Exactly one week before a man used an AR-10 style rifle to kill 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, a small group of gun control activists met with Gov. Janet Mills.

They said it was time for Maine to join other states with more powerful gun laws, including a “red flag” law used by 21 other states and Washington, D.C., to take weapons away from dangerous people.

Maine is the only state that has a so-called “yellow flag” law, which requires a mental health evaluation among other steps. Even its name – yellow flag – suggests caution, deliberation. Designed to prioritize due process over speed, it is the result of a broad compromise the governor reached with interest groups – in particular an influential gun rights organization.

Red flag laws vary by state, but most allow family members to directly petition a judge, and none require a mental health evaluation.

But at the meeting, Mills, a Democrat who once supported a red flag proposal when she was attorney general, wouldn’t budge, according to Margaret Groban, a former prosecutor and member of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, who attended the gathering.

“She thinks it’s working,” Groban said during an interview this summer. “She doesn’t think family members will want to go to court or should be trusted with this situation. That’s my recollection of it.”

Days after the meeting, on Oct. 25, 2023, a gunman committed the deadliest mass shooting in state history. The yellow flag law immediately faced heavy scrutiny. Police had been alerted months earlier to his signs of psychosis and threatening behavior, but they never pursued a yellow flag order to confiscate his arsenal of high-powered weapons.

In the immediate aftermath, Mills promised “a serious and robust conversation” about gun violence and what to do about it.

A red flag bill would have been the most direct response to what happened. If it had been in place at the time, the gunman’s family could have petitioned the courts directly to remove his weapons, possibly stopping the massacre.

Instead, in the months following Lewiston, Mills signaled to House and Senate leaders that a red flag proposal, or other gun control measures, were unlikely to get her support. And lawmakers mostly followed that lead.

One year later, she has not changed her view of the law she helped create.

“We’re saving lives with the existing law,” Mills said during a recent interview.

Critics have said the yellow flag law was too difficult to use, taking cops off their patrols for entire shifts to process a single order. Before Lewiston, it had only been used about 80 times in three years.

Nevertheless, Mills and others mounted an all out defense of it. They shifted the spotlight from its procedural hurdles to individual inaction.

“At its core, this tragedy was caused by a colossal failure of human judgment by several people on several occasions, a profound negligence that, as the commission rightly stated, was an abdication of responsibility,” Mills said in September.

Mass shootings often renew conversations about gun control, but a close look at the politics, history and culture of guns in Maine helps explain why, even after a tragedy like Lewiston, Maine legislators didn’t dramatically overhaul the state’s gun control laws.

Maine policymakers – Mills in particular – largely maintained their fealty to the state’s unique gun culture and a political constituency that’s long held dominion over the state’s approach to the Second Amendment.

Nearly half of Maine households are estimated to own a firearm and roughly 15% of residents have a hunting license, yet the year before Lewiston, there were fewer than two dozen gun-related homicides.

And the local gun rights group that represents these gun owners is one of the strongest political forces in the state, with a direct line to the governor.

“We’ve been able to avoid a lot of the national politics because we are a state that has a strong hunting and firearm culture, but we’re also a Democrat majority state,” said David Trahan, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine. “But those same Democrats own guns, they hunt, they fish.”

‘I NEEDED TO GET BACK’

Trahan did not hear about the Lewiston shooting the night it occurred. He was in northern Maine, out of cell range and helping a friend harvest a moose. But when he heard about it a day or two later, he knew instantly that the tragedy threatened to upend a debate over guns that he’d been accustomed to winning.

“I knew my phone would be ringing. I knew that I needed to get back,” Trahan said in an interview this summer.

Trahan says that he spoke with the governor within hours of returning home, and again the next day.

“She knew that something would be done and, I think, wanted help with that,” he said. “And I was eager.”

A spokesperson for Mills said the governor could not recall those early conversations with Trahan, but she didn’t rule out that they happened.

Mills and Trahan had worked together to create the yellow flag law four years earlier. Now, the national media was examining its novel mechanics, and the state’s permissive gun laws were drawing fresh criticism from gun control advocates.

