalties that are out there, if they don't deter already, what's the difference between the deterrence of a two year incarceration versus a three year. It's from a deterrence and all like I said, all of the studies about deterrence, it doesn't doesn't do anything. It's not really you can do it, yeah, I don't get changes or anything. We at one time, I senator Sears used to get a report about we would have been here, but we were talking about drug trafficking. He suggested that there be a $100,000 fine the drug trafficking. I said, well, I can make it a million. It's and he said, okay. And actually, I think it's a million now. But with the number of drug trafficking, crimes that I've seen come across my desk for reassignment as we arrest, you know, dozens of people a month on the charge, I don't think the fines deterring anybody. And it's you know, that's a long sentence too. So in any event, I don't I'm not trying to smot that. I'm just saying it's not you asked.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: No. Yeah.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: So if you go down the, on page six, and you look at usually starting at lines 11 to 19, and to think on the next page, that's where there is areas where somebody could be charged with a crime for, possessing a, firearm. And what you have to do is, again, try to be as narrow as possible and get at what you're really trying to get at to regulate this. People who have been found in need of treatment or have been found not guilty or who have been incompetent to stand trial or who are subject to commitment order or an order of hospitalizations are not in and of themselves necessarily a danger to themselves or others, that you can be incompetent to stand trial. You said you don't understand or are unable to understand or cooperate with your lawyer. You don't understand the role of the people, but you're perfectly competent to hunt, for example. What I warned the house about was creating a bathtub that is so big that you are including people who you don't need to include in a bill that's intended to curb people who are dangerous slugged up firearms. And because it is of a primary constitutional right, you have to make this marital as possible. Have an example, of I have a tenant who was in the military for twenty years, and he served a number of tours in various theaters of war. He came back. His mother passed away, and he an ankle break down, ended up hospitalized, and was committed for a relatively short period of time. It wasn't a violent situation. The one thing that actually kind of calm him down is when he spent time in the woods, hunting, and nothing about that. Under this, whether he was subject to an order of hospitalization or a non hospitalization, he could be potentially

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: in this bill. Senator Baruth? Matt, sorry to break you off. Just to clarify, the AG's office or, no, I'm sorry, attorneys and sheriffs suggested making the and on line 12, page six and or, but right now the current language is they have to be found in a person in need of treatment and one of these other things. So in your example, if the person had not been found to be in a danger to themselves or others, then wouldn't fall under this, under the slang to judge the house. So are are you arguing against what the attorneys and chairs proposed for against this language as past this?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: I'm commenting on the type of thing you need to be aware of, and I'm not particularly talking about the language itself because this thing is a, you know, an evolving working process. I'm not really concerned about the attorneys and parents or anybody else who's testified about it. There are two parts of how you look at these constitutionally. One is on its face, is it constitutional? The other is as applied, is it constitutional? So when we're looking at this, we're gonna look at this. Are you bringing into that, know, a thing that you're not intending to throw out when you want when you bring it. All I'm trying to say here is that the when you're doing these things, you need to look very, very narrowly. We just don't and I'm not sure that how this is going to come out. I never I never know. I usually come in and talk about these ones and say, look, whatever you do, do exactly what you say you wanna do. Don't expand it to a point where it's gonna capture people that you don't wanna capture. And there is a you know, if you're if you're in a situation where somebody has let me just kinda skip another issue. If you fall under this this category, this sort of a nonsensical sort of result. You've been found incompetent to stand trial, and then the result is and and you possess a firearm, and then the result is a crime.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: You know? You've also been found to be

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: a person in need of treatment in a dating terms of himself or others. The point is if you're not confident, how are you as more confident to be charged with crime? It's I mean, they're asking there should be a different result. There should be an injunction, a seizure of the weapon. There should be a part of your mental health order should include that you don't I think that purchase or possess firearms, that sort of thing. It doesn't make sense for somebody who has been adjudicated and confident that the result of having a having a weapon is that you are charged with a crime. You're already confident. You're already out of the jurisdiction of the of the court. It kinda doesn't it doesn't make any sense. Now we do this. This is a general observation. We do this all the time. We have people who have just been founded and competent. They end up committing some other activity. Law enforcement brings them in. They get tried to do the crime while they're under the word that was part of their finding of incompetence. I've made suggestions about this in the past, but really have gone nowhere. So with administration and with others, it's that part of mental health has to have, in my opinion, an affirmative I'll go with that again. An affirmative ability that social workers who focus on treatment, who follow-up with people who are under orders of non hospitalization, to ensure that they are complying akin to probation officers,

