On Tuesday, amid all the focus on New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia, quiet little Maine also had an important day. It was the day that they voted on a measure about whether they should have a red flag law or not.
Why? Because experts completely blew it when they had the chance to stop Lewiston.
See, what Maine has right at this moment, and what's being replaced, was what many terms a "yellow flag" law. It's like a red flag law, officially called an Extreme Risk Protective Order, but the law limits who can request someone be disarmed. Among those who can make the call are mental healthcare providers.
And Lewiston exposed them, and the polic,e who also failed to act.
The killer in that horrific incident had guns, had owned them for years, but had significant mental health issues for which he was both treated and known to law enforcement. They say they saw him as a threat, but claimed that the yellow flag law was so difficult to navigate that they just couldn't use it.
They blew it, and the guy killed a pile of innocent people.
From the moment that event happened, gun control advocates in Maine went into overdrive.
While Maine is a very reliably blue state, they had a long history of gun rights support as well. They'd previously voted down a red flag law and had no interest in gun control of any kind.
That changed after Lewiston, and not everyone is happy with what happened:
The No on 2 campaign released a statement Tuesday night after the race was called:
"Maine just passed the biggest, far-reaching piece of gun control in its history.A combination of hundreds of thousands of dollars of out of state funding being pumped into the Yes on 2 campaign, the proponents twisting the truth about the Lewiston shootings and current law, and the intentionally vague language presented to the Maine people by the Secretary of State would have taken a miracle to overcome.Add to that the millions of dollars spent by the No on One campaign, and many of those voters being exposed to the aforementioned ambiguous wording for the first time when they got their ballots was a recipe for disaster for gun rights and due process in Maine.
But the kick in the butt is what I already said, the experts screwed up, and now everyone else in the state will have to pay the price.
Everyone seems to forget that the people who claimed the law was the problem were the very same people who failed to act in the first place. That meant they had a reason to lie to cover their butts. They had a reason to overstate the complexity of the law itself. They had a motive to misrepresent their failures as a failure by lawmakers years before.
And they did it with the help of out-of-state money that was all geared toward infringing on people's Second Amendment rights as much as possible.
I feel bad for Maine gun owners. I feel bad for Maine as a state.
And when the next mass shooting happens there, who will the experts blame then?
