With eleventh hour guidance from the state, Maine gun retailers on Friday began requiring a three-day wait period for gun purchases under one of the new safety laws adopted following the state’s deadliest mass shooting.
Maine joins a dozen other states with similar laws, requiring that buyers wait 72 hours to complete a purchase and retrieve a weapon. The law is among several gun-related bills adopted after an Army reservist killed 18 people and injured 13 others on Oct. 25, 2023, in Lewiston.
The new law wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy — the gunman bought his guns legally months earlier — but Friday’s milestone was celebrated by gun safety advocates who believe it will prevent gun deaths by providing a cooling-off period for people intent on buying a gun to do harm to others or themselves.
Gun store owners complained about the guidance, released just Tuesday, and the loss of sales to out-of-state visitors during Maine’s busy summer tourism season. They also said the waiting period will take a toll on gun shows.
Waiting periods do appear to have a small but significant effect on reducing gun homicides according to the research I’ve seen, although I haven’t looked at data specifically for Maine, which is a state with a lot more guns but a lot less gun violence than the average.
(The study I looked at appears to show that background checks increase gun homicides so I don’t trust it very much, but a Rand meta-analysis also claims that that small but significant effect is real.)
My point isn’t that waiting periods are bad policy but rather that they’re an irrational response to this mass shooting. (And it is this particular mass shooting that convinced Maine to pass the law.) Gun violence that would not have been prevented by a waiting period is evidence against the efficacy of waiting periods, but here people are responding to that evidence by increasing their support for waiting periods. It’s contrary to basic logic.
The guy had pretty bad brain damage and was apparently a grenade trainer in the army. There have been some deeply unsettling links to the use of explosives and CTE. These injuries likely can’t be mitigated by better helmets/armor either. CTE is directly linked to violence.
Maine has no capability to alter what our military uses as ordinance. It can, in the wake of a horrifying slaughter commited with a gun, look at ways of mitigating future gun murders. That’s what it’s has done here. Not a “1 for 1” response to a specific issue they can’t affect, but an overall improvement of gun safety.
You’re right about CTE, but I still don’t see why passing this legislation in response to a mass shooting that it would not have prevented makes more sense than, for example, restricting guns in response to a murder committed with a knife. In both cases, the murder weapon is outside of the category of weapons affected by the law.