Consultant Jared Golden had a B score from the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation final 12 months—the very best mark of any member of his occasion operating for the Home or Senate that cycle. In Congress, he had solid votes opposing expanded background checks and towards restrictions on assault weapons. However within the wake of Wednesday’s mass capturing in his hometown of Lewiston, the Maine Democrat had a brand new outlook: “I’ve opposed efforts to ban lethal weapons of warfare just like the assault rifle [suspected shooter Robert Card] used to hold out this crime,” a visibly emotional Golden mentioned in a press convention Thursday. “The time has now come for me to take accountability for this failure, which is why I now name on the US Congress to ban assault rifles.”
“I apologize and assist,” he continued, “as I search to place an finish to those horrible shootings.”
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It was a strong second—however one which solely got here after a minimum of 18 folks had been killed, and greater than a dozen wounded, at a bar and a bowling alley in Maine’s second-largest metropolis.
Unknowns abound within the wake of that bloodbath. However a minimum of one factor appears clear: Too many Individuals proceed to die unnecessary deaths as a result of too few of their leaders are keen to do the correct factor on weapons—regardless of widespread assist for commonsense reforms. “I really feel shattered,” Lynn Ellis, legislative director on the Maine Gun Security Coalition, instructed me the day after the capturing. “The harm is devastating.”
It’s additionally acquainted: Lewiston was the nation’s 565th mass capturing this 12 months alone, based on the Gun Violence Archive. Add within the day by day deluge of suicides, unintended shootings, and routine gun violence, and you’ve got a firearm-related demise price in America that far outstrips that of the nation’s friends. Weapons, beating out automobile accidents and most cancers, are the main explanation for demise for youths and teenagers on this nation. And although research have proven that extra entry to weapons correlates with larger charges of gun-caused deaths, America stays armed to the tooth—the one nation on the planet the place civilian weapons outnumber folks.
“We’re probably not ‘freedom’s most secure place,’” Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Towards Gun Violence, instructed me, referring to the Nationwide Rifle Affiliation’s slogan. “Not when weapons of warfare that have been designed actually for the battlefield are extra simply bought than Ozempic or Tylenol.”
“If weapons have been the answer,” she mentioned, “we’d be the most secure nation on the planet.”
Golden’s reversal is only one signal that the bottom could also be shifting: The NRA is a “shadow of its former self,” as John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Security, put it to me Thursday, whereas the gun management motion has gained momentum—resulting in final 12 months’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, probably the most vital gun security laws in three a long time. “For those who take a look at the final 10 years, vital progress has been made,” Feinblatt mentioned. “An enormous distinction to the times after Sandy Hook.”
However for all the bottom the gun management motion has gained since Newtown, the Lewiston capturing makes clear that there’s nonetheless a protracted method to go—each on the federal stage and in states like Maine with lax gun legal guidelines.
Many Maine residents remained underneath a lockdown advisory Friday as authorities continued their seek for Robert Card, the alleged Lewiston shooter. The 40-year-old suspect—whom regulation enforcement described as a member of the US Military Reserve and a educated firearms teacher, and who was reportedly dedicated to a psychological well being facility for 2 weeks this previous summer time—is believed to have carried out the assaults with an assault-style weapon that will have been legally obtained.
