On a rainy day in May, Arthur Barnard stood on the porch of his daughter-in-law’s house in Auburn. Beads of water clung to his leather jacket.

With cameras and microphones pointed his way, Arthur talked about his son, Artie – what a goofy laugh he’d had, about teaching him to play pool as a kid. He was on his way to Las Vegas to play in a tournament in his son’s honor.

His voice cracked as he told the camera crew what a good father Artie had been, what a solid life he had built for himself.

Then Arthur started talking about gun control. His voice steadied.

He called for a national gun registry, universal background checks, limits on ammunition purchases.

“We have to be able to keep track of these weapons,” he said, his blue eyes piercing into the camera. “You have to register your dog in this country. Why not a gun?”

His daughter-in-law, Kristy Strout, stood still beside him before she stepped out of frame and walked upstairs, the cameras still rolling.

She didn’t want to talk about gun control. But Arthur did. Arthur always does.

Before his son died, Arthur hadn’t voted in decades. He’d never taken much interest in politics or written to his representatives. But at age 62, that all changed.

On Oct. 25, Arthur “Artie” Strout was one of 18 people killed in Maine’s deadliest mass shooting, 10 of whom died at Schemengees Bar & Grille, where Arthur had been playing pool with his eldest son just minutes earlier.

Within days, Arthur started talking about changing gun laws.

He was certain even then that advocating for reform was the only place to pour his endless grief and anger over his son’s violent murder. But he didn’t know much about which laws had been passed in which states or what federal legislation politicians had already tried to push through. He was green.

In the 10 months since, he has tried to get organized in the time he can find between work and taking care of his grandkids.

He sleeps in a bed wedged into the corner of his living room, with his son’s ex-girlfriend and her 2-year-old a few feet away on the couch. At night, he’ll read articles about gun legislation on his phone, his face illuminated in the blue light. On his bedside table is a stack of business cards from politicians and other activists he’s met.

In January, Arthur gave an off-the-cuff speech at the Maine State House during a gun safety rally. He spoke about his grief and about how changing gun laws emerged as his life’s purpose.

Hundreds of people stood in silence, listening as he began to speak. As he went on, his voice grew louder, he sounded angrier.

“This is not about taking guns, OK?” he said. “This is about doing the right thing and finding the right politicians who are willing to do the right thing more than they’re afraid of losing their jobs,” Arthur cried.

The crowd erupted in rowdy applause.

A month later, Arthur went to the dentist for the first time in years.

“I’m finally dealing with these dental issues. I’m going to be doing a lot of public speaking. I know I am,” he said. “Not that I care what anybody thinks of me, but I’ve been putting it off for years.”

By May, Arthur was regularly calling local news stations to talk about guns. Once, he stayed overnight in Portland after work to do an early morning interview.

“I am not going home tonight because I have a television interview tomorrow morning. I don’t even know what channel anymore,” he texted. “lol.”

“My kids are worried about me being consumed,” he texted later that month after a family gathering.

When Arthur did another interview in June, he’d gotten used to the glare of the lights and knew which camera to look into and when.

He was no longer broadly pushing for stricter laws; he’d landed on specific policy views and knew how to spell them out – background checks, a national gun registry and assault rifle bans.

“Background checks for all gun sales – all, no exclusions,” he said, hunched over, speaking directly to the interviewer. He wore a button-up checkered shirt and gray pants. His glasses balanced on the edge of his nose.

“We cannot have people with this kind of mental health problem being able to go to a gun swap at somebody’s house and buying a gun,” he said, turning briefly toward the camera.

The reporter nodded along.

“I’ll preach this till I can’t breathe,” Arthur said.

***

Arthur is keenly aware that the loss of a loved one to gun violence is both unusual and disturbingly common.

He’s been around it for years. He has a friend whose son was shot and killed in a random act of violence. Another friend’s dad was killed in a Walmart parking lot.

When his son died and news came out about how preventable the shootings were, it was more than Arthur could bear. All of the violence started to pile up and he saw a clear thread: guns.

He needed to talk about it with as many people as he could reach. He wanted affirmation that he was right, that guns were the problem and maybe it could be fixed. Mostly, he wanted to do something. He couldn’t stand feeling helpless.

