At this hour, 22 people have been killed while between 50 and 60 people have been reported injured in a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine which is about 35 miles north of Portland.
The shootings took place at Sparetime Recreation, a bowling alley and at Schemengees Bar and Grille.
As of this writing, the suspect remains at large. But he has been identified as a 40-year-old male named Robert Card. Lewiston residents have been advised to shelter-in-place.
On a personal note, I shuddered when I heard some of the shootings had taken place at Sparetime Recreation. When I was out of work during in New York during the COVID pandemic in 2020, I applied for a job in Lewiston and made a point of checking out the bowling alleys in the area. Under a different set of circumstances, I might have been living in Lewiston and might have been at that bowling alley. But for the Grace of G-d....
This is the deadliest shooting in Maine's history. Given its status as a largely rural state, Maine has fairly lax gun laws but has had relatively few gun deaths. In an interview last year with Maine Public Radio, Michael Roque, an associate professor of sociology at Bates College in Lewiston was asked about this very point:
There doesn't seem to be much that would make Maine special in terms of being immune to mass public shootings. I would say that we have been lucky that mass public shootings haven't taken place.
Sadly, that luck ran out tonight.
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