AUGUSTA, Maine — U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine’s 2nd District came out against Gov. Janet Mills’ main response to the Lewiston shooting this week, saying it would have had little effect in preventing the tragedy.
His criticism of the bill showed a divide between two of Maine’s top Democrats. It also drew sharp rebukes from both the governor’s office and the head of a top gun-rights group, illustrating how the third-term congressman is in a category of his own on the fraught topic of guns.
Golden has taken many votes against his party’s preferred gun restrictions in Congress, but he reversed himself a day after the Oct. 25 shooting that killed 18 people and injured another 13 in his home city to support a ban on so-called assault weapons. Republicans now hope that they can use that shift to oust him from the conservative-leaning district in November.
Mills rolled out her response to in her State of the State address last month, floating an expansion of background checks to advertised gun sales, allowing police to take some people into protective custody under her “yellow flag” law that has been scrutinized since the shooting and increasing penalties for those who sell guns to people who cannot have them.
Golden criticized the background check portion in an interview with WGAN on Wednesday, then expanded on it in a Thursday statement. He noted that shooter Robert Card II could have passed a background check because he had no major criminal record, saying tweaks to the yellow flag law would not necessarily stop the next mass shooter.
“We don’t need an expansion of gun control that affects all firearms and all gun owners,” he said in the statement. “I believe we should have a hard but necessary conversation about the lethality of certain types of firearms relative to others and who should have access to them.”
Both Mills and Golden have criticized more sweeping background check proposals in the past. The governor dissuaded members of her party from advancing them in the years before the shooting, while the congressman opposed other Democrats on the issue in one of his first votes after assuming the 2nd District seat in 2019.
Mills nodded to critics on her left in her January speech by saying there is no single or simple solution to gun violence, but that her ideas were novel and were crafted as targeted responses. While 29 states exceed a federal law that makes licensed gun dealers perform background checks, no state limits their mandates to advertised sales only.
On Thursday, the governor’s spokesperson, Scott Ogden, said Golden “does not appear to understand the proposal.” Relatively few gun owners would be affected by the private sale restrictions, Ogden said, and he also said that police may have been able to detain Card if the changes to the yellow flag law had been in effect months before the shooting.
“His apparent opposition to these measures is puzzling,” he said of Golden.
Card, a 40-year-old Army reservist from Bowdoin, was in declining mental health for months ahead of the shooting. Police responded to two sets of complaints. The Sagadahoc County sheriff’s office has said it did not have enough information to invoke the yellow flag law, which allows police to seek the opinion of a mental health professional before asking a judge to authorize seizing guns from dangerous people.
The run-up to the shooting is now the subject of several reviews, including from the Army, its inspector general and a state commission whose members were appointed by Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey. Card’s Army colleagues will testify in public to that latter panel next month.
The shooting has sharply changed the dialogue about guns in Maine, a state that stands out nationally for lax laws despite being controlled by Democrats. The Maine Gun Safety Coalition, a gun control group, is lobbying for a sweeping package of bills including an assault weapons ban, limits on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.
Since his shift, Golden has suggested a registration system for guns like the one used in the Lewiston shooting, which was similar to an AR-15. The two Republicans vying to face him in November, state Reps. Austin Theriault of Fort Kent and Mike Soboleski, have criticized him, with Theriault saying in a Thursday statement that mental health should be a priority.
Golden explained his stance on Thursday in a meeting with the board of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, a gun-rights group that has worked closely with both the congressman and Mills. But David Trahan, the group’s executive director, said Golden’s stance ignores that national gun control groups are pushing more extreme controls that Mills is looking to blunt.
“He’s changed his position in favor of what we consider to be an extreme gun control measure, and then he criticizes a more moderate approach by the governor, which is more measured,” Trahan said. “So I don’t really understand what Jared is trying to do here.”