He connected with Fred Guttenberg, a notable gun control advocate whose daughter was killed with 16 others at Parkland High School in Florida in 2018.

“At the beginning, it was just dad-to-dad talking about getting through the day,” Guttenberg said. “But it quickly became clear that he wanted his voice to be heard. He told me early on that he may be coming to this from a different perspective. He’s got a different background.”

Arthur knows he doesn’t have the education or resources that some of the more notable activists around the country do. And that worries him. He wants to be effective and he doesn’t want anything to get in the way of that.

“I think sometimes he downplays his incredible abilities. I don’t care if he voted or not, I guarantee you he’s a voter in every election going forward. He may not have been politically active before, he will be now,” Guttenberg said. “To me, he is the ultimate activist. He has a voice that everyone should hear.”

Guttenberg didn’t know Arthur before his son died. He has no idea who he was then. But that doesn’t matter now.

“I wish he could go back to a life he’s comfortable with, the life he had before, but he’s not going to,” he said.

He invited Arthur to attend a vigil for victims of gun violence in Washington, D.C., last December, just five weeks after the shooting.

It was on that same trip that he met Judi and Wayne Richardson, whose 25-year-old daughter Darien was killed in Portland in an unsolved shooting in 2010.

Judi said Arthur is one of the few new gun control activists in the state since they got involved 14 years ago.

“There aren’t many of us in Maine in this space. A lot of people who have had loved ones or children shot don’t really want to speak out on this issue because it’s difficult, and it’s particularly difficult in Maine because there’s a big gun culture here,” she said.

“I think he can reach a lot of people because of where he lives and the people he knows and interacts with.”

***

Arthur speaks with a hint of a Maine accent, stretching out his vowels and dropping his r’s. He came to Maine when he was 12, from East Trenton, New Jersey, to live in Gray with an aunt and uncle.

His mom and two younger brothers followed six months later. When he turned 14, he moved out of his aunt’s and uncle’s house and started working on farms in exchange for a place to sleep.

Then, a relative told him that if he didn’t move back in with his mom, he’d be put in a foster home.

“It was a lie. They were trying to manipulate me to get me to come home, but I got scared and that’s when I grabbed my backpack,” Arthur said.

He said he was being abused at home and didn’t feel safe going back.

He went to Exeter, New Hampshire, where he had some friends. He slept in the woods next to a stream and worked at a bakery. When it got cold, he started hitchhiking down the coast and eventually ended up in Tampa, Florida.

“The only thing I learned young was how to survive. I’ve survived a lot of crap,” Arthur said.

He made it back to Maine a few years later. He was 20 when his eldest son, Artie, was born. Six other kids followed.

When his kids were young, Arthur got into crack and things quickly spiraled out of control. He smoked as much as an ounce some days and occasionally sold to friends. When he was 26, he was arrested for drug trafficking and sentenced to five years in prison. But he got out after 16 months because the prison was overcrowded.

“I remember sitting there the day before I went to prison with my kids. They were too young to realize I was going away. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m not going to see them for a long time.'”

When he got out, he got clean and never looked back. That was almost 40 years ago.

“I wanted to make sure my kids never knew the life I had when I was a kid. They were the most important thing. I didn’t want to live like that,” he said.

Arthur now has 20 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He has primary custody of three of his teenage grandkids, Lexus, Emmalee and Jacob, and his ex-wife’s cousin, Tracy, also lives with him. So does his son’s ex-girlfriend, Christine, and her 2-year-old son, Leland.

“I can’t say I’ve had a bad life with this family of mine,” Arthur said.

He feels that way even now, even without Artie.

One spring evening, Arthur sifted through mounds of laundry stacked haphazardly around the kitchen. Leland, his grandson, was in his high chair eating while the teenage grandkids came in and out of the kitchen, grabbing snacks and cooing at their baby brother. The dog hunted for scraps on the floor.

“That’s too small for him,” Christine said. “That’s keepsake pile.”

Arthur nodded and tossed the onesie into a pile.

“Leland,” Arthur said, smiling at the baby. “Hi!”

Leland giggled and reached for him. “Bummm Pa!” he shouted.

“I think he just likes to say my name,” Arthur said.

Leland dissolved into hiccups of laughter. All of his grandkids call him “Bumpa.”

