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The reactions of Mainers to the murders in Lewiston have included many expressions of surprise that it could happen here. If not quite so immune from gun-related deaths by suicide or accident, Maine has mostly been very safe from violent crime. It’s easy to dismiss the suspected Lewiston assailant’s actions as wholly an aberration. Maine folks, it might be said, don’t act that way.
Perhaps. But I am struck by the extent to which Robert Card fit a usually positively regarded Maine profile: A skilled outdoorsman, a hunter and fisherman with a record of substantial military service. Most crucially, he apparently had a variety of firearms and was adept at using -them. In this, too, he was all too familiar.
Clearly, he was very disturbed, but he also appears to have been a typical kind of Maine citizen. Should we, as in the past, just hope that those with powerful guns will always act responsibly? Or is there a case for getting out of circulation weapons that can kill so many so readily?
“We have met the enemy,” Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “and he is us.”
Ed McCarthy
Vienna
