He was at the end of the driveway, thrashing around, starting to cross the road, then pivoting awkwardly back in the direction of the house. I watched him for a minute, as cars slowed and people stared, and then did what most people would do in the central Maine village where I live. I went inside to get a gun.

The raccoon had distemper or some other disease. He couldn’t raise himself up on his feet, and he appeared to be blind. I shot him with a .22-caliber handgun, then put him in a bag and disposed of him at the far side of the back field. It had to be done, and the task fell to me because the sick animal was on my property.

If he had showed up in one of my neighbors’ driveways, they most likely would have done the same thing.

This was a couple of weeks ago, and the incident has stayed with me since, not just because it was unpleasant – I love wildlife and nature – but because I’ve spent months thinking a lot about guns. I write mystery novels and my latest, “Straw Man,” published last month, involves the gun culture in Maine – and the very different ways guns are used in places to our south.

I say this as the nation reels from the horror of Orlando and is confronted yet again by the thorny question of gun rights. Once again, we ask, who needs a gun? And for what? I’ve been asking myself that question for months.

Researching “Straw Man,” I shopped online in Uncle Henry’s, that iconic Maine publication, and talked to gun sellers who ranged from full-time dealers to a guy who wanted to trade a 12-gauge shotgun for a four-wheeler. Everyone I spoke with or emailed was polite and helpful, whether they were offering a Montgomery Ward .22 rifle, a Glock .40 or an assault rifle.

There is an assumption among Maine gun sellers that you share their views on what a gun is for – hunting, target shooting, home protection or just plain collecting. Most sellers eventually ask for an ID, and I didn’t run into anyone who seemed to be the type to sell to someone they found sketchy – or from that other category of suspicious character: “from away.”

It’s a self-policing sort of community, for the most part, ruled by common sense and an underlying belief in the Second Amendment. But the jurisdiction of that policing only extends so far.

I say this because the other part of my research involved riding with plainclothes police in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, teams that patrol the streets in an effort to get guns out of the hands of young people. It’s an endless task, punctuated mostly by small victories: stopping known gang members and finding firearms in the car or seeing a kid on the sidewalk with a bulge in his pants and taking that handgun away before it can be used.

It’s very different from when I was growing up in a city not far from Dorchester, where the most heated disagreements were resolved behind the high school. The combatants were typically surrounded by a ring of spectators who were treated to a clumsy version of mixed martial arts. Often the two combatants would shake bloody hands at the conclusion of the match. Sometimes, like in a bad movie, they came away friends.

Disagreements among gang members in Dorchester are more likely to end with somebody dead.

Guns in that world – from cheap revolvers to machine pistols – are displayed with bravado, flashed in YouTube rap videos. When they aren’t showing up as props, the guns are used to settle scores, and the severity of the punishment is inversely proportionate to the seriousness of the offense. An insult can mean a bullet to the head. Ditto for disrespecting somebody’s girlfriend or, even worse, ratting somebody out. Each shooting demands reprisal, which calls for somebody to shoot back. And in a place where drive-by shootings are known by cops as “spray and prays,” the victims are likely to be people whose only offense was being in the general vicinity of the shooter’s target.

This isn’t Orlando, a horrific mass killing of innocents. But these still are tragedies, especially when both the perps and victims are just kids.

We hear of only the saddest of these cases in the news. A child shot on the way home from church choir practice. A high school sports star killed by a stray bullet. We don’t see the “routine” murders, where young people are killed or wounded on Boston streets, deaths that barely merit mention in the bigger media. I kept track of them on the website universalhub.com, where Boston crime is reported with chilling matter-of-factness:

“Another person shot in Codman Square, this time fatally … Woman shot in arm near Codman Square … Woman leaving church grazed by bullet … gunfire at East Cottage and Leyland streets … Two shot in Ashmont …”

There are some big victories for the police who have taken on the task of breaking this cycle, the latest just two weeks ago. Sometimes some good intel leads to a bust, or an undercover operation yields a roundup of major gang members. Either way, that bust is marked by press releases that include photos of piles of cash, drugs – and guns.