Before Artie, Arthur’s life was a marathon of shuttling kids to and from school, commuting down to Portland, where he works as a cook at the Holiday Inn by the Bay, helping his grown kids out with one thing or another, and squeezing in a pool game when he could.

He thought he’d be able to approach gun control advocacy with the same fervor and energy.

Only recently has he realized that might not be possible. As much as he sometimes wants it to be, gun control isn’t his whole life. It can’t be.

“At the end of the day, my life didn’t stop, even if I wanted it to. I still have all this to take care of,” Arthur said, gesturing at the bustling kitchen.

“I know I’m different. I haven’t been as involved with my kids as I always have been. I’m still having some mental issues. I don’t know what it is. I want to be around people but at the same time,” he said, pausing to take a deep breath. “You don’t want people to always think you’re (expletive) up, so I try not to share it all the time.”

Before his son died, Arthur was dating. He regularly went to the gym, cooked at home and took his cholesterol medication daily. In the last 10 months, he’s only exercised twice. He ended things with the woman he was seeing.

“My doctor told me I need to get out and get my heart rate up. I haven’t been taking my cholesterol medication. I just don’t care anymore. It seems like too much even just to take those pills,” he said.

Approaching the one-year anniversary of his son’s death, Arthur still has days where grief consumes him.

He’s regularly referred to crisis workers. His kids’ doctors, resilience center staff, they’ve all referred him. Sometimes he calls the numbers they give him.

“I wanted to go to town and play pool yesterday,” he texted in April. “But I didn’t leave the spot in the parking lot in Target. I know so many people I could call, but I don’t feel like anybody is the right person to talk to.”

***

As Arthur has begun to process the shootings by talking – about gun reform, about his grief, about how much he misses his son – Justin Karcher has done the opposite.

The 24-year-old was playing pool with Artie that night, too. He was shot seven times, hospitalized for nearly two months and had more than 10 surgeries.

After he was released, he bought 40 new guns. Including the same model of AR-10 that nearly killed him.

“Someone asked like, ‘Why would you buy that?’ But it’s not the gun’s fault,” Karcher said.

He says that often, “It’s not the gun’s fault.”

Karcher keeps most of his guns unloaded and locked in a safe. But there’s one loaded by the front door, a handgun. Just in case.

He thinks what happened to him was mostly a freak accident. But, he says, if anything is to blame, it’s the mental health system.

“I think it’s more about the mental health aspect than it is the gun’s problem,” he said.

At 19, Karcher watched as his dad was shot and killed in a Walmart parking lot in 2019. He views that as an accident, too, something nobody could have prevented.

He and Arthur debate gun control over games of pool sometimes, but Karcher says his mind won’t change on the issue.

“We go back and forth. He’ll be talking about the gun control thing, and I’ll say like, ‘It’s not really the gun’s fault.’ And then he’ll tell me how he views it in a way he thinks I’d take to better, but I still don’t. My mind’s not gonna change,” he said.

He isn’t bothered by Arthur’s activism. He’ll tune in and watch his TV appearances sometimes. But he doesn’t believe gun laws will change any time soon.

“They’ve been trying to do gun laws forever,” he said.

***

Schemengees has been closed since the shooting. But Arthur has been coming to the parking lot for months.

It’s become a ritual.

Sometimes he goes there to cry, other times to talk to his son. It was the last place he saw him alive.

Arthur left the bar about three minutes before the gunman walked in. Brenda Hathaway had left shortly before him.

She was eight months pregnant and running after her 2-year-old daughter that night while her husband, Maxx, played pool at the table next to Arthur’s. The toddler kept getting in the way of his pool game. She apologized. It was the first time they met.

“I remember Arthur kept telling me it was fine. He said he was used to it because he had like 20 grandchildren,” she said.

Maxx also died that day.

Weeks later, Arthur realized Maxx’s pool stick had been returned to him by mistake and he drove over to Hathaway’s house to bring it back to her.

The two have been close ever since.

Artie’s absence is always painful, Arthur said, but finding connections with other families is like a very weak antidote to an illness with no cure. The best thing he’s found.

Even though Hathaway and Arthur seldom talk about Schemengees or the shootings or Maxx and Artie, knowing they lived through the same nightmare is comforting somehow.