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: but not with the

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: punishment, you know, aspect that the Department of Corrections has. So when you see somebody who is not taking their medication or they are starting to decompensate, they can go back and modify that order and say, would like to have a, would like to convert this order of non hospitalization to a hospitalization order or other conditions that would ensure that that person is following the order. I don't think the Department of Mental Health is particularly interested in it. It's gotten some good note of traction, So I doubt that anybody else is interested in it. But what we end up having to do then is depend upon law enforcement's doing who did these these folks, and then they end up the only place law enforcement really knows what to do with them is they bring them into the criminal system, which is what law enforcement does. So to me, the result of a violation of concessions when somebody's already been adjudicated, The insanity thing's a whole other issue, but I'll talk about that in just a second. But it doesn't seem to follow that the result of being incompetent is that he needs to get charged with a crime. There should be another result that is civil in nature, not criminal in nature, And, again, what I'm pointing out here is ways that we're gonna look at this when it comes to class. You do this, you do what we respond to. This is what lawyers do all the time, is they respond to the things that are presented to us. The finding of it's finding of not guilty by at. First of all, I've I've actually surveyed our entire system, and we go back over fifty years, and know who did Vermont that we are aware of is actually being found by guilty by reason of insanity by a jury in the collective memory of the defense bar. When these things arise, it's usually because both the prosecutor and the defense recognize that the person was insane at the time. However, is at the time of the defense, That is a it's like a a snapshot. It's a point in time, and it could be the result of some traumatic incident, a psychotic break. It could it could be any number of reasons why you are insane at the time of a particular offense, where before the offense, you weren't insane. After the offense, the offense, you're not insane. You might be, of course, in any way, Potentially, heard saying at some other time, but I guess any less could be. In any event, this depending on how many words lines eleven, twelve, and the requirements that as senator Baruth pointed out, the key to me is to make sure that the person who is potentially subject to this criminal liability is one who would be a danger to themselves or others as opposed to just having had a prior order. I think that's the language we're looking for. Okay. And that's much narrower, obviously. Not obviously, but it's much narrower than the bill that's originally used in the house. There was also a missionary pay. There was this what I just called the down the clock, which is you can get relief from your disability by petitioning the court. And that was out for a while and now it's back in line four or so, page seven, so that's from a constitutional standpoint. A person at least would have the ability to go in and get a lead from prior disability. The version I originally testified on did not have that in there. I suggested that it's just in the federal law. So I don't have any position on the field as a whole. How this is going to apply and I don't have any comment at all on the definition of machine's done since he's diagnosed with the These to be very fact specific when they arise in our context. And so you may you may see see challenges to the face of the law as it comes up, but it's always connected to facts. It's not just, you know, nobody's gonna sue and try to enjoin the statin legally on its face as it's written. But when it arises in a particular case, then we'll know. And lawyers are gonna raise both sides of it whether or not the bill is is is on constitutional on its basis, and you're always gonna raise that issue. More likely, however, it's going to be how it is applied in any particular case. And then you're really gonna determine whether that person is one of the babies you've thrown out in the bathwater or it's something else. And so, you know, that's my general feelings about the bill. We don't will also say that our United States Supreme Court has has been notoriously unpredictable recently in these types of things. Attitudes on both sides are looking at it saying, hey. They they should have gone a different way. And I can't predict what our name is. Supreme Court. And I asked our Republican division, and

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: they said,

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: you know, there's a general trend to reaffirming rights of firearms and to limit the infringement on those. But there are specific instances where you think that they would and they could. And so predicting how it might turn out in any given situation is very, very difficult. It's a it's a real conundrum honestly for lawyers because one of the things we like to be able to do is kind of look at clear law and tell our clients, this is this happens. This is what we're this is what's you know, this is what you do. This is what

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: we're gonna what the result

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General (Vermont)]: is gonna be. Or if a case comes in, we can give them some prediction. We don't know. The does know. I look at the case law. I don't know. And, you know, so whatever happens, you know, you could be assured that there would be litigation over the change. And what will happen next? I don't know, but we'll find out. She doesn't know where our job is. So thank you. Any questions tonight? Thanks. Great. Thank you.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Thanks for having us here. Thanks, Don. So thanks.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Morning, John. Thanks for your flexibility. I had to switch around a little bit here. But the floor is fully yours. If you could just identify yourself. Yeah,

[John Rose, Solicitor General (Vermont Attorney General’s Office)]: Todd. Thank you. Sorry, I'm getting a little bit of crosstalk here through my speakers. I'm not

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: sure where that's coming from.

