October 25, 2023 was just an ordinary night in Lewiston, a small, working class city of 37,000 in central Maine. Friends and families had gathered to do what they loved to do with the people they wanted to be with at a bowling alley called Just-in-Time Recreation Center and Schemengees, a popular sports bar and restaurant. They felt immune from the violent crime that seemed to wrack the rest of the country in a state that the FBI had just named the safest in America.

Then Robert Card II, a deeply paranoid Army Reserve soldier, walked into both places with a high-powered rifle and opened fire, killing 18 people and wounding 13 more. He then fled to a third location, where according to the evidence and the testimony of his best friend, he likely planned to lay in wait and kill his ex-co-workers when they came to work the next morning.

The tragedy is that the numerous red flags he had raised in the months before weren't enough to stop him before he carried out his terrible plan. A combination of watered-down gun control laws and law enforcement and military negligence made sure of that.

In THE LEWISTON SHOOTINGS—An All-American Tragedy, author and award-winning journalist Robert Conlin traces the shootings that deeply scarred a community that thought it was the last place on earth where a mass shooting would take place. Never again could anyone in Lewiston or the state of Maine say, "It will never happen here."

Because it did.