“I’ll just be blunt. Maine has weak gun laws compared to other states. And we think that lawmakers have basically rejected efforts to make them stronger for far too long,” Matt McTighe, Everytown for Gun Safety’s chief operating officer, told Maine Public a day after the shootings.

Even with the gunman still at large, the conversation was already pushing some lawmakers to change their longstanding views on gun control.

U.S. Rep Jared Golden, D-Maine, who was born in Lewiston, renounced his opposition to an assault weapons ban a day after the mass shooting, a head-turning reversal that immediately made national headlines and may have electoral consequences for his 2024 reelection bid.

Soon, other Maine politicians would have to make similar policy choices.

Emails obtained by Maine Public, the Portland Press Herald and FRONTLINE reveal that Democratic leaders had a strong interest in a red flag proposal after the shooting, at least until January. The messages mostly steer clear of explicit details, but they show that lawmakers were, at first, planning in earnest.

In November, staff for Senate President Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, sought research and analysis for previous red flag proposals. When Senate Democrats caucused on Dec. 5 to discuss legislation for the upcoming session, a red flag bill was atop the list of interests. And by January, the Legislature’s revisor’s office had drafted a red flag bill at his request.

Mills announced later that month that she wanted to change the yellow flag law’s protective custody procedures, fund new mental health initiatives and expand background checks, which she previously opposed, but nothing more.

Nothing about red flag.

Democratic leaders quickly fell in line. When they announced their slate of gun control proposals in late February, the red flag bill was conspicuously missing.

Jackson says his draft bill was originally going to be part of a package of bills, but lawmakers changed course when Mills released her proposal and signaled that other gun control bills faced an uncertain fate.

Asked if she told Democratic leaders that she’d veto a red flag bill, the governor said, “I sent the message that this is a package that we’ve put together after significant research and significant discussions across the board, and this is the package that I’m comfortable with.”

Jackson said, “I think the idea then became, ‘Well, we’re probably going to have to run these (bills) on their own because of her uncomfortableness.’”

He said Democrats always intended to introduce a red flag bill. And they did –  a few weeks before the legislative session ended. But the bill never received a vote and remained stalled in the House when lawmakers adjourned in May.

A spokesperson for House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, D-Portland,, who sponsored the bill and controls which proposals receive votes, said lawmakers simply ran out of time. And despite the hours of testimony that had been given in support of the measure at committee hearings in April, few publicly reacted as strongly when it fizzled out.

Democrats did break ranks with Mills to pass a three-day waiting period to purchase guns. It barely cleared the Senate after Democrats deployed an infrequently used vote-pairing maneuver.

In late April, emails show a staffer in Jackson’s office asked the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, if she wanted to request a bill signing ceremony with the governor. But Rotundo had already talked to Mills that morning.

“If we are lucky, (Mills) will allow it to pass without her signature,” Rotundo replied on April 26. “Not sure this is anything she will be celebrating, but thanks for asking!”

Democrats were lucky, but they wouldn’t know it until three days later.

A day after meeting with Rotundo, Mills signed her own bill into law. In addition to expanding background checks, it also gave cops more latitude to take someone into protective custody and initiate a yellow flag order.

It was a proposal that David Trahan and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine could live with.

“What I said to the governor was, ‘Because we worked so hard on the yellow flag law, we’ll help you with that component, but we insist that the red flag law not pass,’” said Trahan, SAM’s executive director during an interview this summer. “We made improvements we could live with, and we understood that the background check piece was going to pass and that the other more extreme gun legislation would not.”

Mills then announced that she was letting Rotundo’s waiting period bill become law without her signature. She also vetoed a proposed ban on bump stocks, modifications to semi-automatic guns to make them fire nearly fast automatic weapons.

While that veto disappointed gun control groups, she and Democratic lawmakers were celebrated for “monumental” progress by Everytown for Gun Safety. They framed her bills as victories and important first steps in Maine, and a stark juxtaposition to the legislative responses to school mass shootings in Iowa and Tennessee, where policymakers decided to allow  teachers to carry guns in schools.

