A year after the Lewiston shooting, Maine struggles to define its relationship with guns

It was league bowling night and Bobbi Nichols and her sister, Tricia Asselin, were on rival teams. Nichols visited Asselin’s lane to rib her and wish her luck.
Nichols was halfway back to her lane at the Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley in Lewiston when she heard a bang. Then another. 
Nichols, 63, was just feet away from Robert Card II, who killed 18 people and injured 13 others between mass shootings at the bowling alley and Schemengees Bar and Grille on Oct. 25, 2023. At least 20 more were injured in the mayhem that ensued in both places as bystanders rushed to escape, according to a footnote in a state report on the shooting.
Nichols watched Card fatally shoot someone in the face. She and others ran out of the alley and toward the nearby woods, many still in their bowling shoes.
It wasn’t until weeks later during a group counseling session that another witness told Nichols that someone’s body had fallen on top of her during the shooting, shielding Nichols from Card. Nichols had blocked out the memory.
Asselin, 53, who worked part time at the bowling alley but had the night off, didn’t follow Nichols out of the building. Nichols waited an hour and a half for her to come out, but then learned that Card had fatally shot Asselin while she was trying to call 911.
Some survivors of previous mass shootings have publicly come out in support of gun control. Survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, went on to found March For Our Lives, where nearly 2 million people marched nationwide in support of gun legislation. Parents of the children killed in the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde, Texas, testified before Congress and begged members to take legislative action to prevent further mass shootings.
But Nichols, who used to hunt, opposes gun restrictions more now than she did before the shooting. She thinks people should own guns, take classes on using them and learn self-defense.
While she supports one of the gun policies that Gov. Janet Mills shepherded through the Legislature after the shooting, Nichols doesn’t believe any of the bills passed this year would have prevented the mass shooting.
“I’m tired of them coming after our guns,” she said of policymakers, who she believes are pushing legislation without talking to survivors to learn what they support.
In a state with loose firearm laws and relatively low rates of gun violence, last year’s massacre in Lewiston — the deadliest mass shooting nationwide in 2023 and worst ever in Maine — abruptly shifted the gun conversation.
Some of the Lewiston victims and their relatives have since become gun control advocates. But there is even disagreement among some of them. A few of the people killed or shot that night had their own guns sitting in vehicles outside. And others shocked by the shooting — whether they witnessed it firsthand or simply followed the news coverage in the days that followed — bought guns and took self-defense classes despite having had little interest in them before.
The political debate in the months since the shooting shows a state struggling to define its relationship with guns, as did interviews with more than a dozen political figures, gun dealers and owners, and those who have survived gun violence in Lewiston or within their own families.
While many of these people agree on remedies that cut across the normal political divide, they also show the limits that the mass shooting had on changing their views. Those supportive of more gun control are grappling with their own enjoyment of hunting with firearms. Hunters are worried that legislation could impede one of Maine’s most popular pastimes.
And everyone is fearful that Maine — long considered immune from mass shootings because of its rural landscape and low violent crime rates despite its high number of gun owners — will see more violence.
When Maine became a state in 1820, it had relatively few gun laws, and those it had were mostly uncontroversial. In 1841, the state copied a Massachusetts law that sought to limit the carrying of weapons in a menacing manner, but it was rarely invoked. A law enshrining Maine’s concealed-carry permit passed in 1917 with little debate.
A training requirement was added in 1990. Despite tension between gun shop owners and police, there was little controversy about it in the Legislature. A top supporter of the bill said on the floor that it united ideas from gun control opponents like himself as well as “fervent supporters.”
Gun debates picked up in Maine and other states after the expiration of the federal assault-weapons ban in 2004. That led to the resurgence of civilian guns made to mimic military-style ones, including semi-automatic rifles like those on the ArmaLite platform, known as the AR, which are owned by 1 in 20 Americans, according to The Washington Post.
Semi-automatic rifles have been used in seven of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 1949, including Lewiston.
Card used a Ruger SFAR the night of the shooting, and the weapon was later found in his car at a boat launch in Lisbon. The Ruger SFAR is similar to an AR-15 rifle, but it shoots larger bullets that are more powerful. He legally purchased the gun on July 6, 2023, at Fine Line Gun Shop in Poland.
AR-style guns are becoming more popular among Maine hunters because they are lightweight, customizable and accurate. Eight states have banned owning them.
In January, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife canceled a class on how to clean an AR-style weapon after fielding about a dozen complaints that it was inappropriate to offer such a lesson in the wake of the Lewiston shooting.
