Arthur in Maine, who doesn’t live there now but used to and for a long time, has typically astute reflections to pass along in this Comment of the Day on the Lewiston shooting and more. Here he is, responding to the post, “Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?”:

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I am still trying to process what happened in Lewiston – a place in which I spent as little time as possible during the many years I lived in Maine. The town is gritty, an ex-mill town, and I rarely there unless I had business. In my last eight or ten years in Maine, I lived about 30 miles down the road.

Between 1977 and 2017, with a year or a season off elsewhere, I lived in northern New England – specifically, Vermont and Maine. I moved to Vermont in the autumn of 1977 and, with the exception of a year in France in the early 1980s, lived there until 1987, when I moved to Maine. And I lived in Maine far longer than I have lived anywhere else.

In 1983, when I was still living in a tiny town in Vermont, there was a murder. In a town of several hundred, in a state of less than a million, this was shocking news that stayed in the headlines for a week. The victim was a young woman. She was a sweetheart, had a Russian accent, and she and her common-law husband, ran the local gas station/convenience store. He was an Iranian immigrant, gruff and taciturn, but capable of great kindness, which I witnessed more than once. I liked them both very much.

He wasn’t there the morning that Bill Harvey walked into the store and shot her point blank. I knew Bill, too. He was quiet and mousy and shy; he was the guy who serviced the gas equipment at the area restaurants I worked in. He was odd, but he did know his trade; he brought more than one expensive piece of kit back to life over the several years I watched him work.

Apparently, Bill got the idea that Zaid was a threat owing to the Beirut embassy bombing, which happened around then, and decided to off Tanya to protect the United States. Or to take revenge. Or something. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.

I write this in remembrance of the fact that Vermont was heavily armed at the time. Virtually every pickup truck you saw had rifle and a shotgun mounted behind the driver’s seat, and nearly everyone drove trucks – at least in the area in which I lived. Kids were taken on their first hunts as early as five or six; got their first .22s at seven or eight, shot their first deer a few years later. It wasn’t all that unusual, back then, to see someone carrying a sidearm, though it never made much sense to me given how quiet and safe the state was then. The reaction to the murder was straightforward: This sort of thing doesn’t happen here. We know it happens elsewhere, but it doesn’t happen here.

When I moved to Maine in 1987, it was much the same: hunting was simply a way of life, hunting requires guns, everyone who hunted had several – after all, deer, ducks, moose and partridge require different gear. For larger game such as deer, semi-automatics have long been the way to go; a gun that fires faster greatly reduces the likelihood that the deer you just gut-shot wouldn’t run off while you were working the bolt and re-aiming, thence to die horribly from sepsis, instead of taking a sudden fatal shot half a second later.

This is part of what drives me nuts about the entire “assault rifle” debate: the ignorance, carefully crafted by people who should (and don’t always) know better. Other than the cosmetics, there’s functionally no difference between a semi-automatic deer rifle and an AR-15-style weapon, other than its appearance and fact most deer hunters prefer a bigger slug. In fact, some states actually require a minimum of a .243 (6mm) caliber. Most ARs shoot .223 (5.56mm), although some are chambered to accept larger rounds.

As in Vermont, the area of rural Maine in which I lived was home to many an avid hunter, many a pickup truck, many a gun rack behind the seat. Kids drove to high school with their rifles in their hand-me-down trucks. The bottom line is that any time you went to the local lumberyard or supermarket, there was enough weaponry in the parking lot to sustain a serious firefight, if anyone was so inclined. But nobody was.

Then there’s the fact that despite all the headlines, the vast majority of mass shootings are carried out with handguns, not rifles of any sort, be they semi-automatic or plain-old-plain-old. That’s from FBI statistics.

Simply put: it’s not the weaponry. We’ve long had the capability to create untold carnage in our everyday lives, and up until comparatively recently we’ve not done so. There’s something else going on – some THINGS, more likely.

We live in a time when there’s a mood of anger and fear in our culture. To me, it seems cultivated – by news media that wants to sell our eyeballs; by politicians who know it’s easier to stoke anger and envy than kindness and cooperation; by schools that prefer indoctrination to critical thinking; by tech companies that will do anything for a buck, and probably dozens of other players.

It all seems to be linked to a simple desire: a hunger for power.

In that environment, when it’s so hard to trust, I don’t find it surprising that so many Americans are armed. Those problems exist elsewhere, of course – but here in the United States, we have a right to arm and defend ourselves – even if many only have a vague inkling of the threats we’re defending ourselves against. And yes, crazy people can and do slip through the cracks.

One of the great pities of what happened in Lewiston – and there are many – is that apparently nobody at either scene was carrying. That’s legal in Maine, or at least, it is currently. I suspect a lot more people in the state will be packing going forward.