They got the same call at the same time, they rushed to the same hospital, they received the same life-altering news.

“We shared all the tragic parts of this, but really both of us went there and got to spend that last hour or so with the people we loved,” Arthur said. “I have a connection with her much more than anybody else in this shooting.”

In March, the Maine Resiliency Center, which was set up in Lewiston to provide support after the shootings, invited the victims’ families to walk through the bar.

Arthur arrived with Artie’s daughter, Brianna, and several of Artie’s siblings.

“Actually going in there was weird. Nothing’s there anymore. The rugs are gone, everything’s gone,” Arthur said afterward.

As the group milled around, Arthur would see someone across the room collapse in tears, then moments later it would happen to him.

“It would come, and then people would recompose themselves and then conversations would strike up. The composure was in and out,” he said.

Brianna was stoic and quiet. She drew pictures, sometimes of her dad, sometimes random doodles.

Someone pointed out bullet holes in a light fixture, but Arthur didn’t take a closer look.

Karcher was there. He showed the family exactly where Artie was when he died: near the front door.

Arthur spins about what those last moments were like. No matter how many interviews he does or how much he learns about gun legislation, he always goes back there.

Karcher can fill in some of the blanks, but still, Arthur wonders what his son was thinking, if he was in pain, if he realized he’d been shot.

“I read that sometimes people don’t even know they got shot, because it happens so quickly. Kinda like someone giving you a needle and you don’t realize it because it’s so fast and sharp and small and whatever,” he said.

After the walkthrough, Arthur went to McDonald’s. He ordered a Coke and an apple pie. It was past 9 p.m. and a group of 20-somethings sat in a corner booth laughing and talking loudly. They’d periodically shout over one another or dissolve into laughter.

Arthur sat a few booths over, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Reflecting on the experience, he couldn’t say yet if he was glad he’d gone.

“It helps me to know he didn’t have a lot of time to lay there and suffer,” Arthur said, ripping his napkin into little pieces. “The first thought in my mind always is that he was alone. And I don’t think anybody should ever die alone. Ever.”

His voice twisted and he paused to take a few deep breaths.

“I mean, I hope somebody was with him, but I don’t know. Some people said they seen my son, some people said that tonight. I don’t know. I’ll never know.”

***

Arthur doesn’t see Kristy and her kids as often as he used to. He’s been busy and they have been, too. They both say it’s hard to get ahold of one another.

In the months immediately following Artie’s death, they were constantly in touch. Now, they talk about once a month.

After the walk-through at Schemengees, Arthur drove Brianna home. In the car, she talked to him about funny videos her dad used to show her on his phone. He nodded.

“Oh yeah, I remember that, sweetheart,” he said.

But he didn’t say much else.

“She wanted me to tell her stories, but I couldn’t get myself to do that for her. It’s very hard for me to talk about stories with him,” Arthur said later that night. “It will very quickly get to the point where I can’t speak. I’ll have to swallow and regroup.”

When he has a moment alone, he’s forced to sit with the reality of what happened.

His son is dead for no good reason.

His son was violently murdered.

His son will never come back.

There are two things that bring Arthur comfort. One is those other cars in the Schemengees parking lot. Knowing that he is not alone.

“Now and then, I think about how we’d never be friends if it hadn’t happened,” Hathaway said. “It’s weird to think about that – that we wouldn’t be friends if his son and my husband hadn’t died. I mean, sure, that’s unreal, but all of this is unreal.”

The other thing that Arthur comes back to again and again is the number of years in his son’s life: 42. When he thinks of it that way, there were 42 years in my son’s life – a simple fact – sometimes, he can breathe.

“I have to be grateful for those 42 years, you know. Fred got 14 with his daughter. How many kids die of cancer before they’re 10? I try to put things in perspective. It doesn’t really ease the pain, but it’s something,” Arthur said.

But even those thoughts, the ones that have taken him months to reach, aren’t enough to keep him still for long. He has to keep moving. He has something to fight for.

In mid-August, Arthur started planning his next trip to Washington. He wants to go every year for the vigil, to be with other families and to meet with lawmakers.

“I can’t see myself writing hopeless notes to politicians every year,” he said. “I’m different from a lot of these people and I think, with the right messaging, maybe something can finally happen.”

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