Two committees of the Vermont Senate summoned a pair of Harvard Business School professors to the Statehouse on Thursday in an attempt to breathe life into vetoed gun legislation.
The bill in question, S.169, would mandate a 24-hour waiting period before most handgun purchases. It cleared the legislature last May but was vetoed in June by Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
Since then, legislative leaders have struggled to decide whether to compromise with the governor or attempt to override his veto, which would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers. While the measure met that threshold last year in the Senate, it fell short in the House on a vote of 82 to 58.
On Thursday, senators sought to convince their colleagues — and perhaps the governor — that the bill could, in fact, save lives. They invited professors Deepak Malhotra and Michael Luca to present their research showing that waiting periods cut the homicide rate by 17 percent and the suicide rate by 7 to 11 percent.
“If this policy passes, if the objective is to reduce gun deaths, that would be something you could very much expect,” Malhotra told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Health and Welfare Committee.
The professors reached their conclusions after analyzing the outcomes of various state-based waiting periods over a 45-year span and studying the impact of a national waiting period in effect from 1994 to 1998. They determined that, throughout the country, waiting periods could prevent 900 homicides and 950 suicides a year.
Such measures, Malhotra conceded, were “not a magic wand,” noting that 90 percent of suicides would still take place. “But every one of those deaths has an impact on the family, the community, the entire state,” he said.
Less clear from their research, the professors acknowledged, was whether the length of a waiting period made it more or less effective. They were not able to study the efficacy of a 24-hour waiting period because no state has enacted such a limited measure.
Scott cited that paucity of applicable data last year in explaining his veto to reporters. “There are no comparisons to a 24-hour waiting period on handguns alone,” he said at a press conference. “There are no-apples-to-apples comparisons.”
The governor hasn’t, apparently, changed his mind since. According to spokesperson Rebecca Kelley, Scott “stands by this decision” and believes that “the best way to build upon the work we’ve done to reduce gun violence and suicide is to focus on the root causes.” She cited proposals from his budget address earlier this week that would increase funding for suicide prevention and early intervention programs.
“If the Senate disagrees, they have the ability to override the governor’s veto,” Kelley said.
Whether the Senate will attempt to do so remained unclear after the professors delivered their testimony. During a brief discussion about what to do next, members of the Judiciary Committee complained that the administration had not made clear what the governor would support and what he wouldn’t.
“It’s hard to make that decision without actually hearing from them,” said Sen. Dick Sears (D-Bennington), who chairs the committee.
One option, Sears suggested, would be to increase the duration of the waiting period — something the senator has previously opposed. Another would be to strip out that portion of the bill and pass a more limited measure. Its other provisions include closing the so-called “Charleston loophole” by requiring background checks to be completed prior to a sale and allowing medical professionals to request “extreme risk protection orders” against those they deem a risk to public safety.
That’s the preferred approach of Bill Moore, a firearms policy analyst for the Vermont Traditions Coalition, which supports gun rights. “There’s consensus on all of the other elements,” he said. “So we would strongly urge both [chambers] to go ahead and just take out the waiting period — have that debate on another platform.”
Senate President Pro Tempore Tim Ashe (D/P-Chittenden) said he believes the Senate “should do anything we can to get a waiting period passed into law to save lives.” But, he added, “We’re also realistic. There are three partners in this, and hopefully the research helps people make a better decision.”
Disclosure: Tim Ashe is the domestic partner of Seven Days publisher and coeditor Paula Routly. Find our conflict-of-interest policy here: sevendaysvt.com/disclosure.
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Reply to JohnGreenberg:
1) Where did they compute where someone saved themselves from an abusive spouse because they had a gun to defend themselves. Where did they compute people killed by people trying to commit suicide in other forms that they lived though but killed other people in the process like driving the wrong way on the interstate. How can they know that 17% of those people would not have commited murder? I know a lot of people that have the “it isn’t my fault” or the “if they had done this” complex but it was still them.
