The New Yorker:

“When I saw how my American peers reacted and how I reacted, the contrast just blew my mind,” Alan Wang, a senior at Bates College, said.

By Diego Lasarte 

Alan Wang, a twenty-one-year-old from the Henan Province of central China, had never seen a gun before he moved to the United States—not even one attached to a police officer. When he was leaving home to attend Bates College, a liberal-arts school in Lewiston, Maine, his grandmother warned him not to go out on weekends; she had been reading about the increase in mass shootings in the U.S. and was concerned that he would be shot. He told her that the U.S. was safe, and that Chinese state media was exaggerating the gun-violence problem to make America look bad.

Two days ago, the worst mass shooting in Maine’s history—and the deadliest in the United States this year—occurred in Lewiston, when a gunman opened fire at a local bowling alley, and then a bar, killing eighteen people and injuring thirteen more. The shootings were just a couple of miles away from the Bates campus, and the school went into lockdown, along with the rest of Androscoggin County. The suspect, Robert Card, has not yet been caught, and a manhunt—involving local and state police, federal agents, and the Coast Guard—is under way. As of Friday afternoon, county residents and Bates students are still sheltering in place.

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