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October 28, 2023

The Maine bowling alley where so many died is a gun-free zone

By Andrea Widburg

I haven’t written about the Maine shooting because a lot of the things one can say are so painfully obvious. It was a heartbreaking tragedy, and there is evil in the world. In this case, the evil manifested itself through a person who was, apparently, a delusional schizophrenic who admitted to hearing voices. What I couldn’t figure out, though, was how this shooting occurred in Maine, a Second Amendment-friendly state. Now I know: The killer went to one, and maybe two, gun-free zones.

Maine, like many northern coastal states, is very leftist along the coast and very conservative inland. That conservativism shows in the fact that Maine has not attacked the Second Amendment. Instead, its Constitution strongly reinforces it: “Every citizen has the right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.” (Maine Const., Art. 1, Sec. 16.)

With that mindset, it’s no wonder that Maine is a constitutional carry state with a “shall issue” rule for concealed carry permit requests. There are no bans on long guns, including semi-automatic long guns, and there are no restrictions on magazine size. Given Maine’s willingness to let ordinary citizens carry guns, I couldn’t understand how nobody tried to shoot back.

Well, it turns out that, as in all states that allow open or concealed carry, individual establishments may ask that people who enter disarm themselves before doing so. In the case of the Maine shooting, at least one of the locations the killer attacked politely required people to disarm themselves before entering.

Clearly, the killer ignored the sign. I have names for those places that force ordinary people to disarm: “Turkey shoots.” Or “fish in a barrel” shooting zones. Or “magnets for would-be mass shooters.”

Let me go back to my original point: Evil exists. There will always be people who, because they are delusional or psychopathic, want to kill. However, in America, at least for now, most people are not evil. They do not want to die, and they do not want to kill. If they carry arms, it’s solely so that they can defend against those who wish to kill them and other innocents.

Moreover, while Democrats can never take their eyes off mass deaths, the reality is that when ordinary citizens are armed, the rate of deaths due to violent crime drops. That’s the whole point of John R. Lott’s excellent More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws.

Indeed, just recently, the results from Ohio’s adopting permitless carry show this to be true. Although the usual suspects insisted that violent crime would go up with everyone carrying, the opposite happened: Violent crime decreased. That’s because criminals, like non-criminals, don’t want to die. When the risk-reward balance for criminal activity shifts toward risk, they change their behavior.

In the case of the Maine shooter, his apparent mental illness probably broke his risk-reward analysis. However, had a few people been armed at the venues where he carried out his murderous rampage, they probably could have stopped him before the number of victims got so high. That’s what happened at a Texas church when a gunman thought he could go on a violent rampage:

That’s also what happened in 2007 in Salt Lake City at the Trolley Square Mall when an armed, off-duty cop who just happened to be there stopped a man who’d been on a mass murdering rampage. (Although authorities profess not to know a motive, I’m betting that the killer’s first name, a Bosnian variant of Suliman, holds the answer.)

And that’s what happened last year when Elisjsha Dicken, a 22-year-old legally carrying a gun, stopped a man who intended to pile up the bodies at an Indiana mall. Given how well-armed the killer was, he obviously planned to murder more than the three people he succeeded in killing when Dicken stopped him.

When you take away guns from the good guys—the ordinary citizens who will step up to stop evil—you give the evil-doers free rein, and that’s what may have happened in Maine.

Image: X screen grab.

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