“This session, our lawmakers have proven that stronger gun safety laws are possible in Maine – now we’ll be back to continue working with them so that even more are enacted for years to come,” Alisa Conroy Morton, of the Maine chapter of Moms Demand Action, said in a joint statement with Everytown.

Trahan, however, was shocked. He says the governor’s staff told him she didn’t support the waiting period bill.

“Both sides knew what was acceptable and what wasn’t,” he said. “And then, at the last minute, that passed.”

‘A RIGHT TO BE HEARD’

Trahan, a former Republican state legislator and logger, is often the face of the gun rights movement in Maine. He’s led the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, or SAM, for the past 13 years, a tenure that has further solidified the group’s standing as a leading voice in the state’s political debate over gun policy.

Trahan had worked directly with Mills and her administration to draft the yellow flag law in 2019, an effort that both have held up as an exemplar of compromise and a Maine solution to American gun violence.

Its supporters were confident it would save lives and potentially become a model for other states. Even the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, a local gun control organization, gave it qualified support.

And while Trahan took some heat from gun rights activists, he and the law’s backers repeatedly highlighted its extra procedural steps. Four other states with red flag laws require law enforcement to initiate the process, but Maine also requires police to take the person into protective custody. And the suspect has to go through a mental health assessment before the weapons removal petition can go before a judge.

Trahan lauded those steps as due process features, not bugs. And he believes the law – the only one of its kind in the nation – is evidence that Maine policymakers can craft nuanced legislation on thorny issues rather than give in to pressure from national interest groups.

“Maine self-governed when it came to that policy and I’m proud of that fact,” Trahan said.

“We didn’t need the out-of-state groups telling us what to do, whether it was the NRA, or Michael Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action. We said we can solve this problem and we did.”

Gun control advocates argued that the added requirements were unnecessary barriers that limited the number of dangerous people whose guns should be seized, while also stigmatizing people with mental illness.

Groban, the former federal prosecutor who met with Mills a week before the Lewiston shooting, pointed to a 2018 FBI study of 63 active shooters between 2000 and 2013 that showed only 25% had been diagnosed with a mental illness, and only three had been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.

“What has happened in your life that your circumstances have changed? That makes you angry, or sad, or paranoid, or any of those things?” she said. “Those are real indicators of dangerousness, much more than whether … you have a mental illness.”

Mills had once worried about that, too.

As Maine’s attorney general, she testified in support of a 2018 red flag proposal that would have allowed family members to directly petition a judge to remove a person’s guns.

“I think it balances the public’s safety without trampling on Second Amendment rights and without stereotyping individuals with mental illness, the vast majority of whom live fulfilling lives without posing any threat to other people,” Mills told the Maine Legislature’s Judiciary Committee in 2018.

Her predecessor, Republican Gov. Paul LePage, ultimately vetoed the bill after it was enacted by the Legislature by an 18-vote margin in the House that included several Republicans.

That same year, Mills highlighted her support for a red flag law and ban on bump stocks, during the Democratic gubernatorial primary when all seven candidates were touting their gun control bona fides.

Mills was sworn in as governor the next year alongside new Democratic majorities in the Legislature. Gun control advocates, who for years had been exiled to Maine’s political wilderness after a string of defeats, were upbeat. They plowed their energy into a new red flag bill.

But when the bill received a public hearing, Mills leaned more into her campaign promises to be a consensus builder and issued a statement vowing to find a compromise with stakeholders.

Her support for a red flag law disappeared. Her support for banning bump stocks later would, too.

Trahan, a pragmatist feeling pressure after a spate of school shootings in 2018 revived national conversations about gun control, had reached out to Mills directly when she became governor.

“I talked to her about, instead of red flag, let’s create something that will face constitutional muster,” he said. “And give some level of credibility to the gun rights community’s concerns, which is due process, which is ensuring the (gun) rights can be restored, and making sure that elements like mental health and professionals were involved. We did that.”

Mills’ decision to join Trahan and back the yellow flag proposal also effectively killed the red flag bill, drawing a warning from one of its sponsors, then state Sen. Rebecca Millett, D-Cape Elizabeth.