Michael Hansen’s first gun was a Daisy Red Ryder. The 39-year-old, who lives on a homestead in the rural Oxford County town of Roxbury, learned to hunt from his father, who learned from Hansen’s grandfather to help feed the family through Maine’s long winters.
Hansen was 7 or 8 years old at the time. The tradition continued with his own children, now ages 8, 11 and 14, who received their own Red Ryders when Hansen decided they were old enough. They learned to use them proficiently, moving on to a .22-caliber rifle. They have all advanced to higher-caliber hunting guns, including ARs.
“Through hunting, my children know guns kill and do damage. They know it can’t be undone. They see what guns are capable of, and it’s not glorified like in video games,” he said. “When they pull the trigger and the bullet goes, it is going to do damage. When you are raised where a firearm is a tool, you use it as one.”
It’s that reverence for firearms, especially among hunters, that allowed many to think that Maine was different. And Maine has plenty of hunters.
There were 207,849 hunting license owners in Maine in 2023, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That placed Maine as the state with the sixth-most registered hunters per capita at 15 license holders for every 100 people.
U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine’s 2nd District, didn’t grow up with guns, but pointed to how common it was by the time he was a teenager to have friends with rifles in their trucks to know that some Mainers viewed hunting as a hobby.
Golden enlisted in the Marines in 2002. He didn’t own a gun himself until he served in Congress. In 2021, he purchased an AR for self-defense while serving in Congress to protect himself and his family after receiving death threats.
“I used to, like many other people in Maine, believe and tell myself that because of our traditions, we’re different, and these kinds of mass shootings don’t happen here, and we are insulated from it by our tradition and the uniqueness of our society and its kind of rural interconnectedness,” Golden said.
“We can’t say that anymore, because it’s not true any longer,” added Golden, who generally opposed gun control before reversing himself at a news conference the day after the shooting in his home city to support a ban on so-called assault weapons. “It happened here, and we now know that it can happen again.”
The mass shooting did nothing to decrease gun ownership in Maine.
If anything, the number of gun owners has grown in the past year. Dozens of people signed up for gun safety classes and purchased handguns for protection after the mass shooting, multiple gun dealers in the Lewiston-Auburn area said.
Nearly half of all Mainers are gun owners, according to a 2020 study by the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that conducts policy research and analysis. The 47.7 percent of Mainers who owned guns in 2016 was up from 41.3 percent in 2015. Maine ranks 16th highest in gun ownership in the United States and is second to Vermont in New England.
Don Mailhot of Auburn, an instructor with R.D. Tactical Handgun Institute in Poland, saw a rush for basic handgun safety and concealed carry classes after the mass shooting, with the number of students more than doubling. Some participants were first-time gun owners looking for defense instruction, and about two-thirds were women, he said.
R.D. Tactical Handgun Institute normally offers two classes per month. After the shooting, beginner pistol classes more than doubled to five sold-out classes in November 2023 and four in December. The business held four concealed carry classes in December and in each of the next two months. The March and April classes were full and had waiting lists, Mailhot said.
Mailhot, who is a retired Lewiston police officer, declined to say whether any of the participants were survivors of the mass shooting.
Maine gun shop owners had differing perspectives on what drove people to buy firearms in the wake of Lewiston.
“Maine’s gun culture is the same, but the mass shooting opened the eyes of some of the anti-gun people,” said Josh Klemanski, owner of Top Gun in Poland Spring, which sells new and used firearms and offers classes. “People who took the classes have a better understanding about gun ownership.”
What made Lewiston unique among mass shootings was the terror that gripped the state as the manhunt for Card stretched into days, said Gage Jordan, owner of the G3 gun shop in Turner.
“It made people rethink their views on police’s role in protecting them, and that they might have to be ready to protect themselves. They worry that police won’t get there in time,” he said.
Maine has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the United States, with the 14th fewest gun homicides in 2022, according to the FBI’s most recent annual report. Most of them came from death by suicide and domestic violence, not from mass murder.
Arthur Barnard, 64, of Topsham lost his son Arthur Strout at Schemengees Bar and Grille. Barnard left the bar about 10 minutes before Card came in and killed 10 people, including Strout.
Strout, a 42-year-old father of five children, had decided to stay at the bar to play a couple more rounds of pool with his friends. Barnard later learned that Strout had shouted out the warning about the gunman’s presence.
Now Barnard is channeling his anger and grief into an effort to institute a national gun registry, which would require owners to register firearm serial numbers under their real name.
Barnard used to hunt until a felony drug conviction for selling cocaine when he was in his 20s made it illegal for him to own guns.
He wishes he could still own a gun for hunting. He has fond memories of hunting as a kid and would like to pass that tradition on to his grandchildren and experience it with them.