[John Rose, Solicitor General (Vermont Attorney General’s Office)]: Thank you and thank you for the flexibility in allowing me to appear remotely. My name is John Rose. I'm a solicitor general at the attorney general's office. Solicitor General, I'm responsible for I'm a litigator over here primarily and I'm responsible for overseeing all the offices' appeals to the Vermont Supreme Court, the Second Circuit, the U. Supreme Court, and I also oversee significant trial court litigation. So that includes constitutional litigation and litigation involving sort of challenges to state laws. I'm typically involved in some way or overseeing that those cases. So I understand you all asked me over here to give a little constitutional context for the law. So I'm going to try my best not to make this into a constitutional law lecture, but I did want to just kind of go through some of the basic principles over the years and sort of how I'd see those generally generally as as applying applying to to the the law. Law. The caveat here is that Second Amendment jurisprudence is still kind of a new thing. The Supreme Court only recognized individual Second Amendment right in 2008 for the first time. And so the lower courts and we've only had four Supreme Court decisions, including that one on the right. So the law is still evolving a little bit. It's working its way through the lower courts, but we do have some general principles and I'll share those with you as they're oh, excuse me, Relevant to age six zero six. So the first was, and I walked through those cases a little bit. The first was the Heller case in 2008 that was a challenge to Washington DC's law that barred people from owning handguns in their own home. And the court said, yes, there is a second amendment right, it belongs to individuals. The central concern of that right is self defense and owning a handgun in your own home is squarely within that right. And so that was all the court did in that case. One thing it said in that case that's of particular relevance today is it said, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill and several other things like sensitive places like schools and churches, things like that. The other thing they said in that case, and this is sort of foundational to Second Amendment law right now is that they said, we think the limitations on sort of dangerous weapons are supported by historical traditions of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. So those are two sort of cornerstones that I think courts have been pretty uniformly assuming is that whatever restrictions there are on firearms regulation, barring guns, barring mentally ill from possessing firearms and restricting sort of unusually dangerous weapons and machine guns are sort of the prototypical example of that, have always been part of it. The next case in the line was a case called McDonald versus City of Chicago. Another sort of that one's a little bit more esoteric and that it was the question was whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. And the Supreme Court said that it does and it bars states from regulating from violating their citizens' Second Amendment rights to firearms. The third case was the big one, that's the Bruin case that I'm sure everybody here has heard of. What Bruin did was establish the test that courts are supposed to use when they're looking at Second Amendment rights, and it's a two part test. The first part of the test is does the Second Amendment's plain text cover the conduct that you're regulating? So does this involve the right of the people to keep and bear arms, basically? So that's a lot of litigation over what's an arm, who are the people, and sort of what circumstances would have fallen within that definition around the time of the founding or for technical reasons around the time when the fourteenth amendment was adopted in 1868, I believe. And then so that's part one of the test. Part two of the test is if the regulation falls within the text of the Second Amendment, the government has to show that the regulation is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation. And so that's the part where we're looking into history and trying to figure out whether at the time of the founding or at the time of the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, whether there were some laws that were sort of analogous to the laws that we're trying to pass today. Now, so Bruin involved sort of firearms licensing, so it didn't really address the categories that were identified in Heller about the mentally ill and dangerous weapons. It wasn't really that wasn't really part of that case. And so it didn't really touch that language from Heller that says, of course, regulate the mentally ill and we can regulate sort of unusually dangerous weapons. The fourth case did touch on some of that and touches on your law a little bit. That case was last year's decision and sorry, I guess two years ago now, the decision in The United States versus Rohimi, and that was a case involving a domestic violence restraining order and whether a person could be disarmed while they were subject to a domestic violence restraining order. And the Supreme Court, I think in an eight to one decision, Justice Thomas was the only justice who dissented, held that the state can do that. And the key there was, here's what the court said, when a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may, consistent with the Second Amendment, be banned from possessing firearms while the order is in effect. So, Rahimi sort of was based on historical laws that banned people from carrying guns out in sort of with dangerous intents or with ill intent toward people. And so the court said there was history and tradition of that. I think one note that the court made in that decision that's relevant to your law also is it said, We don't suggest that the Second Amendment prohibits the enactment of laws banning the possession of guns by categories of persons thought by a legislature to present a special danger of misuse. And so when we're looking at particularly Sections three and section four of your bill, I'd feel pretty comfortable under those precedents that we'd have very strong arguments that they're constitutional sort of under the plain language of Heller, which was reaffirmed by Rahimi. That's because we have in both circumstances, well, in the case of section three, we have a finding that a person is mentally ill and even further than that, a finding that a person is dangerous and a person in need of treatment. And so we feel very comfortable defending that restriction under that language I quoted from the first original Heller decision, which sort of made clear that laws banning the mentally ill from possessing firearms are constitutional. And I think probably the rehabilitation provision the ability of a person under state law to go to court and petition to have their rights restored would even further support that argument. On section four, your machine gun ban, I said, the machine gun ban was sort of one of the pillars of the reasoning in the Supreme Court in Heller where they said that you can still ban dangerous and unusual weapons because they cited an earlier case from the 1930s where the court did look at sort of the original federal machine gun ban and said, yes, of course, we can regulate machine guns. And so I'm not aware of any decision finding machine gun bans unconstitutional. I think there's been some litigation at the federal level about what exactly is a machine gun for purposes of the federal statute. But I don't see any a real viable constitutional challenge to that. So that's the whirlwind overview. I guess the headline is that we're acting in two areas that we think are pretty squarely covered by the court's recent Second Amendment precedent. So as a litigator, I'm not here as a policymaker, but as a litigator, I'd be pretty comfortable defending the law. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: has. Thank