She said in Senate proceedings in 2019, “While we have been lucky so far in Maine to not have experienced a school or mass shooting, parents and students that I speak with, and hear from, believe that it is not a matter of if, but when, unless something more is done.”

In an interview in September, Mills dismissed the idea that SAM had more influence over her views in 2019 than other stakeholders. But she made it clear that she respects the group as an advocate for Maine gun owners.

“They have a significant voice in the Maine Legislature and they have a right to be heard,” she said.

That’s rarely been a problem.

HOMEGROWN INFLUENCE

While the National Rifle Association maintains an influential presence in Maine and works to defeat state gun control initiatives, SAM is a local group with deep connections to Maine gun owners.

The organization has roughly 8,000 members, but its coalition extends to more than 70 fish and game clubs, creating a formidable activist network that Trahan pegs at roughly 45,000 people.

“We’re viewed as probably one of the top, strongest political entities in the state,” Trahan said.

Its strength comes from connecting gun ownership to Maine’s tradition of hunting and a culture of self-reliance.

It’s not a monolithic constituency, but gun rights are a common thread in a tapestry of interests that SAM aims to represent.

“They know their constituency, and I think that’s something that collectively, does give them great strength,” said Matt Dunlap, Maine’s state auditor and former secretary of state.

Dunlap is a SAM member and briefly served as its interim director before Trahan got the job.

He’s also a gun owner and a Democrat, one of many in the state who supports the organization. The political diversity of its membership has helped SAM avoid getting pigeonholed as a partisan advocacy group, and also why it’s been influential in shaping Maine gun laws regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans control state government.

Since 2013, SAM’s political action committee has only spent a little more than $30,000 on advertising and other materials to influence elections, according to Maine Ethics Commission data.

Its influencing power rests mostly in cultural association, drawing a connection between Maine’s hunting and firearms traditions to the politicians its political arm endorses and grades.

“When you’re a candidate for the Legislature and people don’t know who you are … if you’ve been endorsed for election by the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and the National Rifle Association, those sportsmen who do not belong to those organizations will still look at that and say, ‘Hey, that guy’s good on my issue and I’m going to support them because of that,'” Dunlap said.

Trahan is a convincing spokesperson for the cause. He describes his own guns as cherished heirlooms, each possessing personal connections to experiences, friends and relatives.

“Those firearms represent memories,” he said. “And I think that that is the piece that the gun control community misses. …When you try to depict all firearms as evil, as killing, you’re missing the boat here. A lot of those firearms mean something to people, and when you come to take them, people are going to defend their right to keep them.”

‘THEY CONTROLLED IT ALL’ 

Michael Chitwood knows gun violence. He was a homicide detective for the Philadelphia Police Department for nearly a decade.

But when he arrived in Maine in 1988 to become chief of the Portland Police Department, he was startled by what he described as state politicians’ and officials’ lackadaisical attitudes about gun safety.

It was a culture shock for Chitwood, who had left the Philadelphia Police Department four years earlier. The year he arrived in Portland, Philadelphia was rocked by a surge in homicides – more than 400.

His conflicts began as soon as he walked into his new office in Portland and noticed a foot-high stack of folders on his desk.

“And when I looked at the pile, I said, ‘What the (expletive) is this?” he recalled in a phone interview from his home in Florida.

Concealed weapons permits. Chitwood was expected to sign them, no questions asked.

“There’s no check. No check to see if they’re mentally ill. No check to see if they’re domestic violence abusers. Nothing,” he said.

Chitwood refused to sign the permits and so began his confrontations with the Maine gun rights movement.

Chitwood is now 80-years old and retired. But when he was police chief of Maine’s largest city for 17 years, he attempted to take on a powerful political machine.

His brash, swashbuckling style turned heads. But his rhetoric also made him a perfect foil for gun rights activists who framed gun violence as a “from away” problem.

“We’ve been getting along fine for a hell of a lot of years. Now we’ve got some flatlander come up here and try to tell us we’ve been doing it all wrong,” Michael Polakewich, owner of the York County Pistol Range, told Knight-Ridder newspapers in 1989.