“I am not anti-gun. I am anti-stupid,” Barnard said. “I want people to be responsible for their weapons.”
The state was not immune to gun violence prior to Lewiston. But many of the deaths happened in private — 87 percent of gun deaths in Maine in 2022 were suicides.
Joel Cartwright didn’t like guns. But on June 27, 2008, he drove to Johnson’s Sporting Goods in Rockland and purchased a .22-caliber Ruger Mark III pistol. He died by suicide later that day at his family’s cottage in Tenants Harbor.
“I feel like my son died from gun violence,” said Joel’s father, Steve Cartwright. “Even though it was self-inflicted, it still counts, right? It’s still a death because of a gun that was bought too easily.”
Federal law prohibited Joel Cartwright from buying a gun because he had recently been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. But he didn’t disclose that on the form to purchase the pistol.
Steve Cartwright has been advocating for stricter gun control measures in the 16 years since his son’s death. But it wasn’t until after Lewiston that politicians who had long resisted gun control began to embrace new limits.
Mills signed into law her plan to expand background checks to advertised gun sales, tweak the “yellow flag” law scrutinized in the wake of the mass shooting, make it a felony to sell guns to people banned from possessing them and fund various mental health initiatives.
The Democratic governor also vetoed a proposed ban on bump stocks and other rapid-fire devices while allowing a bill requiring 72-hour waiting periods for firearm purchases to become law without her signature, though gun-rights groups have vowed to try to block the law in court. Meanwhile, proponents of gun control are trying to put a stricter “red flag” law on a future Maine ballot.
Recent Maine polling data on guns is scant. In 2021, the gun control group Giffords released results showing 70 percent of Mainers support expanding background checks to all private purchases. But when the state was asked to vote for that in 2016, it was narrowly defeated with heavy opposition from rural Maine.
The winning position at the highest level of Maine politics has been to take more of the gun-rights side. Mills espoused support for gun restrictions during her 2018 primary, but she took office and immediately dissuaded legislative Democrats from pushing restrictions. Golden’s previous gun-rights stance inoculated him from Republican criticism during his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.
Things are different for the congressman now. His Republican opponent, state Rep. Austin Theriault of Fort Kent, has criticized him heavily for the shift and got the endorsement of the National Rifle Association. Their race appears to be one of the tightest ones for control of the narrowly divided U.S. House.
“They want somebody who’s going to defend their Second Amendment rights,” Theriault said of 2nd District voters in a recent debate. “They want somebody who understands that Maine has a long history of law-abiding gun ownership.”
Nichols supports the 72-hour waiting period when a gun is purchased, but doesn’t want any further gun control measures passed until state leaders address mental illness.
Members of Card’s family and several fellow reservists had warned police multiple times in the months before the shooting of Card’s declining mental health and access to guns. He was hospitalized for two weeks during a training stint in New York after his peers reported that he was becoming more paranoid and behaving erratically.
Card died by suicide. His body was found on Oct. 27 after a manhunt that lasted about two days.
An independent commission appointed by Mills to review the Lewiston shooting cited police and military failures in its final report issued in August.
It found that the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office had sufficient probable cause to use Maine’s yellow flag law, which would have allowed the sheriff’s office to take Card and his guns into custody. The report also said that the Army Reserve should have shared more information about Card’s mental health with local law enforcement.
Some survivors and family members of those killed in October have found comfort in their own guns in the year since the shooting.
Kathleen Walker, whose husband Jason Walker was killed at the bowling alley after attempting to charge Card when his gun jammed, testified before the commission in February about how her life had changed in the months since his death.
“I lock every door, I installed cameras at my home,” Kathleen Walker said. “When I go out, I carry a firearm.”
Nichols can no longer work due to anxiety, and had to go on food stamps and collect disability.
She isn’t comfortable in crowds but doesn’t carry a gun for protection. Instead, she would rather stay in her house, where her guns make her feel safer.
She misses her sister every day.
“My sister’s never coming back. I am trying to deal with what I saw and also grieving,” she said. “I’m not the same person. Never will be again.”
She continues to speak out in favor of better mental health services as a way to deal with her loss.
“I know why I lived and [my sister] died. I would be the one to make sure she wouldn’t be forgotten,” Nichols said.

Julie Harris is senior outdoors editor at Bangor Daily News. She has served in many roles since joining BDN in 1979, including several editing positions. She lives in Litchfield with her husband and three…
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Michael Shepherd joined the Bangor Daily News in 2015 after time at the Kennebec Journal. He lives in Augusta, graduated from the University of Maine in 2012 and has a master’s degree from the University…
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