2) Guess you didn’t read his whole comment in Heller. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those“in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition. Common weapons across the world right now are select fire rifles with 30 round magazines. Yes 30 round magazine are part of the weapon system.
3)James Madison originally proposed the Second Amendment shortly after the Constitution was officially ratified as a way to provide more power to state militias, which today are considered the National Guard. It was deemed a compromise between Federalists — those who supported the Constitution as it was ratified — and the anti-Federalists — those who supported states having more power. Having just used guns and other arms to ward off the English, the amendment was originally created to give citizens the opportunity to fight back against a tyrannical federal government.
John Greenburg: Even you must admit this “small inconvenience,” is a technical obstacle placed in the path of exercising a constitutional right. How “small” and whether any life is saved is an improper shift of focus to one based on emotion.
The 16th Article of Vermont’s Constitution is explicit. Every citizen has the right to bear arms for the purpose of self defense. Handguns are the most commonly used device for practicing that right. Your shift continues a dangerous trend: that all potential encroachments on constitutional rights should be based on the political winds of emotion. This is troubling.
For instance, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have a constitutional right to free speech. There are those on each side of the aisle who argue the opposite’s tweets are inciting violence. (Whose are worse or more frequent is irrelevant.) If researchers found violence less likely with a waiting period, are we then justified in placing a 24 hour obstacle between draft and publication?
All of us have a constitutional right to privacy. I support a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion as an exercise of that right. Yet we know almost 100% of abortions terminate a fetal life. (Measure that to the comparatively small and speculative numbers proponents of S.169 are using.) Abortion opponents also claim that a waiting period is just a “small inconvenience” that may save a life. The only difference with S.169 is the subject matter.
No constitutional right is safe if the measuring stick by which we examine potential encroachments is the emotional one you argue we should adopt here. That may not be politically popular at the moment, but it’s the only way our constitutional rights will be preserved.
Thanks again for the response, I miss debating with people on Vtdigger, but thats apparently not allowed anymore.
Your correct in saying that the governors proposal on staff to student never made it into a bill. But its important to remember that writing bills is NOT the governors job. When a legislator writes a bill, it, the pro-tem or speaker of the house assigns that bill to the appropriate committee where it eventually moves to another committee and head towards a vote, or stays where it is and dies a slow death.
But again, the ideas are out there, and have been for a while whether its student ratios, cutting Social security taxes for all Vermonters, or eliminating corporate taxes for businesses in the climate economy – which the governor also proposed.
Whether any of the governors ideas gets put into a bill by a legislator, and passes thru the various committees is another story.
These Harvard Business School suits have no skin in the game at all. Aren’t even from this state. But what if the BS they are spewing as gospel, designed & contrived to put impositions and restrictions on tens of thousands of other people through oppressive legislation, doesn’t pan out? What is their punishment? Do they lose their jobs, do they go to prison themselves for a couple years, are they fined a million dollars and have to make reparations to everyone they caused problems for? No, there is no downside at all for them coming and setting up this State requested Bully Pulpit.
Have these seditious legislators gone to any trouble at all to get testimony from anyone at all with a contrary opinion? No, they haven’t, in fact they’ve actively blocked anything that doesn’t support their agenda.
Maybe it’s time to bring back Tarring & Feathering.
Skyler Bailey’s conclusion — “meaning that a waiting period in Vermont could not possibly have any effect on 99.85% of suicides” — doesn’t follow from his statistics.
In order to reach that step, you’d have to prove at least 2 additional points. First, that your sample was actually representative, and not skewed for some reason. Because Vermont’s population is small, the number is relatively small and over a large number of years. What other factors might have influenced these numbers during these years? Scientific studies are, or at least purport to be randomized, precisely so that legitimate inferences can be drawn from them. This sample is not at all random.
Second, you’d want to look for effects that might not be readily apparent: for example, how many suicides were there four days later? Might a day of waiting have made a difference?
