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Commentary
I'm not surprised it happened here
The morning after a gunman in Lewiston, Maine, killed 18 people and injured 13 more, my husband and I spoke in whispers in our kitchen. We were planning how to explain to our children, ages 6 and 8, why they wouldn’t be going to school that day.
We would keep things simple and direct, then respond to their questions. We would say people had been hurt, not in our city but 45 minutes north, and that we needed to let the first responders do all they could to help.
“Was it a shooting?” our oldest, a third grader, asked right away. “I’ve heard about shootings, but I didn’t think it would happen here.”
Here, where we walk hand in hand to school most days, where we chat with the crossing guard on the way, and sometimes stop for ice cream on our walks home. Here, where I tell my children, after trips to our favorite state parks and beaches — all rocky coastline and crisp air — that someday they’ll realize how lucky they are. Here, a safe place, according to all the officials who document and track such things.
This is where you might expect me to say: I didn’t think it would happen here, either.
You’d be wrong.
In the days after the Lewiston shooting, we heard this sentiment over and over — the shock that this particularly American horror had come to Maine, how it had pierced a veil in this rural, idyllic state.
“This isn’t us,” our governor, Janet Mills, said at a press conference last week announcing the discovery of the shooter’s body. Maine is a “big small town,” reporter Steven Kurutz wrote in The New York Times. Here, he argued, there’s a “sense of being removed from the chaos and churn of America at this moment.”
But this idea rings hollow, born from willful ignorance or political convenience. The sad truth is, this is us.
Maine is a state within a nation that has allowed mental health care to collapse from underfunding. That has prioritized the militarization of our police departments over equipping them with the training and adequate resources to help individuals and communities grapple with the mental health crises that so often underlie violent crime. That has seen a dramatic increase in what economists have dubbed “deaths of despair,” from overdoses, alcohol use and suicide, with rural counties especially affected.
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Add to this the deepening economic and political divide between the “two Maines”— the generally blue southern part of the state and coastal towns, versus the generally red northern inland areas. And increased vitriol over the rights of trans kids and the LGBTQ+ community. And a growth of white nationalist activity in the state, with neo-Nazi rallies held in Portland and Augusta this summer being the most obvious display.
A sense of remove is only possible if you haven’t been paying attention — if you have the privilege of not paying attention. Or if you are looking to justify your own inaction.
Maine has a high rate of gun ownership and few of the gun laws that are widely considered reasonable and effective. Gun laws we do have on the books, such as the yellow flag law that might have saved lives in Lewiston, aren’t always put to use. This spring, Maine’s state legislature rejected a bill that would have required background checks on most gun sales, and another that would have instituted a 72-hour waiting period — a bill partly aimed at mitigating the state’s high rate of suicide by gun.
Gov. Mills, a Democrat, was silent on those bills, offering no public support. She has an A grade from the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, a powerful lobbying group that has been effective at blocking or minimizing state-level gun control measures for years. In the Alliance’s 2022 election questionnaire, Mills said she opposed requiring licenses to buy or possess a gun. She opposed restricting semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines. She opposed requiring background checks for private sales.
This is who we are.
In our school district, a teen was arrested earlier this year and charged with trying to recruit another person to kill students and staff at his high school. Police said they seized several high-powered rifles from his home. This fall the same school was placed in lockdown when another teen showed up on campus with what turned out to be a replica airsoft gun.
As I write this, schools in multiple parts of the state were responding to what seemed to be three separate threats.
A sense of remove is only possible if you haven’t been paying attention — if you have the privilege of not paying attention. Or if you are looking to justify your own inaction.
People will keep dying in mass shootings unless our leaders acknowledge their own culpability and sacrifice their egos and their political capital
At a remembrance ceremony on Sunday at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, photographs of the victims were set out beneath an altar inlaid with the image of a pelican plucking flesh from its own breast to feed its young. The image, a centerpiece at the historic church, has long been used as an allegory for Christ’s sacrifice. I think it holds another meaning here.
People will keep dying in mass shootings unless our leaders acknowledge their own culpability and sacrifice their egos and their political capital for the good of the whole and in duty to the truth.
U.S. Congressman Jared Golden, a Democrat, has shown them how. He lives in Lewiston and has long opposed an assault weapons ban. Last week he apologized for his “false confidence that our community was above this and that we could be in full control.” He pledged to work with colleagues to implement the ban and prevent future shootings.
On that October morning in Maine, our kids kept asking questions, and we tried to answer as honestly as possible. Yes, many people had died. Yes, more were hurt. No, we didn’t know yet why this had happened. But when our 8-year-old asked if the shooting was “a once-in-a-lifetime” kind of tragedy, something that wouldn’t likely happen again, I answered him the only way I could. I lied.
