Lewiston (United States) (AFP) - Police in Maine struggled for a second day Friday to catch a man who gunned down 18 people with a semi-automatic rifle in a bowling alley and a bar in a town where locals were enjoying an evening out.

In Lewiston, a hard-scrabble city in the mostly rural north-eastern state, there was an atmosphere of dread and bewilderment as residents waited indoors, while authorities erected roadblocks and ordered schools and businesses to stay closed.

Robert Card, 40, is accused of being the man seen on security cameras walking into a Lewiston bowling alley on Wednesday evening and launching the country’s deadliest mass shooting of the year so far. In addition to the 18 murdered at the bowling venue and later in a bar, the US Army reservist is accused of wounding 13.

There was a brief flurry of excitement late Thursday when dozens of heavily armed officers, backed by armored vehicles and a helicopter, surrounded the Card family home in Bowdoin, near Lewiston.

State police warned “please come outside” and “we don’t want anyone to get hurt” over a loudspeaker.

However, Card was not inside and police left empty handed to continue the hunt.

On Friday, investigators were combing the riverbank and stretch of water where Card’s car was found at a boat launch site, Mike Sauschuck, commissioner for Maine’s department of public safety, told reporters.

They were also searching a tree line by the bowling alley, he said.

But there was no indication that the police were any closer to finding the man that Maine Governor Janet Mills said remained armed and dangerous.

“Uneasy,” Lewiston resident Jeremy Hiltz told AFP when asked how he felt. “It’s a small community. When something like this happens, everybody knows somebody” affected.

One longtime neighbor in Bowdoin, Dave Letarte, said news of the shooting “floored me.”

- Republicans oppose new laws -

Card is an army reservist, but had not been deployed in any combat zone. US media reported that he had recently been sent for psychiatric treatment after he said he was hearing voices.

This latest shooting is one of the deadliest in the United States since 2017, when a gunman opened fire on a crowded music festival in Las Vegas, killing 60 people.

The country has recorded at least 565 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nongovernmental organization that defines a mass shooting as four or more people wounded or killed.

President Joe Biden called Maine’s governor to offer federal support, and ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff at the White House and all government buildings.

Biden added that the gun violence that plagues the United States “is not normal, and we cannot accept it,” urging lawmakers to pass a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

A Maine Democrat who holds a seat in the US House of Representatives, Jared Golden, said he regretted his previous opposition to new laws.

“I have opposed efforts to ban deadly weapons of war, like the assault rifle used to carry out this crime,” Golden said Thursday.

“The time has now come for me to take responsibility for this failure.”

But in a reminder that Congress will not be considering stronger gun ownership laws anytime soon, the newly installed Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, told Fox News that the reason for so many mass shootings in the United States “is the human heart, not guns.”