LEWISTON, Maine (AP) — A history of mental illness. An array of weapons. Numerous run-ins with police. But he was still able to own guns and commit the deadliest mass shooting in Maine’s history.
One week later, many in Lewiston and nationwide are asking: Why did he have guns at all?
Robert Card was identified by authorities as a person of interest about four hours after he shot and killed 18 people and wounded 13 others at a bowling alley and bar in Maine’s second-largest city. But Card, who was found dead two days after his rampage, had been well known to law enforcement for months.
The questions about how Card was able to own guns underscore the difficulty in seizing guns from potentially dangerous people with mental illness — especially when numerous states and jurisdictions are involved, as was the case with Card.
The police agencies that responded to the mass shooting faced pressure to account for how Card could have owned guns after spending time in a psychiatric facility in New York. Card reportedly blamed Army Reserve officials for his hospitalization, according to a letter an unidentified member of the unit wrote to a Maine sheriff’s deputy.
The letter was included in the deputy’s Sept. 15 report about efforts to contact Card. It’s unclear when it was sent, but the writer describes getting a call from a friend of Card’s who was concerned Card was “going to snap and commit a mass shooting.”
Card threatened to shoot up the Army reserve drill center in Saco, Maine, and other places, and that he was going to get “them.”
“Since the commander and I are the ones who had him committed we are the ‘them,’” wrote the unidentified letter writer. “He also said I was the reason he can’t buy guns anymore because of the commitment.”
Authorities at the state and federal level have not said that Card’s history of mental illness should have triggered laws that kept him from owning guns. There was nothing on Card’s record before the shooting that would have kept him from passing a federal background check to buy a gun, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said in a statement.
How involuntary commitments are reported to federal authorities differs by state, said Mark Collins, federal policy director at the gun-violence prevention group Brady.
Generally, though, not everyone who gets mental health treatment at a facility is considered involuntarily committed. That’s a determination legally made by a court or a board, which then communicates it to another state body tasked with sending that information to the federal background-check system maintained by the FBI.
Each state has an agency that should report it, but it’s not legally required everywhere, he said. Maine, for example, does require the State Bureau of Identification to report commitments to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
“This is the clearest cut case I’ve seen where an extreme-risk protection order could have saved all these lives,” Collins said, referring to measures often called “red-flag” laws, which Maine does not have. “This guy did everything short of taking out a front-page ad in the newspaper saying he was going to commit an atrocity.”
Concern about Card’s behavior accelerated after an altercation he had with fellow Army Reserve members this summer. Card and other members of the Army Reserve’s 3rd Battalion, 304th Infantry Unit were in New York for training on July 15 when he accused several of them of calling him a pedophile, shoved one of them and locked himself in his motel room. The next morning, he told another soldier that he wanted people to stop talking about him.
“I told him no one was talking about him and everyone here was his friend. Card told me to leave him alone and tried to slam the door in my face,” the soldier later told Maine authorities, according to documents released by the sheriff’s office.