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: you for your time. Appreciate it.

[John Rose, Solicitor General (Vermont Attorney General’s Office)]: Alright, thank you very much.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Good morning.

[Policy Director, Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence]: Let's run-in. I'm the policy director at the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Similar to Assistant Attorney General Carolyn Hansen, getting somewhere in

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: line with you, I'm here

[Policy Director, Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence]: to speak in support of the proposed amendment to H-six zero six to codify recommendations from the Fire Surrender Order Compliance Work Group. As you heard from Carolyn, these policy recommendations were developed through a very thoughtful and collaborative process, and we support advancing them this session. Firearms injury is the leading cause of domestic violence homicide in Vermont. And in twenty twenty four, nine out of the fourteen domestic violence related homicides involved a firearm. That's why we have longstanding state and federal laws in place to protect victims at any risk of harms. And as you heard, under current law, certain defendants, as well as individuals subject to civil relief and abuse orders, can be legally required to surrender their firearms for a period of time. But there is no uniform process for carrying out or monitoring these court ordered early equipments. And the lack of compliance with these conditions really reflects administrative systems that are fragmented and need procedural update. Coming forward to request a relief from abuse order is very difficult for a plaintiff survivor. Asking the court to order firearms relinquishment can be even harder. It often reflects a survivor's true desperation and fear, and it can also often reflect their trust that the system will protect them. But too often that trust is broken in our current system.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: A relief from a needs

[Policy Director, Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence]: order is an important acknowledgement by the court that a survivor has been abused and that there is a risk of future abuse. These orders include court order conditions needed to protect survivors' safety, but an order is really only a piece of paper unless our systems ensure that the conditions are clearly understood by defendants, complied with, and enforced. We see survivors harmed by defendants who were ordered to surrender firearms but did not understand the order, did not abide by the order, and did not receive needed follow-up to ensure their compliance. And often survivors experience very extreme stress because they have limited information about whether firearms have been relinquished and they don't know whether they're safe. The provisions in this amendment are procedural improvements to ensure that our existing laws operate as intended. There are consensus recommendations among a very diverse group of stakeholders and the Firearms Render Order Compliance Workgroup. And we're very deeply grateful for the work of these members. It was good work, in particular to Carolyn who chaired this work group. We thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee today and your consideration of its language, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Okay.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Next up is we have three folks from every town. Do you guys have a rough estimate of how long collectively you'll need?

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: You speak for myself, five minutes, four minutes.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Okay, I'm not trying to condense your time right at the I just want to know just for future thoughts. If you need more than five minutes, Okay. So Susan Lurie. Suzanne Lurie.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Please feel free. Good morning, everybody. Fort Worth. Good everyone. Name is Suzanne Lurie, and I live in Charlein.

