The Maine Legislature last week approved comprehensive legislation that could impact gun ownership in the state, including background checks on private gun sales, waiting periods for gun purchases and criminalizing gun sales to prohibited individuals. Many of the new laws are simply twists on long existing laws that haven’t been properly enforced. The legislation comes nearly six months after the deadliest shooting in state history, a tragedy that Democrats oft invoked as they worked to implement their anti-gun agenda and tinker with laws that have failed to prevent such shootings in the past.
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and the Democratic-led Legislature advocated for various gun and mental health proposals following the shooting that claimed 18 lives and injured 13 others. Despite the state’s strong hunting tradition and gun ownership, most of these proposals were adopted.
“We heard loud and clear from Mainers across our state that they wanted meaningful action to make our communities safer from violence, and I’m so proud that we had the courage to take meaningful steps that will get us closer to making that a reality,” said House assistant majority leader Rep. Kristen Cloutier, a Democrat from Lewiston.
The governor is expected to sign her bill, approved early Thursday, which would strengthen the state’s yellow flag law, enhance background checks for private gun sales, and criminalize reckless gun sales to prohibited individuals. Additionally, the bill allocates funds for violence prevention initiatives and establishes a mental health crisis receiving center in Lewiston.
“A sick person did a sick thing that day. And the Legislature and politicians are trying to capitalize on that to get their agendas passed,” said Ben Dyer, who was shot five times by the shooter in Lewiston, Maine. Dyer told ABC News that law-abiding gun owners are the ones who will suffer from the proposals while criminals, as usual, will ignore them. He noted “the state already had a yellow flag law but law enforcement officials didn’t use it to prevent the tragedy,” ABC reported.
Two other bills narrowly approved by the Senate on Wednesday await the governor’s review. These bills propose a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on bump stocks that can convert a weapon into a machine gun.
However, no action was taken on a proposal to institute a red flag law, sponsored by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross. This bill would have allowed family members to petition a judge to remove guns from individuals experiencing a psychiatric crisis. Critics argue that the state’s current yellow flag law, which places police at the forefront of the process, is overly complicated.
The legislative session saw intense deliberations, with lawmakers working through the night and into the morning to meet their adjournment deadline. The tragic shooting on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city, loomed over the session, prompting urgent calls for legislative action.
Survivors of the shooting expressed mixed feelings about the proposed laws. While some advocated for legislative action, others, like Ben Dyer, who was shot five times, were skeptical, contending that law-abiding gun owners would bear the brunt of the proposals while criminals would ignore them. Dyer emphasized that although the state already had a yellow flag law, law enforcement officials failed to utilize it to prevent the tragedy.
Republicans accused Democrats of exploiting the tragedy to advance their agenda. Republican Sen. Lisa Keim expressed concerns about the proposed legislation, characterizing it as the rehashing of old ideas. However, Democrats defended their actions, citing constituents’ calls for preventive measures against future attacks.
“My big concern here is that we’re moving forward with gun legislation that has always been on the agenda. Now we’re using the tragedy in Lewiston to force it through when there’s nothing new here,” Republican Sen. Lisa Keim told ABC News. “It’s the same old ideas that were rejected year after year.”
“For the sake of the communities, individuals and families now suffering immeasurable pain, for the sake of our state, doing nothing is not an option,” said the governor in late January when outlining her proposals during her State of the State address.
“…doing nothing is not an option,”
yeah, eliminate victim-disarmament zones and criminalize infringements on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by The People of this Nation. The Right to Self-defense and bearing arms is a Civil Right and those who stomp on our Civil Rights need to be pursued to the greatest extent in civil and criminal courts. Put them in jail, seize all their assets to pay their fines & settlements, and forcefully show these tyrants how infringing on Civil Rights will cause them to lose their own.
Anything less is not going to stop this. Sic Semper Tyrannis!
She meant that “doing nothing [that fails to increase our power over the plebs] is not an option”.
And you, sir, win the Intertubez for best comment of the day!
You deserve the tyranny…You allow. And not just the tyranny denying your Constitutional Rights.
Stop complaining. You folks voted for this. Just they voted for it in Colorado. Re-lax and en-joy the dis-trac-tion of leg-al b.u.-t.t s.e-.x and drugs.
edit
Just like they voted for it in Colorado. They made their wildest dreams cum true.
Weren’t you just complaining about proper spelling and punctuation?
He’s using word play to allude to his hobbyhorse of LGBTQers in politics.
You just go right ahead and keep on voting for that hobbyhorse. As they take your civil rights away and you expect a different result.
Yes, I am. The enemies of liberty hate society standards. They have fought to erase and lower standards.
Well, seeing as I’ve never voted even once for “that hobbyhorse” or anything even “hobbyhorse adjacent”…
I thought the three L’s yearned for more uses of sexual and foul language in public discourse???
