A national gun safety advocacy group has upgraded its rating of Maine laws following a historic legislative session in which lawmakers passed expanded background checks and a 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases in the wake of the Lewiston mass shooting.

Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence released its annual gun law scorecard for states around the country on Tuesday. The center gave Maine a C+, which is an improvement from last year’s D- rating and made Maine the most improved state.

“Following the tragic mass shooting at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston, Maine enacted important improvements to its gun laws,” the scorecard said. “However, there are still basic gun safety measures which are missing, putting Mainers at grave risk.”

Following the mass shooting that left 18 people dead and 13 others injured last year, lawmakers expanded background check requirements to include private, advertised sales and implemented a new 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases.

They also updated the state’s yellow flag law to make it easier for police to take someone into protective custody in a step toward restricting their access to weapons, and set aside millions of dollars for mental health and violence prevention programs.

The budget passed by lawmakers and signed by Gov. Janet Mills in April included funding for establishing an Office of Violence Prevention at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, an expansion of crisis receiving centers to help people experiencing mental health or substance use crisis and additional money for the mental health assessments that are part of the yellow flag law, among other things.

Still, the state still lacks fully universal background checks for gun purchases and a red flag law that would give family members, in addition to law enforcement, a path toward restricting access to weapons for a person in crisis without a mental health evaluation.

“Additionally, Maine passed a reckless permit-less carry law in 2015 that allows residents to carry loaded, concealed handguns in public without a permit or background check,” the scorecard said.

Gun safety was a major topic of this year’s Legislation as lawmakers were met with public demands for action in the wake of the Lewiston shooting. While it remains to be seen what initiatives will be taken up in the coming year, the Maine Gun Safety Coalition is trying to get a citizen’s initiative for a red flag law before voters, and said last month that it was close to getting the necessary number of signatures needed.

This story will be updated.

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PORTLAND, Maine — Ross Adam is two people at once.

By day, as a gray-and-blue-clad mailman, he has trudged the same Deering neighborhood route on foot for nearly a decade. He stuffs letters through mail slots, scans bar codes, takes care with the occasional aggressive dog and deals with the weekly flood of Saturday fliers that make his satchel extra heavy.

By night, dressed in his trademark tartan trousers, Adam packs pubs and venues all over southern Maine with his brand of high-energy, multi-instrumental folk music. Adoring fans and strangers alike hoist their glasses and sing at full volume, eager to forget their troubles and revel in the tattooed, Scotland native’s relentless charm.

But late night music gigs and early post office mornings aren’t a friendly fit, and maintaining the balance is nearly impossible.

Increasingly, like many artists with day jobs and successful side hustles, Adam feels like he must make the difficult choice between one or the other.

Adam is a responsible father of two children with college expenses. He’s got a mortgage, a wife and a future retirement fund he’s nearly vested in.

At the same time, he recently released a popular new album and secured a music manager who is helping him get better-paying gigs. He’s about to embark on his first international mini-tour of Ireland, using vacation time.

He has the nagging feeling that at age 36, it’s now or never for becoming a full-time musician.

“You only get one life,” Adam said. “It’s so sacred. You’ve got to be able to look back and be happy with what you did with it.”

Growing up in the small Scottish town of Burntisland, Adam didn’t come from a musical family. He discovered music as an eight-year-old while sheltering from a rainstorm on a family camping trip inside a music store.

There, he picked out the melody to “The Skye Boat Song,” a traditional lullaby his mother sang to him, on a piano. His astonished parents soon bought him a small keyboard.

At 11, he and a friend wandered into a free bagpipe lesson. Adam stuck with it, coming back every Wednesday night, learning the pipes and life lessons from older men he recalls as being “big, tough guys.”

The band was called the Burntisland and District Pipe Band, and Adam was soon traveling, marching and competing with it, all around Scotland and England.

“When I joined that pipe band, it changed who I was,” he said. “It was my whole life. It gave me discipline.”

High school rock bands followed but, at the same time, Adam was fascinated by folk musicians who could get a crowd of distracted pub-goers all singing together. He was especially impressed by Alex Killin of the Kingdom Folk Band.

“He could get everyone singing — old people, young people, even the bartender,” Adam said. “I always thought it was a cool superpower.”

Adam was soon emulating his hero, playing solo gigs and doing whatever it took to get a crowd singing. But, as a young adult, grownup realities also started to take over. He earned a social work degree, worked with at-risk youth, married an American woman, moved to South Portland and started a family.

Crossing the ocean, he left his professional musical ambitions behind. Instead of gigging, Adam got a good job at the post office with decent pay, union benefits and a retirement plan.

But a subsequent divorce and what turned into a new marriage changed all that.

Shortly before the pandemic, he went on a blind date that morphed into a bonfire party with friends. There, Adam pulled out his guitar and entertained the gathering the way he would have, in a pub back home.

“I knew I was going to marry him after about the first 10 minutes,” his blind date and now spouse, Shannon Adam, said.

Enamoured and encouraging, she urged Ross Adam to take his talents seriously and booked him for a St. Patrick’s Day show at a pub. The gig was a success, and his music career took off.

At a recent show at RiRa in Portland, it was standing room only with all eyes and ears on Adam as he commanded the room. Using special, sound-looping pedals, he played guitar, fiddle and banjo at the same time while stomping another pedal creating a drum sound — which made the crowd clap along to the beat.