Democratic House Speaker John Martin put it less bluntly during a public hearing that same year for a bill that nullified municipalities’ ability to enact gun laws, including Lewiston’s waiting period to buy handguns.

“There are differences between Philadelphia and Portland, Maine, and we ought not forget that,” Martin said at the time..

The bill was a direct response to Chitwood, who had begun enforcing a 19th century Portland ordinance that barred people from carrying firearms in the city between sunset and sunrise. Chitwood had hoped to force a debate over background checks for concealed weapon permit applicants.

The move backfired.

The Legislature “went absolutely ballistic,” Chitwood said.

Martin’s preemption bill became law shortly thereafter. The NRA has successfully led the effort for similar laws in more than 40 other states.

Chitwood continued his push for gun control up until his departure in 2005 but with little success.

Over the next decade, gun rights continued to dominate in Maine politics, further solidifying the state’s reputation for permissive gun regulations even as the U.S. began to see an upswing in mass shootings.

When Republicans controlled the Maine Legislature between 2011 and 2012, state lawmakers passed a law that allowed state employees with concealed weapons permits to leave their guns in their vehicles on state property, and another that allowed the same permit holders to carry a hidden gun in state parks and historic sites. The Republican majority stopped short of passing a bill that would have allowed firearms in the Maine State House.

Gun rights groups even won after Democrats took back control of the Legislature in 2013. That same year the Bangor Daily News started asking local police departments to turn over their concealed weapons permit data in accordance with Maine’s public records law. SAM and gun rights groups unleashed a withering pressure campaign that led to a state law permanently sealing those records. Two years later the state did away with the need for concealed carry permits entirely.

By 2016, gun control groups were effectively shut out of Maine’s legislative system, so they tried another route. They proposed a bill expanding background checks via the state’s citizen referendum process.

They tried to get SAM to stay out of it, Trahan recalled.

“They bragged to me that they had all this polling (showing) that (they) would win, and they had 85% support,” Trahan said. “And I said, ‘I don’t think you do.’”

He was right.

The proposed law required background checks for most gun transfers and was supposed to exempt loans between family members and hunters. But Trahan, working alongside the NRA, argued it could penalize hunters for simply loaning a gun to a hunting buddy.

“Have you seen a crime wave associated with hunters loaning firearms to hunters? No, no. There’s no crime wave,” he said in an NRA campaign ad.

Maine voters narrowly rejected the measure.

“Had (the referendum) been written differently, I think the outcome might have been different,” Trahan told the Portland Press Herald after the election.

Gun control advocates tried to write background expansion proposals differently when Mills took office in 2019. But Mills signaled early on that she was skeptical.

“You know, the people have already spoken on background checks and they’ve spoken pretty loud and clear,” she said when asked that year about a background check bill that later failed in the House and Senate. “Thirteen out of 16 counties voted against background checks. That’s a significant thing to me.”

Mills’ reluctance to endorse background checks and a red flag bill was praised by SAM’s political arm when she ran for reelection in 2022. It gave her an ‘A’ rating in its election guide.

RED VS. YELLOW FLAG

Sanford Police Lt. Colleen Adams believes Maine’s yellow flag law has averted suicides, homicides and police shootings. She also believes her department is lucky it has the resources to utilize it.

Sanford is the second most prolific user of the yellow flag law, using it 25 times since its 2020 implementation as of Oct. 23. Officers there say it takes between six and eight hours to execute a protection order from start to finish. Some law enforcement officials say that’s too cumbersome, requiring too much time and too many steps, especially for smaller agencies.

“If there could be some way to shorten the process for law enforcement, I think you would see … more participation,” Adams told a legislative committee in March. “Because it comes down to one person versus protecting the entire city for some of these agencies who only have one officer working.”

Sanford is one of just 20 police departments in Maine with 20 to 64 full-time police officers, according to the Maine Criminal Justice Academy’s most recent annual report to the Legislature. Most local police departments in Maine have between one and eight cops. An increasing number of smaller towns have no local police department and have to rely on either the Maine State Police or one of 16 county sheriff offices.