[Suzanne Lurie, Gun Violence Survivor (Everytown Survivor Network)]: And I'm here today as a gun violence survivor and someone who believes we can and must do better. My personal story is not unique. The consequences of gun violence have far reaching ripple effects that impact the lives of too many people. In 1987, I was in law school when I received a call that would change the lives of my family forever. On the day before his 50 birthday, my father, a neurosurgeon, was the victim of a premeditated murder in our home by a patient. My mother was also shocked. She survived her injuries, but later died in large measure due to the trauma. She relived that horrible event over and over, and could no longer distinguish whether the gunman was still a present threat. The perpetrator went home and with that same gun, killed his wife and then himself. Another tragedy for another family. That gun was later stolen from evidence and used again in an interpersonal violence incident, yet another tragedy for another family. That experience is why I'm here today. Like many survivors, I never expected gun violence to become part of my personal story. I expected to be working to support others, not personally wearing a red shirt with the word survivor. I'd like to tell you a little bit about my background. As I often share with the survivors I work with through the Everytown Survivor Connect program, the gun violence we've experienced does not define us as one piece of our story. My parents made it clear to my siblings and me that we were expected to pursue professional careers, and my path was to go to law school. But I decided to delay for a bit, and I took a job as a counselor in a domestic violence shelter where I volunteered during college. There, I witnessed the courage of so many women attempting to leave dangerous situations. Several women I worked closely with took the brave step to leave their violent partners were later in shock and guilt. The reality is that most dangerous time for someone in an intimate partner situation is when they leave an abusive partner. It was heartbreaking to share that news with the other residents in the shelter who were carefully planning their own path to safety. I decided to go to law school to focus on changing the laws related to interpersonal violence. I interned victim as witness advocate and volunteered at a domestic violence legal clinic where I learned firsthand about the intersection of gun violence and domestic violence. We know, we know that access to a firearm makes it five times more likely than a woman will die at the hands of an abuser five times. More than two thirds of intimate partner homicides are committed with a firearm. Eventually, I changed directions and became a licensed social worker. As a mental health clinician, I know that far too often we blame gun violence and mental health issues instead of focusing on access to firearms. Simply having a mental health condition does not mean someone is a threat to themselves or others. House Bill six zero six would help keep guns out of the hands of people who have been found by a court to be a danger to themselves or others because of a mental health condition. The perpetrator who shot my parents had a very specific plan in place, one that was known by others, including his therapist. If there had been a procedure in place to prevent his access to a firearm, perhaps my family's story would have a different outcome. As a mental health clinician of Vermont, I quickly became aware that the vast majority of all gun violence deaths are suicides. In fact, eighty five percent of gun deaths in Vermont are by gun suicide. It is eighty five percent. This bill would address a gap in state law by removing firearm access from someone accords a danger to themselves or others. I now use my skills in supporting gun violence survivors all across the country. Our backgrounds and our stories are very different. What ties us together is the experience of grieving a mother, a father, a son, or a daughter, a sibling, a beloved friend, or having been at the end of a gun in an interpersonal violence incident. Or having served in the military, you experienced the impact of gun violence. Or been part of a mass shooting at a school, a bar, a concert, and the list goes on. I urge you to support hospital six zero six so that other families do not have to live with the life lockdowns and crisis of preventable gun violence. You.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Any questions? Okay, thanks.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Melissa, for Lydia Lee.