At one point, wearing a wireless headset microphone, Adam left the stage and asked the rowdy crowd to be quiet while he sang them a tender song about whiskey. Almost like magic, the hushed room stayed silent as he walked among the audience like a revival preacher, singing, patting children on the head and laying his hands on shoulders.

Then, as Adam finished the a capella song, he raised his pint and released the audience with a toast. The crowd burst into whoops and applause while he remounted the stage and got the party going again with traditional Scottish and Irish songs, as well as the hip-hop classic “No Diggity.”

A few days later, on a gray, snowy morning, Adam pulled his postal van up to the sidewalk on Stevens Avenue, and he stepped out of the sliding side door. There was no applause as he started his route, mail satchel slung off one shoulder, his steaming breath hanging in the air.

Adam said he genuinely likes his post office job and cherishes the connections he’s forged.

Down one side street, he found Steve Robnett, standing in his driveway. After handing Robnett his mail, the two chatted for a while. Robnett said he knew all about his mailman’s other life.

“We’ve actually had him play two house concerts here,” he said. “We love Ross.”

Further on, at the Rwanda Bean coffee shop, manager Alexa Kelly said Adam has always been more than just a mailman and helped her as she struggled through a messy divorce.

“He was one of my biggest rocks,” Kelly said, “I didn’t have anyone else in my life who knew what I was going through.”

To this, Adam mostly shrugs.

“You leave a trail wherever you go,” he said, “so I try to be good to people.”

But, as his music career blossoms and takes up more time, Adam has a decision to make. A recent bout of pneumonia exacerbated by exhaustion made it even more clear: one job or the other has to give.

Right now, he’s leaning toward full-time music. There isn’t anything which makes him feel more alive or in the moment.

“There’s nothing like it, even in a small pub. It feels incredible when people sing along. It’s almost like they’re part of the band — it’s magic,” Adam said. “I feel like I was made for this.”

A national gun control advocacy group upgraded Maine in its annual scorecard Tuesday after crediting lawmakers with passing various measures following the October 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston.

The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Maine a C+ in the 2024 version of its Annual Gun Law Scorecard that ranks every state and also looks at gun death rates. That came after Giffords, the nonprofit led by former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Arizona, who survived getting shot in the head during a 2011 assassination attempt, gave Maine an F in 2022 and a D- last year, reflecting what had been lax gun laws in a rural state with a strong hunting culture.

But things changed dramatically after a 40-year-old Army reservist from Bowdoin used a semi-automatic rifle to kill 18 people and injure 13 others at a Lewiston bowling alley and bar on Oct. 25, 2023, the state’s deadliest-ever shooting and the country’s worst that year. The Democratic-controlled Legislature responded by expanding background checks, investing in violence prevention and mental health initiatives and requiring 72-hour waiting periods.

Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat who opposed past gun control efforts, vetoed a bump stock ban and let the bill requiring 72-hour waiting periods for gun purchases become law without her signature. The Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and Gun Owners of Maine filed a lawsuit in November that seeks to strike down the waiting period law.

Giffords cited the waiting period law, expanded background checks and a $1 million investment in community violence prevention programs in upgrading Maine to a C+ this year. Lindsay Nichols, the organization’s policy director, said Maine “stood out” nationally for passing various laws and for jumping up more than one grade.

“Maine’s jump is significant,” Nichols said.

The Giffords scorecard said Maine ranks 21st nationally for its “gun law strength” and 27th for having a gun death rate of 14.1 fatalities per 100,000 people. It called on legislators to ban bump stocks, ban ghost guns, repeal Maine’s permitless carry law and pass “gun industry accountability legislation” that could allow lawsuits against firearm manufacturers.

Opponents of gun control said they were not surprised with the higher grade. Gun Owners of Maine Vice President Joshua Raines said that since Giffords ranks states highly if they “restrict law-abiding citizens from exercising their Second Amendment rights, we look forward to them needing to downgrade our ranking as soon as possible.”

While Democrats saw their State House majorities narrow after Republicans picked up several seats last month, more gun control proposals could come before Maine voters in the next year. After the Legislature did not take up a late effort in the spring to pass a “red flag” law, advocates launched a campaign to put a red flag or “extreme risk protection order” measure before Maine voters via a referendum.

Red flag laws, which 21 states have adopted, allow both family members and police to ask judges to confiscate weapons from people deemed dangerous, while the existing “yellow flag” law does not allow family members to directly petition a court.

Mills worked with gun-rights advocates to craft the 2019 yellow flag law and has not thrown her support behind a red flag law. A commission she formed to review the Lewiston mass shooting found the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office had probable cause to use Maine’s yellow flag on Robert Card II about a month before the shooting after family and peers repeatedly shared concerns about his mental state, threats to “shoot up” places and access to guns.

Police instead conducted welfare checks at Card’s Bowdoin residence in September 2023 and left when he did not answer the door.

Mills proposed and signed into law earlier this year tweaks to the yellow flag law meant to make it easier for police to take a person into protective custody before the person receives a mental health evaluation and a court hearing. Mills also signed off on extending background checks to advertised gun sales and investing in mental health initiatives added to the state budget.

Nacole Palmer, executive director of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, said supporters need to collect about 7,500 more signatures to reach their goal of 75,000 signatures before submitting the petition to the secretary of state. It could appear on the ballot either in November 2025 or November 2026, Palmer said Tuesday.

“This rating reflects the progress we have made so far in Maine by coming together to pass common-sense gun safety laws to save lives,” Palmer said. “But it also demonstrates how much work we have left to do.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect number of fatalities per 100,00 people in Maine.