By Sam Douglass
On Thursday, May 7 the Vermont Senate will take up legislation that will place into effect a statewide prohibition on machine guns and create a statewide ban for bringing firearms into establishments licensed for alcohol, sponsor and Senate Pro Tem Phil Baruth (D-Chittenden Central) told VDC today.
The bill is on today’s calendar but will be passed over for action tomorrow, Baruth said.
S.329 was introduced in mid-April by Sen. Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden Central) as an exact copy of H.606, which was reported on by Vermont Daily Chronicle in early April. When introduced, S.329 also included a proposed amendment to ban firearms in bars statewide.
The proposal is based on Baruth’s 2025 legislation to modify the Burlington City Charter to the same effect. That legislation was taken up in the Senate last year and passed along party lines to the Vermont House where it has since remained in legislative quagmire.
At this point in the legislative session, senators are no longer allowed to introduce new bills, and the March deadline for legislation to advance out of committee has passed. However, according to Baruth speaking in committee on April 17, following his discussions with House leadership regarding his 2025 proposal to amend the Burlington City Charter, and citing unknown procedural obstacles, he appealed to the Rules Committee for an exemption to allow the drafting and advance of S.329 in the Senate.
In 2025, Governor Phil Scott went on record to state his intention to veto changes to the Burlington City Charter, citing the inability of business owners to enforce the measure and uneven rules across municipalities for banning firearms in licensed establishments. With S.329 applying prohibitions evenly statewide, it’s unclear whether the Republican Governor intends to veto this bill as well.
Information for In Committee news reports are sourced from GoldenDomeVt.com and the General Assembly website. Generative AI has not been used in the writing of this story.
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Categories: Legislation
What a waste of time ! A restaurant or any other business can already ban firearms on private property. Of course the incident that brought this about occured on a sidewalk outside a restaurant, and therefore would not have had anything to do with this bill. As far as fully automatic firearms, they are already controlled by federal laws. They require a more thorough background check, and higher cost to obtain the license. This is all about disingenuous legislators trying to put their names on laws that they can then claim as some kind of revolutionary, paradigm shifting legislation . In light of the woman that just last week, entered the hospital with a handgun, how well did the law that Baruth convinced others was not only necessary, but would end these kinds of incidents work ? It didn’t ! All that did was ensure that the perp did not have to worry about being confronted by a “good guy” with a gun.