Vermont’s House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines last week to advance H.606, a bill that would tighten gun restrictions in the state, sending the measure to the full chamber just before a critical legislative deadline.
All six Democrats on the committee backed the bill. All five Republicans voted against it. The narrow Friday vote kept H.606 alive at a point in the session when bills failing to clear committee effectively die for the year.
The legislation carries several distinct provisions. It would make firearm theft a felony, with steeper penalties for repeat offenses. For the first time in Vermont law, it would also broadly prohibit the ownership or sale of machine guns and devices capable of converting other firearms into machine guns.
“The reason we’re doing this is because guns that shoot fast kill more people,” said Rep. Angela Arsenault, D-Williston, one of the bill’s lead sponsors.
But the provision drawing the sharpest debate would bar people from owning or purchasing firearms while they are under an active court order requiring outpatient mental health treatment through the Vermont Department of Mental Health. Under Vermont law, that type of court order applies only when someone has been found to have a mental illness and be considered dangerous to themselves or others.
Arsenault pointed to what she described as a genuine gap in state protections. When someone is receiving court-ordered treatment outside a psychiatric hospital, they are not under close supervision, even though a court has already determined they pose a danger. She argued Vermont needs narrower, more targeted prohibitions to address that vulnerability.
The restriction would lift once a person completed treatment and was no longer deemed dangerous, allowing them to legally purchase firearms again.
Republicans on the committee pushed back hard. Rep. Zak Harvey, R-Castleton, asked Democrats to remove the outpatient treatment provision as a compromise before the vote, but Democrats declined to make changes on those grounds.
“I mean, think about that, Republicans supporting a gun bill,” Harvey said in an interview, suggesting the rest of the legislation had enough support to earn cross-party backing if Democrats had been willing to negotiate on that single provision.
Before the vote, Harvey said he felt as though he was “screaming out into the wilderness and it just continues to fall on deaf ears.”
Vermont has historically held a more permissive stance toward firearms than many other New England states, a fact that shapes the political terrain around any gun legislation in Montpelier. The Upper Valley, which straddles the Vermont-New Hampshire border, reflects that complexity. Rural communities on both sides of the Connecticut River often share a similar culture around hunting and firearm ownership, and many residents view restrictions with skepticism regardless of party affiliation.
That regional context matters as H.606 moves to the full House. Vermont’s rural districts, many of which lean more conservative even when represented by Democrats, could complicate the bill’s path. The court-ordered treatment provision, in particular, sits at the intersection of two politically charged issues: gun rights and mental health policy.
Critics of the provision have raised concerns about stigmatizing people who seek or receive mental health treatment, arguing that a court order for outpatient care should not automatically trigger the loss of a constitutional right. Supporters counter that the standard for such orders already requires a finding of dangerousness, making the threshold meaningful rather than arbitrary.
The machine gun provision, by contrast, drew less controversy in committee. Federal law already restricts machine gun ownership broadly, but Vermont lacked a parallel state statute. H.606 would close that gap under state law.
The firearm theft felony provision also reflects a gap advocates have long sought to address. Stolen guns frequently surface in crimes, and advocates argue that treating theft as a felony creates stronger deterrence and gives law enforcement more tools to track illegal firearms.
Whether the full House will keep the bill intact or strip its most contested provision is now the central question. Lawmakers return to Montpelier with a divided picture of what compromise, if any, looks like on gun legislation this session.