[Olivia Lee, Senior Policy Counsel (Everytown for Gun Safety)]: Good morning, Chair, Vice Chair, members of the committee. Thank you for having me here today. My name is Olivia Lee. I am senior policy counsel at Everytown for Gun Safety. I'm testifying in support of H606. Vermont has made remarkable strides in gun violence prevention over the past several years, and this bill would help the state address one of the remaining foundational policies that it lacks, which is a prohibition on fire and possession for those who have been found by a court to be a danger to themselves or to others by reason of mental illness. This bill would bring Vermont closer into line with federal law in 29 other states. As you heard earlier, federal law bars individuals who have been involuntarily committed to psychiatric facilities from having guns, and this law has been in place for more than fifty years. A separate state prohibition is important to ensure that state authorities can properly enforce this policy. This bill is a step in the right direction. It prohibits people who are subject to court orders for mental health treatment, whether in a hospital or in outpatient facilities, from possessing firearms. And as you heard earlier, under Vermont law, court orders such mental health treatment when a person's capacity to exercise self control judgment or discretion is so lessened that they pose a danger to themselves or others. The key concept here is that this bill requires a court to find under existing state law procedures that contain due process protections that a person is a danger to themselves or others by reason of mental illness. This firearm prohibition therefore does not apply when someone merely has a mental health diagnosis or when someone is simply voluntarily seeking mental health treatment. It requires the determination of a court under a very specific process that a person is a danger to themselves or others. This principle is a very long standing principle in both federal and state law restrictions for people who have severe mental illnesses. The Supreme Court in DC versus Heller, which I think someone spoke about earlier, stated that that decision finding an individual right to bear arms was not questioning the long standing prohibition on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill. And the recent Supreme Court decision in Rahimi from 2024, the Supreme Court specifically evaluated and upheld a prohibition on possession by someone who had been found by a court to be a danger to others. That was in a domestic violence context, but the court wrote at length about how dangerousness was a key factor that law enforcement officers needed to watch out for, and it was reasonable to prohibit firearm possession based on those grounds. Additionally, a prohibition like this is still important even if states have IRPA laws. There are, I think, over 21 states that have IRPA laws and 29 states that have mental health restrictions on firearm possessions. IRPA laws allow a court to order that firearms must be banned or sorry, must be relinquished by a person if they pose an immediate threat of harm to themselves or others, but those orders are very short, lasting only from fourteen days, I think, to six months in Vermont. And those ERPAs can be extended under some circumstances. They should exist in conjunction with a more robust comprehensive system that this bill would provide. I just want to speak additionally to this for a moment, which is that the state of Vermont already has a process in place to determine that someone needs to get involuntary mental health treatment, whether that's inpatient or outpatient. And we shouldn't be forcing families or law enforcement or medical health professionals to try to initiate a separate process just to make sure that a person who's already been found dangerous by a court can't access firearms for the duration of that order for treatment. So I think that this is going to help families and mental health professionals out in the sense that this mental health prohibitor is gonna attach to the order that is already, you know, in the pipeline for getting someone the treatment they need. And you're not going to ask anyone to initiate a separate petition just to make sure that they can't access firearms. With that, I'll end my testimony and thank you so much.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Thank you. Committee, any questions?

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: All right.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Okay. Thanks, Ian. And next

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: up we have Greg Lickenbroke.

[Greg Lickenbrock, Senior Firearms Analyst (Everytown for Gun Safety)]: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to testify today in support of this legislation. My name is Greg Lickenbrock and I'm Everytown for Gun Safety's senior firearms analyst. Before joining Everytown, I was a gun magazine editor for ten years. I worked with dozens of gun manufacturers, attended media events and training courses, and tested hundreds of firearms, including machine guns and the firearms designed to mimic machine guns. That's why I'd like to focus my remarks on the machine gun provision provisions in this bill. So as you've heard, federal law prohibits civilians from possessing machine guns manufactured after 05/19/1986, as well as the parts used to create them. These parts are known as auto seers or machine gun conversion devices or MCDs because they convert semiautomatic firearms, which fire one shot per trigger pull into fully automatic machine guns that will continue firing as long as the shooter depresses the trigger and the gun has ammunition. New technologies, particularly three d printing, have made it significantly easier for people to manufacture auto sears quickly at home. The most common auto sears today, devices known as Glock switches because they convert Glock style pistols into machine guns, can be three d printed in roughly thirty minutes. A pistol modified with a switch can fire 20 rounds per second, and I've included some photos of all these devices with my testimony. It takes less than ten minutes to three d print an autoseer that will convert an AR 15 into a machine gun like the kind used by the US military. Like Glock switches, these autoseers are routinely sold online as innocuous products. They're called key chains, wall hangers, things like that. Police around the country have seen a surge in auto sear recoveries. In January 2024, the ATF announced it had recovered that it had recovered more than 31,000 auto sears in the past five years, and Glock switches in particular have been used in over 20 mass shootings. These figures highlight the difficulty of stopping these devices. That's why to bolster federal law enforcement efforts, 29 states have enacted laws prohibiting machine guns and auto series on the state level, giving state law enforcement agencies the power to go after criminals who obtain these dangerous weapons. In other words, if enacted, this bill will be a crime fighting tool, a powerful one for the state. But auto seers, they're not the only modifications people seek to enhance their weapons lethality. As you know, Vermont made the wise decision to prohibit bump stocks and high capacity magazines in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, in which a gunman fired over 1,000 rounds of ammunition in ten minutes using 14 a r fifteens equipped with bomb stocks and high capacity magazines. That gunman killed sixty concertgoers and wounded over 400 others. Since then, gun makers have not only doubled down on AR fifteens and other assault weapons, but also other rapid fire devices designed to get around the federal ban on machine guns. Those devices include trigger cranks, which are manually operated. They pull the gun's trigger each time the crank rotates.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: There

