AUGUSTA, Maine — The state of Maine released guidelines on Tuesday that advise gun dealers to keep detailed records of sales to help enforce a controversial 72-hour waiting period that takes effect later this week.
The waiting period law was the main response of the Democratic-led Legislature to the October mass shooting in Lewiston. It would not have prevented the shooting, since the gunman who killed 18 people and injured another 13 at a bowling alley and bar legally purchased firearms in the months before the shooting.
Gun shops have had major questions about the law, which gun-rights groups including the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine have vowed to sue the state over. The guidelines from the Department of Public Safety and Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office answer many of them.
For example, the law says that a gun dealer must wait 72 hours after an agreement with a customer to turn the firearm over to them. The advisory notes that the law does not specifically call for that agreement to be put in writing, but agencies tell gun dealers to keep documentation of agreements so questions can be answered if sales are called into question.
Those documents could include correspondence between buyers and sellers or federal transaction records, the advisory says. But David Trahan, the executive director of the sportsman’s alliance, cited the guidelines as evidence that the law is “a mess” in part because the state is asking gun dealers to keep records they are not required to keep.
“It puts people in a vulnerable position of having to come up with their own agreement, define what agreement is, and then hope that it meets the guidelines,” he said.
The 72-hour waiting period is concurrent with the time it takes to run a federally mandated background check. Maine will be joining 12 other states in requiring some kind of waiting period, according to Everytown, a group that supports gun control.
Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat who has generally opposed gun control, allowed the waiting period law to take effect without her signature. That decision came after she signed another bill that expanded background checks to private sales and tweaked her 2019 “yellow flag” law that was scrutinized after the shooting.
Researchers have made conflicting findings about whether waiting periods reduce mass shootings, but studies have suggested that waiting periods of between two and seven days can lower risks of suicide and domestic violence shootings. Gun-rights advocates have argued waiting periods could delay a victim in protecting themselves, but little evidence of that exists.
Sen. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, the sponsor of the law, pitched it in floor debate as a response to the shootings in her city but also to gun suicides, which made up 158 of Maine’s 178 firearm deaths in 2021.
“Our work is not done, but with these major steps, Maine enters a new era in its fight to ensure that our communities and our loved ones are safe from gun violence,” Nacole Palmer, the executive director of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, said in a Wednesday statement hailing the new law.
