LEWISTON — A birthright, a death sentence.

In this small, tight knit New England town ablaze in autumn greeting card colors, the guns to which we Americans are entitled have once again taken everything — this time in a bowling alley and a bar.

The preliminary tally: 18 dead, 13 injured.

A man playing cornhole was shot in both knees and another ducked under a table for cover as a gunman unloaded his weapon into dozens of others, according to some town residents who’d heard from family. The rest are waiting, waiting for news in our gruesome, American ritual.

“Three,” said Victoria Wysocki-Wilson, 31, who spoke with family members and friends present at the nation’s most recent mass killing. “My stepdad knew three people who were killed.”

Lewiston, the second-most-populous locality in Maine with about 38,000 residents, was a ghost town on Thursday. A traffic sign blinked “Shelter In Place” in front of a cheery, metal-and-lightbulb sculpture that said “Hopeful” on the side of a dead cotton mill factory. Schools across the region were closed. Banks, stores, even all the Dunkin’ outlets — and there are a lot of them in New England — were closed, many with handwritten signs on their doors.

The only people outside were the crowds of journalists with airline tags on their Pelican equipment cases and nowhere to pee, police officers, a few locals who heard that the 7-Eleven across the street from the hospital was open, and the bench sitters near the bus station.

As the collateral consequences of the atrocity settled in, residents balanced shock and resignation.

“This stuff happens everywhere,” one of the men outside told me. “It’s all over America.”

“I’ve never felt safer anywhere else,” said Hunter Kissam, 27, who recently moved to Maine from Massachusetts. “Never in a million years would I imagine this here.”

Kissam was among the few outside, accompanying Miia Zellner, 22, an art teacher who was hanging heart-shaped signs throughout the deserted downtown: [Heart] To My Friends, [Heart] To My City.

Lewiston is one of those moody, New England mill towns with a skyline pierced by church spires and brick factory stacks. A lot of the big Victorian mansions where the mill owners used to live are beautifully restored dental or law offices. Entrepreneurs are fighting the brick infrastructure’s decay with craft breweries and espresso shops.

“There is so much diversity and beauty here,” Zellner said, in between hammering signs. “I love that about the community.”

That diversity, though, has been fueling resentment in Lewiston as the city’s demographics have shifted, Kissam and Wysocki-Wilson said.

Authorities have not detailed a motive in the shootings. The man they are looking for in connection with the massacre, Robert Card, 40, is a firearms instructor and Army reservist who, according to police bulletins, had been unsuccessfully seeking mental health treatment for weeks.

What we do know is that last year, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court handed a victory to gun rights advocates with a landmark ruling that has set the stage for more challenges designed to erode gun laws that were erected to save lives. In that case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court struck down a New York state law that restricted permits to carry handguns to people who could demonstrate that they faced security risks.

Just last month, a federal judge in Maryland prevented from taking effect portions of a new state law that forbids guns at private businesses, restaurants and public gatherings, as the measure’s constitutionality undergoes further scrutiny.

And next month, the nation’s high court will take up a case seeking to build off the Bruen ruling: U.S. v. Rahimi, which originated in Texas and poses questions that could literally mean the difference between life or death for domestic violence victims attempting to break the cycle of isolation and control. While some legal observers are skeptical of the plaintiff’s chances, lawyers for Zackey Rahimi essentially argue that under the Bruen ruling, the government can’t take guns from abusive husbands and boyfriends who are under a restraining order.

Maine has some of the loosest gun laws in the nation and a low gun homicide rate, about 14 a year, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. But Wednesday night showed us that one gun — one man — can do a year’s worth of slaughter in just one night.

I was a couple of hours away in Boston, visiting my son in college, when the news alerts began coming. This is a part of Maine where we have visited friends during the summer for more than a decade, exhaling in woods and on the rugged coastline.

This is where we go for blueberry picking at Card’s Fruit Farm in Bowdoin (it’s unknown whether the farm has any connection to the suspect; no one there picked up the phone Thursday). This is where the kids get Frosty’s Donuts or Witch Spring Hill Ice Cream after a day at Popham Beach. As the sign says when you cross the state line from New Hampshire, this is Maine, “The Way Life Should Be.”

Except, Maine is America. And it’s America that has the problem.

Just listen to the Swedish reporter joining my conversation with Wysocki-Wilson outside the 7-Eleven. “I was just here in your country following up on Uvalde and then this happens,” she said. “Unbelievable.”

Our elected representatives in Washington have invested a lot of energy recently pointing to D.C. and the city’s leaders, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, when they’re talking about crime.

But the massive death toll that America sustains thanks to gun violence — more than 15,500 so far this year, excluding suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive — is not a problem to be batted about to score political points by the people in power.

Each year, we lose about 20,000 people to gun violence — with immeasurable ripple effects of stress and trauma for those left behind.

When one man declares war on a quiet town of civilians, the entire city goes into lockdown, protecting themselves, their co-workers and families from this one person.

Once the manhunt is over, everything will reopen. But Lewiston has forever joined a devastating list: Newtown, Orlando, Uvalde. Families will struggle to move through it, and feel pressured to push past it, if there is ever such a thing.

And America will go on, enduring the problem.

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