[Greg Lickenbrock, Senior Firearms Analyst (Everytown for Gun Safety)]: are also bump grips and hellfire triggers, which operate just like bump stocks. They harness a semiautomatic firearms recoil energy to keep firing, but they do not use a shoulder stock. So in other words, they would get around Vermont's current bump stock prohibition. Binary triggers are replacement triggers for semiautomatic firearms, including AR fifteens and Glocks that allow you to fire one shot when you pull the trigger and another shot when you release it. In this way, binary triggers effectively double the host weapon's rate of fire. And then finally, the last example I have are forced reset triggers or FRTs, which go a step further. Once installed in a semiautomatic firearm, an FRT will automatically return forward after it's pulled. So if a shooter holds the trigger to the rear, the gun will continue firing, which is the very definition of a machine gun, and the federal government had originally cracked down on these devices. But last year, the Trump administration reversed course and effectively legalized them again. These are just a few examples of the rapid fire devices that proliferated in recent years. And I respectfully urge you to consider an amendment that would prohibit rapid fire devices as well as machine guns, as they have no legitimate uses and should have no place in our communities. The original draft of this bill included language prohibiting rapid fire devices and several states have used similar language in their legislation, which I've included toward the end of my testimony, such as Colorado, Illinois, and Massachusetts. And with that, I will end my testimony. Thank you.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Thank you. Council member Hossein.

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: Yeah. I have a question for

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: you that was a question I asked someone earlier. There's the in the machine gun ban, there's this ability, it sounds like, to get a gun registered as not a machine gun, and I'm curious about what that process is. Does the ATF come in spectrum you have? What is that?

[Greg Lickenbrock, Senior Firearms Analyst (Everytown for Gun Safety)]: So the ATF has the ability to if someone sends them a gun, they will rule on whether or not it is a machine gun. They do some testing with it. They see if it fits the federal definition of machine gun, and they which is mostly carried over for this legislation. So ATF has the power to determine what is and isn't a machine gun.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: On sort of an individual basis, but they do actually have to test the weapon.

[Greg Lickenbrock, Senior Firearms Analyst (Everytown for Gun Safety)]: Generally, yes.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Thank you.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Any other questions?

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Okay thank you Greg. I have on the list for today, Senator Baruth? Yes. I do.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: So this amendment should look pretty familiar to everyone since we passed it out of the Senate in another version last year. This was part of the work we did on the Burlington Charter and obviously in that context it was the municipality of Burlington. There was, as I remember it, grumbling from some quarters about the fact that the Charter would create a piecemeal structure in which certain restrictions would apply in Burlington and not the rest of the state. So the Burlington Charter, as everybody knows, has been stuck in house government operations and does not look likely to move from there. And so a few months ago I began considering proposing a statewide version of the Burlington Smarter. In other words, a prohibition on guns in bars statewide rather than just within the boundaries of Burlington. And so this is pretty simple in the sense that page one, line seven and eight lay out the coalition and the rest of it is really, other than the penalty that follows, all a series long series of carve outs for places where it may not apply where the people may not apply.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: I

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: must have not captured the error. This says page two zero two, but I don't see an effective date

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: there. Oh, that's because it's an amendment. The effective date of the underlying bill would have Got it. Okay.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: With that said, I'll just repeat, my preference had been to allow Burlington to amend its charter. If people don't know, that charter was brought forward originally by an overwhelming vote of the voters twelve years ago. It was allowed to die in the House at the time I and others opposed that, but that's what happened. Then if you go back a couple of years, we had a particularly shocking murder outside of Red Square in Burlington and voters went back to the polls and renewed the vote on the charter by an even more overwhelming margin. So this comes with an urgency from Burlington but I think the principle applies statewide and it's simply said, which is that in a place where people are in the process of becoming intoxicated, we do not want firearms available to them in that context. So with that said, Mr. Chair, this is placed on the table. I'm happy to help provide people for the witness list. And that's about it.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: Would it apply to hotels that have bars?