And some of those guns are likely to have come from Maine, New Hampshire or Vermont, all classified by the federal Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms as “source states” that sell to “market states” in the rest of New England.

The numbers are a little fuzzy, but the cases are not.

A Maine gun that got some press was the 9 mm handgun used by Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to kill Sean Collier, an MIT police officer. That gun was originally bought at a Maine gun shop, and years later it surfaced in Boston. In another case, a Boston gang member was convicted in 2009 of using straw buyers to buy 40 guns in Maine. The buyers were paid in crack cocaine. The guns were sold on the streets in Boston.

Last year a member of the Red Side Guerilla Brims, a New Haven, Connecticut, gang, was sent to Maine to trade cocaine and heroin for 20 firearms. Last fall a man from Bangor was convicted of using straw buyers to pick up more than 20 guns from private sellers and pawn shops in Maine. The guns were sent to New Haven for distribution.

The fact is, Maine isn’t Mayberry. The opioid epidemic that’s ravaged the state has been matched by what seems like daily drug busts in small towns across the state. Bag a drug dealer and you’re likely to find one of the tools of the trade: a loaded handgun. But gun violence here is nothing like gun violence in places like Dorchester. A fatal shooting on the streets of Portland or Bangor or Lewiston still makes the front page.

Here in Maine, we’re a world away from the never-ending gang feuds around the Dorchester projects. So how does their problem become our problem? If a gun makes its way south into the hands of criminals, how is that our fault? If a Maine car dealer sold a car used years later at a Boston bank robbery, do we lock down the car dealers? If you sell your old beater off your front lawn, are you culpable if the new owner drives drunk?

Of course not. But a car isn’t a gun. You can’t carry a loaded Subaru in your waistband.

I say all this knowing full well that guns are the tools of my trade, too. Many of the characters – good and bad – in my dozen or so crime novels carry guns and sometimes use them. In “Straw Man,” death threats against my protagonist, reporter Jack McMorrow, and his family have him carrying a loaded handgun. McMorrow is backed up by a Marine Corps veteran named Clair who can be depended upon for sound judgment and firepower. When the New York Times assessed the book, the review noted that in “Straw Man,” Clair offers McMorrow sage advice – and a Glock with an extra clip.

But that said, as I did my research I couldn’t help but be struck by – and even haunted by – the contrast in gun cultures in these two nearly adjoining states. In rural Maine, a gun is like a chainsaw or a riding mower. I know for a fact that in my small central Maine village, most of my very law-abiding neighbors – from middle-aged hunters to elderly women – keep at least one gun in the house, and many keep several. The other neighbors? I’m not sure. It hasn’t come up in conversation. (As I write this on a Sunday morning, I hear shots nearby. Target shooting to start the day.)

So should private gun sales in Maine be better regulated? Should all sellers be legally required to demand ID and report that information to the state? If I trade a shotgun to my neighbor for an old snowmobile, do I take down my neighbor’s information and mail it in to somebody in Washington?

The idea rankles many of us Mainers, I know, being people who are independent by nature and able to run our lives just fine without Augusta, thank you very much. And if we thought a potential gun buyer intended to use that gun to commit a crime, we’d refuse to sell that weapon, get the license plate number and call the cops – law or no law.

But here’s the rub, the part that I can’t shake. In Dorchester riding with the gang unit, we passed occasional makeshift memorials, flowers and candles and stuffed animals set out on sidewalks and tenement stoops. Each marked a spot where someone very young had been shot very dead. Life over. No second chance.

For some reason I thought of this as the raccoon was writhing at the side of the road. A few kind people stopped to ask if I was going to call the animal rescue. I said no because the “rescue” would end the same way, and waiting for someone’s arrival would just prolong the animal’s suffering.

So the deed was done, the gun put away until next time. But I couldn’t help but wonder if those people who were distressed by the raccoon’s plight would be just as moved by the tragedy of teenagers shot and killed on the street an hour from the Maine border. And if so, would they feel at all responsible? Would they feel a need to change our own gun culture? If not, why not? If so, where do we begin?