The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Joshua D. Filler is an attorney and homeland security consultant living in Falmouth. He served in the cabinet of the mayor of New York on 9/11, as director of local affairs at the White House Office of Homeland Security from 2002 to 2003, and as director of the Office of State and Local Coordination at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005. He now works with law enforcement, first responders and the private sector around the nation on preparing for terrorist attacks, including active shooters.
On Oct. 25, 2023, our perception of Maine as a sanctuary from most of the nation’s violent ills vanished when a lone gunman entered a bowling alley and then a restaurant in Lewiston and murdered 18 innocent people and wounded more than a dozen others, shattering an entire state’s sense of security.
While it is understandable that people across Maine have called for various steps to prevent this horror from happening again, the truth is none of us are in a place to make any such recommendations. Long-term consequential public policy decisions should not be made without the benefit of facts and perspective, and every single one of us is still trying to process what happened and why. To that end, while the commission announced by Gov. Janet Mills on Wednesday is a step in the right direction, such a commission should be created by law through the Legislature, similar to the 9/11 Commission created by Congress.
To be effective, the commission must be truly independent, bipartisan, possess subpoena power and the ability to swear in witnesses under penalty of perjury. The commission’s focus should be on fact finding, a task it is uniquely designed for, and less about proposed solutions for the future, the purview of the Legislature and the governor. Any commission’s examination must include what happened from the moment anyone in authority had knowledge of the shooter’s erratic behavior, all the way through to the point of finding the shooter’s corpse.
We must determine what, if any, human errors, systemic flaws, or both in the law inhibited the ability to interdict the shooter before the attack, and review how law enforcement and first responders operated following the 911 calls made during the assault, including the search for the shooter. We owe it to the victims and their families, and to help prevent such a catastrophe from occurring in the future.
Among the many questions the investigation should address is the shooter’s reported history of mental health issues. There are multiple news reports the shooter, an Army reservist, was committed to a mental health facility for two weeks in July 2023 in New York, and that his family warned law enforcement and the U.S. military about his ongoing deteriorating mental health thereafter. How fully was this information shared with law enforcement in Maine?
If the shooter’s commitment was involuntary, as the Boston Globe reported, under federal law he would have been ineligible to purchase or possess a firearm. As such, his name should have been submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to prevent any acquisition of a firearm. Was it?
Regardless of whether his commitment was voluntary or involuntary, why wasn’t Maine’s yellow flag law applied against the shooter? That law is specifically designed to prevent people with mental health issues from accessing firearms to avoid tragedies such as the one that befell us on Oct. 25. There are reports the shooter committed an assault against a fellow Army reservist, itself a crime. At the very least, was the assault considered in determining whether to invoke the yellow flag law?
There are also reports the shooter made direct threats to attack the Army Reserve facility in Saco. What exactly was the nature of those threats? Who at the federal, state, or local level in law enforcement knew about these threats? Why was he not arrested under Maine’s anti-terrorizing law or at the very least placed under surveillance by state or local law enforcement or the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force?
In contrast to how the shooter’s threat was handled, news reports indicate a man was arrested this week under that same statute for posting on social media a selfie outside the Walmart in Palmyra with a gun and ammunition calling for “Lewiston part 2.” Regardless, was the shooter’s threat against the Army Reserve also included as a factor under Maine’s yellow flag law? Did any single law enforcement agency in Maine have the full picture of the shooter’s conduct leading up to the attack?
Finally, the right to own firearms is enshrined in both the Maine and the U.S. constitutions. At its core, that right is centered on self-defense, including for moments like the one that occurred in Lewiston. Calls to ban certain firearms or accessories must withstand not only legal scrutiny but questions as to their practical benefits in preventing future mass shootings. Moreover, there is no point in passing new laws if we cannot or will not enforce the ones already on the books.
There will come a time to debate all of these issues across Maine, but now is the time for answers as to how this historic crime and tragedy happened in the first place.