Bowdoin, where the Lewiston gunman lived, is one of those communities. It relies on the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office for police coverage. Sagadahoc was also one of more than 100 police departments statewide that had never used the yellow flag law before the tragedy.

A deputy had considered invoking it against the gunman after he was alerted to the man’s threats, but said he ultimately didn’t because he could never get the would-be gunman to open his front door, and others downplayed the danger.

The governor’s commission that investigated the shootings has asserted that Sagadahoc deputies, and one in particular, failed to utilize the yellow flag law to potentially stop the shootings. Mills has strongly echoed that criticism.

She and others have argued that Maine’s extra steps ensure more due process and inoculate the yellow flag law from legal challenges following the U.S. Supreme Court’s sweeping Bruen decision in 2022. The ruling overturned a requirement in New York state law that concealed weapons permit applicants demonstrate “proper cause” before they can carry a hidden gun.

Gun rights groups like the NRA celebrated the ruling. They viewed it as creating a new post-Bruen test, opening the door to challenge the constitutionality of other state and municipal gun control regulations, including red flag laws.

“I want to make sure what we do enact is real, that it’s effective, that it doesn’t get kicked out of court as soon as somebody brings a lawsuit suggesting it’s not constitutional,” Mills said during a recent interview.

The Bruen decision could test the expansion of red flag laws in other states. In response to the mass shooting in Buffalo, New York passed a law in 2022 that requires cops and district attorneys to petition the courts for an order if they think someone is a risk to themselves or others, essentially serving as mandatory reporters.

In Massachusetts, a sweeping overhaul of gun laws this summer has riled gun rights groups and created the prospect of a constitutional challenge that might have ramifications for other risk protection order laws under the new post-Bruen standard.

Groban, the former federal prosecutor who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Maine School of Law, believes the high court signaled that red flag laws will be safe when it ruled 8-1 in United States v. Rahimi.

The 2024 ruling effectively upholds a federal law that allows the government to confiscate firearms from people under domestic violence restraining orders. Groban says the Rahimi ruling clarified the Bruen test, applying it to the founding principles of gun regulation – not an exact match contemplated in the 18th century as gun control activists initially worried would be applied after Bruen.

Mills believes that Groban’s analysis of Rahimi’s effect on red flag laws is “a stretch,” and besides, she says, allowing families to directly petition the courts to remove a loved one’s guns shifts the burden from police.

“Police officers are, on the whole, trained and professional in responding to complaints about people who are dangerous,” she said. “That’s their job. It’s not the job of a family member. … It’s an enormous responsibility that (families) probably shouldn’t have.”

She added, “I wouldn’t want that responsibility.”

ON THE MARGINS

Combined with the background check expansion, the waiting period bill marked an extraordinary change of fortunes for gun control groups that had long failed to gain a foothold in Maine.

But for how long is unclear. The 2024 election could provide a preview.

The three-day waiting period law was an unexpected loss for Trahan and he’s vowed to hold state lawmakers accountable for its passage.

SAM’s political arm has already docked Golden’s ranking, dropping him from an A+ in 2022 to a C in its election guide. Republicans, meanwhile, are highlighting Golden’s post-Lewiston views on assault weapons in a contest that could determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the U.S. House next year.

Trahan was already gearing up for the next gun policy fight early this summer. He knew that his battle against a red flag law wasn’t over.

“It’ll be back next year because that’s what the national folks want,” he said.

But next year Trahan might have to fight gun control groups at the ballot box, too. Maine gun control activists have not directly criticized Mills or the Legislature for not passing a red flag law, but they assert that the current law is “weak and ineffective.” They recently announced they’re launching a campaign to take the proposal straight to Maine voters via its citizens referendum process.

Whatever comes, Trahan believes Maine’s gun culture will prevail once again.

“There’s a culture there that supports gun rights,” he said. “And politically, it translates into how people vote.”

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and Maine Public that includes an upcoming documentary. It is supported through FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Copy the Story Link