Source: In These Times
Pssst. Want an unregistered semi-automatic handgun, some heroin and a way to make a 1,400 percent profit?
First, the gun. You can legally buy it through a “private” sale at a gun show, yard sale, online or from a dealer. Doesn’t matter if you’re a convicted murderer with a history of mental illness and a restraining order for domestic abuse. Anyone 16 or older with $600 can, for example, go to Armslist.com and arrange with a “private party” in Arlington, Vt., to pick up a “Zastava M92 PV 7.62 x 39 cal. semi auto pistol that has a 10 inch barrel, comes with 2 each 30 round clips.” The Serbian assault weapon is, the ad notes, the “very cool … pistol version of the AK-47.”
Then, if you are willing to break the law, you can drive the weapon to New York, where semi-automatic handguns are banned, and sell it for triple the Vermont price. You can invest the $1,800 in heroin. Back in Vermont, where heroin is in relatively short supply, you can resell it for five times the New York cost and garner $9,000—a quick 1,400 percent profit.
Just the facts
Vermont is a gun lover’s free-market paradise. And anti-gun control advocates argue that because it has a golden triangle of virtues—loose gun laws, high gun ownership and a low crime rate—the famously safe, liberal state is proof that gun regulations are largely irrelevant to crime rates.
National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke gleefully described Vermont as having “no gun laws at all,” and concluded that the state does “damage to the idea that there is an ironclad link between the availability of firearms and crime.”
And facts back him up.