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: It has a card out that says that it does not apply to second class licensed premises, including the premises used for retail alcohol and beverage tasting permits. That's lines twelve and thirteen. So that's the distinction that's in play. And then down below, the sidewalks are public highways through which people are passing, and a dining car that holds a promotional railroad that's in the state permit is not included.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Senator, it's good

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: to hear.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: In terms of the liquor license classes, it's I've worked pretty closely with Tucker on navigating which, for the Burlington Charter, which liquor license classes were excluded and which it's been but it's been over a year since I did that, so

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: I don't remember what all

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: of them are. But all of this is to say a company partner wouldn't be a great witness to come in and explain the differences between the classes of liquor licenses, but I do believe it would include hotel and boardwalk. I think it's fair to have something.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Yeah, just to vary, Senator Vyhovsky point as well, those exceptions are identical to the exceptions that were in 01/2031 as it passed the Senate, as it would apply to a hotel, the way an actor would be a great person on the site, happened to, as you

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: might expect, talk to them

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: at length this week. So that can at least also not as though it's in, but at understand what's going on with the licensee issues here. Generally speaking, the way a license works, for example, in a hotel bar, which there are plenty of, the first class license applies to the sales of beer and wine, third class license applies to sales of spirits or consumption on premises. And in the premises, there's a license for serving and consuming those types of alcohol is very specifically set out in the license in terms of the geography, specific portions of the area, for example, a hotel on where you consume the drink that you bought there. So yes, if the firearm is possessed in those premises that have been defined in their license very specifically as to where it goes on the ground, then that would be covered. In other words, yes, that would

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: be prohibited in those premises.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: It would not be prohibited in the other portions of the hotel where the consumption of alcohol under the license applies. So if you take a hotel bar, if that's the area of the premises where alcohol is consumed. Outside of that, it's not physically broke off, but you sort of imagine it's just broke off on the background on their license.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Right, I'm not allowed, for example, to to sell and

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: consume at the reception desk. Exactly. So if you

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: have room service, you're not, if

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: you can get

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: a drink drinking room in a hotel, you're not allowed to grab

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: a little bit of firearm.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: That's an interesting question because I'm not sure how the licensing interacts with the fact that, say, you can take the drink up to your hotel, I mean, up to your road. So that would be a good follow-up question for Tucker as to, because you're probably not in the licensed premises, but you are consuming the drinks that

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: you buy on that.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: I wonder if that's fairly similar because I believe we have permanently codified the ability to order mixed beverages from restaurants to go. Right. And so it is delivered

[Kim (Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs)]: to me at my home.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: I'm not in the licensed establishment. Yeah, that's a good point because the phrasing of the prohibition is in the premises where the alcohol is licensed to be served. So if you're not within that premises that's cordoned off, at least metaphorically, in the license, then it wouldn't seem real life as you're drinking it in your room and got in the process. I was curious about that Burlington, was trying to remember exactly what happened. Was the person involved in the shooting ever, were they in the bar? Yeah. And then they went out

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: of the bar? They were in and out and the last time that they went out, they shot the mansion and having an altercation. Was she under the influence? I would say they both were because they had been in there for a few hours. So I don't know if she was legally over the limit, but they had them consume the alcohol.

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: Is that anywhere in here that be over the limit or just Yeah.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: It's just a sensitive location. Not a

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: prohibition on someone who just consumed alcohol from being in possession of a firearm. It's prohibition on having a firearm in a premise. In that place. Yeah.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Yeah. It doesn't matter if that didn't mean to have it.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: I'm just

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: going to say it's just the sidewalks, public highways, something in Church Street. They had the seats out front.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: This was Senator Vyhovsky's addition to this, so if you're passing, like if you imagine Church Street and you've got tables and the sidewalk goes through, you're fine having a firearm as you pass through, but if you take a seat at one of their tables you're

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: in an apprentices. Is that how it Yes.

[Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky (Member)]: Yes and those are explaining, those outdoor surveying areas are formed and defined by the license. And in many of them, are actually roped off. Yeah.

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: And when it comes to licenses, it's the licensee. I'm I'm looking at page two, slide 13, the to the bar owner and carrying firearms but no none of the bar staffs.

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Right and I think that was a concession to the idea that that's in making their property and so it preserves their second method of right on their own property.

[Sen. Robert Norris (Vice Chair)]: Other

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: comments or questions on this one?

[Sen. Philip Baruth (Member)]: Anything

[Sen. Nader Hashim (Chair)]: else generally on 606 for today? That's fine. Alright. Sounds good. Well, we've got some other testimony

[Eric FitzPatrick, Office of Legislative Counsel (Vermont)]: for tomorrow, and then this is working for everyone.