by Steve MacDonald, for Granite Grok

For years, the City of Burlington has pursued its ‘salesman’s foot in the door’ strategy to begin broader gun bans in the city. Gun-banning Bolsheviks will try anything to get that ball rolling. Get one local, isolated ban, and then work on it until you have made it almost impossible to exercise your right to self-defense.

I will ban them here, then there, yes, I will ban them everywhere!

Burlington has been pining for a bar ban. No firearms in bars. The residents have voted twice to approve it. Legislators have tried repeatedly to get the State to allow it (localities are prohibited by state law from passing their own local prohibitions). The issue, aside from it violating the Second Amendment, is that there’s never been, as far as I can tell, a shooting in a bar.

Without repeating what I’ve already said about Democrats banning guns the spark for this particular effort was a shooting outside a bar. “Supporters say it’s needed to reduce the increase in homicides in downtown Burlington and elsewhere.“

Everywhere, including elsewhere, that is not inside a bar is outside a bar, so I suppose, if you are insane enough to want the government to have all the guns, this makes some sense. A guy shoots another guy in front of the bar; we need to ban guns in bars. [Related: The Blight of Democrat Rule Continues to Take It’s Toll on Burlington, Vermont.]

The problem of shootings, murders, and crime in Burlington has nothing to do with bar patrons being armed. It is the direct result of other brilliant Democrat ideas, which have filled the city with members of rival foreign gangs and tribes (who hate each other), and other progressive acts that encourage bad behavior and punish anyone who wants to talk truth to it.

The city in decline is a direct result of Democrats not armed bar patrons. They didn’t invite the third world, encourage drug abuse, homelessness, crime, and sex trafficking, unless you mean by voting for Democrats contrary to their best interests. Democrats do use bars, and since Democrats don’t trust anyone but the government with guns, which clearly demonstrates a mental handicap that should prohibit them from having the right to vote, disarming them anywhere makes sense to whatever occupies the carapace of bone surrounding their 60 cc brains.

To be clear, it is never a good idea to consume alcohol while armed, but this does not justify disarming law-abiding citizens. It has also occurred to me to ask why Bar owners don’t just put gun-free zone signs on the door and around the inside. Those will work just as effectively as a law that no criminal is going to follow anyway, and by advertising that you’ve disarmed everyone or tried to, it invites shooters or mass shooters to do what Burlington’s best and brightest are convinced their ordinance would prevent.

Governor Scott may be a Northeastern liberal Republican, but so far, he’s promised to veto any such move giving Burlington permission to make its bars soft targets. Absent the veto-proof majority, this has little to no shot in the 2026 legislative session, but Vermonters have this sad habit of letting Democrats collect political power to their detriment, and the midterms are coming.