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by Northern
I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, I’m sure everytown lobbied here, but they are not the reason those bills received overwhelming support. They received overwhelming support because the vast majority of progressive/liberal voters, who are the most powerful political force in the state, support such laws. If there was a campaign on the ground to gather voter support for this, I sure didn’t even see it. It’s not why it happened here. The fact that we don’t have some of the crazy firearms restrictions that are seen in other progressive/liberal areas is probably because although people here give knee jerk support to “gun control,” it’s also largely perceived as unnecessary because our overall amount of gun violence is low—it’s not a looming issue.
In Burlington, people just started drumming harder about it this year because there were something like 12 shootings, which is apparently a record.
My point is that your post above attributes the changes to some greater influence of Everytown here, which isn’t needed because people here are largely going to support gun regulation at this point; and “retirees from NY,” which, I’m sorry but while some of them may vote with progressives, they really aren’t more than a part of the bigger block of voters from Burlington and the surrounding county who are driving the agenda here.
As far as “out of state students” go, yes of course, the state’s liberal politics are partly attributable to people who move here and stay after college; but that has been happening for a long time, and we only ended up with the gun laws tightening in 2018. Many of the liberals whom I know are ages 30-60 and have lived here for 20-40 years. It isn’t an influx of NY retirees and a horde of Everytown lobbyists who caused this recent change, it was a knee-jerk reaction to a mentally disturbed teenager who allegedly planned a school shooting. That fear meant that even many conservative voters supported the legal changes, as demonstrated by the conservative governor’s signing of the law. The protests against it appeared to be attended to the most extreme right wing anti-government people, and were extremely small demonstrations compared to, say, the marchers wearing pink pussy hats during the previous years (who also weren’t largely NY retirees).