A gunman killed at least 18 people and wounded another 13 in Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday night, targeting a restaurant and a bowling alley in the community of less than 40,000, the state’s Gov. Janet Mills said on Thursday.

Even if that death toll does not rise, the attack on Lewiston would be the deadliest this year and one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, according to data maintained by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. The archive defines a mass shooting as an incident where at least four people are shot.

By the Gun Violence Archives qualifications — there is no standard definition of a mass shooting used widely by U.S. law enforcement agencies — the country is on pace for roughly 700 mass shootings in 2023, which would be the most ever recorded. There were 647 in 2022 and 690 in 2021, according to the archive.

“For countless Americans who have survived gun violence and been traumatized by it, a shooting such as this reopens deep and painful wounds,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Far too many Americans have now had a family member killed or injured as a result of gun violence. That is not normal, and we cannot accept it.”

But mass gun violence has only worsened over time, as dozens are killed every month and legislation seeking to stem the bloodshed has continuously stalled at the federal level. So far in October alone, including Lewiston, 52 people have been killed and 172 wounded across 43 mass shootings in 22 states and Washington, D.C. 

If the reported death toll stays at 18, the Lewiston mass shootings would be the tenth deadliest in the U.S. since at least 1982, according to the data-gathering company Statista, the Gun Violence Archive and a database maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

The alleged gunman is still at large, police said on Thursday. A massive manhunt is underway throughout southern Maine.

“This is a dark time for America. We have a lot of problems. We are really, really hopeful and prayerful,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Thursday morning as he started his first full day as his chamber’s leader. “Prayer is appropriate in a time like this, that the evil can end and that this senseless violence can stop.”

But Republicans seem to have little interest in pursuing the gun control policies that Democrats and advocates have been pushing for decades, with increasing urgency in recent years as gun violence has risen rapidly.

Already this year, 35,275 Americans have been killed by guns, including nearly 20,000 by suicide, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The ages of the Lewiston victims is not yet publicly known, but almost 800 children from ages zero to 11 have been killed or wounded by guns this year prior to that shooting. Nearly 4,500 teenagers, ages 12 to 17, have been killed or injured in 2023.

“I never thought I’d grow up and get a bullet in my leg,” a 10-year-old named Zoey, who was at the Lewiston bowling alley for a practice with her youth league and was grazed by a bullet, told ABC News. 

Biden on Thursday implored Republican lawmakers in the House and the Senate to tackle gun control legislation, but the odds of progress on that front on the federal level is unlikely.

“Work with us to pass a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to enact universal background checks, to require safe storage of guns, and end immunity from liability for gun manufacturers,” Biden said in his statement. “This is the very least we owe every American who will now bear the scars — physical and mental — of this latest attack.”

Last year, Congress passed and Biden signed into law a bipartisan bill that toughened background checks for gun buyers ages 18 to 21, restricted access to firearms for some domestic violence offenders and created a funding mechanism for so-called red flag laws that states can implement to allow authorities to take guns from people judged to be dangerous. Additional funding went to mental health programs for schools.

It was the first major piece of gun control legislation to take effect since the 1990s.

Republicans in Congress are almost universally opposed to most gun control measures despite recent polls showing that six-in-10 Americans support stricter gun control laws, believe guns are too easy to acquire and that it’s more important to rein in gun violence than to protect gun rights.

Johnson, the House’s freshly elected speaker, is a staunch opponent of gun control efforts.

"They have a zeal, really, a quest, a goal, to disarm the populace," Johnson said on Newsmax last year of efforts by Biden and Democrats to pass gun control legislation. "There's really no other way to say that. It's a political ideology that drives them, and they have no regard for the Constitution at all, and [Biden] proves that over and over."

As mass shootings of this caliber often do, the Lewiston shootings have rippled through American culture beyond the political realm. Thousands of miles away from Maine on Wednesday night, the head coach of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, Mike Brown, pleaded for solutions as he discussed the deaths at a press conference after a game in Salt Lake City.

“I don’t know everything that’s going on. I’m not that smart, but I know that we as a country have got to do something,” Brown said. “Until we decide to do something about it, the powers that be, this is going to keep happening and our kids aren’t going to be able to enjoy what the United States is about because we don’t know how to fix a problem that’s right in front of us.”