At best, his numbers show that only a small number of suicides occurred withing the waiting period, which certainly does lend credibility to the notion that waiting periods would save only a relatively small number of lives. But that point was never contested by waiting period proponents.
Their point, with which I agree, is that ANY life saved is worth more than the small inconvenience of a waiting period.
The construction of the waiting period study cannot reveal a thing about what they mean to study – yet it claims that waiting period laws definitively decrease homicide rates by 17%! The effects of a waiting period law do not unfold over time – they are fully realized within the length of the waiting period itself. If a 2-day waiting period really decreased homicide rates by 17%, the effect of that would be fully and entirely apparent in 2 days following the enactment of the law. It wouldn’t be a change in rate trajectory and it wouldn’t be a change in rate over time; each of those would have to be attributable to other causes. If the waiting period caused the change, it would literally be that homicide rates would be 17% lower on Wednesday than they were on Monday, and they would stay there. That is a statistical cliff, and that is what these studies need to look for. Comparing and contrasting the homicide and suicide rates of many different states against one another over a period of 45 years (which the study proudly proclaims it does) literally cannot tell you a thing about the efficacy of waiting periods. The entire study is bunk. If you wanted to look for a possible effect of waiting periods, you would look within the states that enacted them for that statistical cliff at the time of enactment.
“Forestgimp,” thanks for your reply.
The governor made a big issue of student to staff ratios in his first year in office, but introduced no bills.
Assuming that this proposal is in the form of a bill — which from the article you link to, does NOT appear to be the case — then, if passed, it MIGHT effect spending a year from now. It would have NO impact on spending last year or this.
But, as the article you quoted notes, it won’t pass: “Lawmakers on the House Education Committee responded with skepticism to the administration’s idea on Tuesday … “It is highly unlikely that the Senate would vote for a mandatory arbitrary number,” Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, said of the ratio proposal.”
So my point remains. What the governor has finally proposed — a year after running on a platform of cutting spending and then taking office — is a proposal, not yet in legislative language, which has essentially zero chance of passing and whose effects on the state budget, in any case, are unclear but surely not large.
If cutting state spending were my first and highest priority, then I would support candidates who proposed specific plans that might actually get legislative approval and which would clearly do the job. This proposal doesn’t even get into the ballpark of meeting either of these criteria
But personally, I believe that there are MANY other issues which require attention, and some of them will require increased spending. So my own priority is to make sure that government runs as efficiently as possible while still meeting the myriad needs our society as imposed on it. So cutting spending is NOT my first or highest priority.
Donald Davis, thank you for your replies.
1) Your first point totally misrepresents the study you’re trying to rebut. The study, which was based on “the country,” not just Vermont, reached conclusions about homicides and suicides, NOT specifically mass killings.
Instead of responding to its findings which are based on “analyzing the outcomes of various state-based waiting periods over a 45-year span and studying the impact of a national waiting period in effect from 1994 to 1998,” you’ve completely changed the subject.
Finally, without doing additional research, I’m quite certain that there actually are other studies, which may differ slightly on the statistics reached, but which also conclude that waiting periods would save lives. THAT is the question we’re discussing here.
2) I didn’t continue the Heller quote because the remainder just adds specific examples to the generalization I quoted, and because comments are space limited. But in any case, the additional material you quote bolsters my argument, not yours.
3) Other than some gratuitous assertions about “republican thought” and “the deliberations of the Framers,” your answer fails to address the text of the Constitution (which is, after all, what we’re trying to interpret).. As I showed previously, it not only does NOT support your specious idea of militias “to protect themselves from an oppressive government,” it explicitly and specifically contradicts it. One of the 3 purposes of the militia, as explained by the Constitution is to “suppress insurrections.” Explain the text of the Constitution and I’m all ears.
You can’t legislate against stupidity.
The Vermont senate seeks to be placed under arrest by a lawful militia of the People, for contempt of their oath of office.