When I was a kid the christians used to complain about people who spoke this way. But they were told to “loosen up” and “get real.”
just do what Illinois is doing. Middle finger the government and move on
Fueled by History illiterate useful idiots Gun Control the agenda Rooted in Racism and Genocide marches on…
Neat it is starting to get noticed. Great example of how trace quickly becomes irrelevant with full blown tyranny. I will see about posting the donation link for the appeal as this will be a wild one to see play out in this state/circuit.
Gotta keep that State-to-SCOTUS pipeline full until they control both chambers and the Oval Office.
Then it’s lights out for the BoR nationwide.
And, statistically, you’ll comply. Probably while whining about how you had to go to work instead of doing something useful.
For those few who don’t comply, well, there are ways of dealing with them and with that pesky BoR out of the way it will be over quickly.
That does seem to be the plan they are going for. May be a bit harder to enact than we expect but your scenario is exactly what we need to plan for re opposition and contingency. With that said I would be utterly unsurprised if we get a Trump presidency get a few trinket level court wins but get mired in another military adventure to sap attention and resources until more statists get in position to ratchet yet tighter on the next presidency. After all there are other civil rights to infringe upon besides the 2nd.
After all there are other civil rights to infringe upon besides the 2nd.
A careful examination of the BoR and one finds that the individual rights are linked. Interlocking fields of fire if you wanna be super gun-nerd about it.
Once they can erode one or two of them significantly the others fall more easily. Which, by the by, is why they invested relatively heavily in emotional manipulation directed at getting Conservatives to support eviscerating certain parts of the BoR because muH dRuGz! or mUh DuI or other *moral* crimes that are “addressed” by malum prohibitum laws (mala prohibita, technically since it’s plural, but this isn’t TTAL). All these things have an absolutely identical logical base to gun control.
Which isn’t to say that those things don’t cause problems, they certainly do. It is, however, the case that destroying the BoR to go after those problems creates bigger problems and that this is by design.
Most of what these people do is a long game that wins via undetected manipulation of the population while also keeping most people blind to real, serious problems that would potentially wake them up were they to become aware of the situation’s gravity.
The turn the Democratic Party took at the macro level under Obama is a fascinating thing, academically. Getting the public to purge your party for you was a neat trick.
One wonders about how well it preserved a level of competency though. What they’re going for only works if they don’t create a upheaval somewhere else, like perhaps the economy. Gotta keep the cattle calm while you prepare the captive bolt gun and all that.
Interesting to note people reposting of Herbert Marcuse’s obit in the NYT back in 1979 the other day. It is actually worth a read.
“At the center of his philosophy was a faith that reason and science could be employed by a mythical “new man” to build a state that was shaped by an aesthetic unifying of intellect and feeling. To bring the new age about, he argued, violence was justified.
A New Coalition But, like other neo‐Marxists, Dr. Marcuse had little belief that the working class would, in affluent, highly technological societies, incite revolution. Rather, he believed, a new coalition of student radicals, small numbers of intellectuals, urban blacks and people from underdeveloped nations could overthrow forces that he saw as keeping workers from an awareness of their oppression.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/31/archives/marcuse-radical-philosopher-dies-largely-unnoticed-before-60s.html
Fed up? Don’t feel alone…
https://youtube.com/shorts/eWqpAJ5jTvs?feature=shared
Bunch of immigrants get dumped in Maine, now this 🤔
“We heard loud and clear from Mainers across our state…”
And how many of those “Mainers” are transplants from MA and NY?
I think the bigger question is how many of them there are and it’s pretty telling that they don’t even allude to a number.
10 people spread out appropriately is, technically, ‘Mainers across our state”.
And this wouldn’t be particularly shocking. Tim Pool makes it kind of a thing to point out a case of a news outlet that interviewed a homeless guy living in an alley next to a politician’s office and then cited “a source close to the office”. Technically true but entirely misleading.
Cowards and cooks.
They will pay with there freedom. Then they will pay with their safety because they cannot protect themselves. It was obvious from October 2023 event when no one resisted the murderer.
I guess taking the wife to see the fall trees is off the list, couldn’t drive through NY anyway.
Missouri_Mule,
“I guess taking the wife to see the fall trees is off the list, couldn’t drive through NY anyway.”
That is the GIANT problem trying to drive to New England: you have to drive several hours through New York.
Cowards and kooks.
They will pay with there freedom. Then they will pay with their safety because they cannot protect themselves. It was obvious from October 2023 event when no one resisted the murderer.
I guess taking the wife to see the fall trees is off the list, couldn’t drive through NY anyway.
did the shooter use a bump stock?
For the record bump stocks do not, I repeat, DO NOT convert a rifle into a machine gun.
Bump stocks may enable someone to achiever faster rates of fire than without a bump stock. And I have to think that the operator typically sacrifices accuracy–especially compared to an actual machine gun.
And arguing about machine guns is mental master-bation anyway. There are countless ways that a deranged murderer can kill just as many people just as fast as he/she can with a machine gun.
(Politicians who passed laws to prohibit legal ownership of machine guns claimed that doing so would reduce how many victims a deranged murderer could kill–which is simply not true when countless alternate techniques and methods are available.)
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