The 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine marked a turning point in the state’s gun control debate. Before Lewiston, anti-gun measures faced an uphill battle in both the legislature and the court of public opinion. A 2016 ballot referendum to enact universal background checks, for instance, was defeated despite Michael Bloomberg pouring millions of dollars into the “yes” campaign, while then-Gov. Paul LePage signed a permitless carry bill into law the year before.
Since the mass shooting, Maine residents have approved a “red flag” law, while legislators have passed bills expanding background checks and imposing a three-day waiting period on firearms. There are also ongoing efforts by Democrat lawmakers to ban so-called assault weapons and “large capacity” magazines, adopt storage mandates, and other measures targeting lawful gun owners.
The perpetrator of the Lewiston mass shooting could have been disarmed under the state’s “yellow flag” law, and could also have faced criminal charges that would have precluded him from legally possessing a firearm if they had been pursued.
Now shootings in Lewiston are once again making headlines in Maine, and the perpetrators are already unable to lawfully possess firearms. Since January, there have been at least 16 shootings in the city, and in more than half of the incidents police believe juveniles were pulling the triggers.
Police said there’s no simple way to explain how these kids are getting their hands on the weapons.
“I wouldn’t say there’s one specific pipeline,” police Chief Carly Conley said. “They get them in a variety of ways. They get them by stealing from irresponsible gun owners, or people who leave their cars unlocked. They’re getting them from what you’d call straw purchases where somebody who’s not able to get a gun will get their girlfriend or whoever to buy one. Then that gun gets traded through the drug trade. There’s no one nexus. There’s no easy answer.”
Last month, 20 of the 27 individuals arrested in Lewiston for firearm-involved crimes were under the age of 18. Lewiston PD official Corey Jacques, who serves as the department’s youth coordinator, says he sees the same faces time and again.
“Over the last four to five years, we have started seeing younger and younger kids with guns,” he said. The children stealing guns are as young as 13 years old.
The youths involved with the aggravated crimes are often the same group of children and are targeting each other in a gang-type mentality. Very rarely are the acts of violence random, Jacques said. Most of the teens involved are already expelled from public schools.
Adding to the problem, Jacques said, is that when and if the children are charged, they often have their charges dismissed after being deemed incompetent to stand trial for various factors, including their mental well-being, trauma and age. It’s becoming more and more common for teens to be considered incompetent to stand trial, he said.
Some of those teens go through the system and think that “it wasn’t that bad,” he said.
“We hear them say a lot of the time when we arrest them, ‘I don’t care. What am I going to do, spend one day at the youth center?’” Jacques said.
I can almost guarantee that Democrats at the statehouse are going to point to the increase in juvenile crimes involving firearms and blame lawful gun owners. They’ll demand storage mandates, gun and magazine bans, and more restrictions on the right to carry, but they won’t do anything to address the actual problem that Jacques identifies: a lack of consequences for juvenile offenders.
Lewiston is a fairly small city. We’re not talking about thousands or even hundreds of young offenders running wild here. A few dozen juveniles are responsible for almost every violent crime committed by someone under the age of 18. Police and prosecutors know who they are, but so long as the court system gives these teens and tweens a pass, they’re going to keep breaking the law.
None of Maine’s recent gun controls have had an impact on these juvenile offenders, and no future proposals will make much of a difference either. Will Maine’s Democrats dare to get tough on juvenile crime, or will they use these shootings as an excuse to go after the right to keep and bear arms? Based on what we’ve seen in recent years, I don’t think there’s much doubt about where the Democrats’ focus will be, or who will ultimately end up paying the price for the actions of these young criminals.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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