Houghton said testimony from Bell and other medical experts has convinced her that ready access to guns likely accounts for the incongruity in those statistics. And yet the rate of suicide deaths in the state is higher than the national average in every age group. Rebecca Bell, a pediatric intensivist at the University of Vermont Children’s Hospital and president of the Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told lawmakers that young people in Vermont are less likely than their peers in other states to report feelings of sadness or hopeless or suicidal thoughts. Waiting periods and safe storage, Houghton said, would be particularly effective mechanisms to reduce suicides by gun.ĭr. “You know, losing 142 individuals in the most recent year that we have data, when they’re preventable, is really unacceptable when it comes to health care.” “We really needed to look at it from a health care perspective,” Houghton said. And she said the new gun proposals represent a public health approach to addressing the problem.

Lori Houghton, the Democratic chair of the House Committee on Health Care said that suicide deaths now outnumber highway fatalities. And legislation making its way through the House of Representatives would establish a 72-hour waiting period for all gun purchases, and a so-called “safe storage” provision that would require gun owners to keep their weapons securely locked if a child, or someone else who shouldn’t have a gun, would otherwise be able to gain access.Įssex Rep.

Lawmakers want to bring those numbers down by making it harder for people in crisis to gain access to firearms. One hundred and forty-two Vermonters died by suicide in 2021, the highest yearly total in state history. Supreme Court decision last year that upended legal precedent over the right to bear arms.

Vermont lawmakers are poised to move ahead with new restrictions on gun ownership that are all but certain to invite a constitutional challenge due to a U.S.

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