LISBON, Maine — Gun shops across southern Maine are reporting a surge in customers in the days since the mass shooting in Lewiston and the manhunt that followed.
"It's just an additional insurance policy," Daniel Soules, who owns Buck’s Guns in Lisbon, said on Saturday. "We've been getting a lot of phone calls and people wanting to come in and look at firearms, look at ammunition."
It's not uncommon for areas affected by mass shootings to see an uptick in firearms sales. A 2022 study in the Journal of Policy Modeling finds that between 1999 and 2016, mass shootings, on the whole, were associated with an increase in gun purchases in the state where they happened.
While the main reason given for this is a fear of future gun control passing, in the Lewiston area, that's only one part of the equation.
"I have had people in their seventies who haven't shopped for 50 years, haven't used a gun in 50 years, who have come in and purchased handguns because they're afraid of what's going on," Soules said.
But this impulse for new, or "rusty," gun owners to buy firearms is being met with a warning: be careful.
Chris Arrington is an Army veteran and a gun owner who says his friends comment on how safety-focused he is with weapons while hunting. He sees merit in the desire for protection following the Lewiston shootings but believes it should be paired with "some kind of training."
"A novice shouldn't just pick up a firearm and they have no clue how to use it," Arrington said.
Still, others like Maine Sen. Joe Baldacci, a Democrat serving Penobscot County, think the premise of arming up after tragedy is misguided.
"They’re being overreactive," Baldacci said, believing the focus instead should be to "more aggressively remove firearms from people who shouldn't have them."