Gunshots rang out over I-295 outside Portland on Tuesday morning. As police searched the wooded area nearby, and a SUV with bullet holes in the windshield sat empty at an exit, neighbors couldn’t believe their eyes.
“This is crazy,” one woman told the Press Herald. “This is Yarmouth, Maine.”
No, in fact. This is the United States of America, where the peace and quiet of a community – of any community – can be shattered instantly by gun violence.
We like to think we are safe in Maine. But as long as it’s easy to get a firearm, nowhere is safe.
Just ask the communities whose names we know only because of mass shootings: Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Parkland. These felt like safe places, too – until someone with a gun took away that feeling forever. Following each of those shootings and many others, shocked community members went in front of the cameras to say, in some form, “We never thought it could happen here.”
We have no choice but to acknowledge that “it” can happen anywhere – even in Maine, where a majority of legislators, spanning both parties, seem to think we’re somehow immune from the gun violence plaguing the rest of the country. The events of Tuesday provide alarming, incontrovertible proof that we are not.
After the investigation into the shooting on I-295 stopped traffic there for hours, four people were found shot to death in a home in Bowdoin. Police said they believed the incidents were related.
Just as terrifying was the arrest last week in South Portland of a teenage boy who police say made threats to “cause serious harm to individuals and groups using specific weapons.” Alerted by the school department’s resource officer, authorities moved quickly to search the teen’s home. Officers found what they said were a number of high-powered rifles.
Two Waterville youths also were charged over the weekend in a separate incident that police said involved direct threats against the city’s schools, setting that community on edge.
There are also plenty of signs in Maine of the extremism that drives many mass shooters. A 19-year-old Waterville man was arrested last year after authorities said he planned to blow up a Chicago-area mosque. In December, a 19-year-old from Wells who had recently converted to a radical Islamic ideology attacked two police officers in New York City.
Seven people from Maine were charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, in which supporters of former President Trump attempted to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election, including one who assaulted three police officers.
Most disturbing has been the increase in the presence of white supremacist groups in Maine, where they have been regularly posting banners and recruitment fliers. A march in downtown Portland earlier month ended when members of a neo-Nazi group attacked counter-protesters.
No, Maine is not free from extremism, just as it isn’t free of other leading drivers of gun violence: anger, isolation, desperation, fear and untreated mental illness. Why would Maine be exempt from gun violence, whether it takes the form of domestic violence, suicide or a mass shooting?
Despite this fact, the Legislature has failed to pass even the most minimal reform of gun laws. Similarly, there is little to no recognition that Maine’s lax gun laws fuel violence elsewhere.
Instead, legislators say something like, “It won’t happen here.”
Until they decide to take action, we’re going to learn just how mistaken that statement is.
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