by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
Another subject conspicuously absent from Justice Scalia’s discussion is the danger that bullets fired from handguns present to one’s innocent neighbors. According to a 2012 article in Guns & Ammo magazine, this risk of “overpenetration” is one that “has always been a concern when discussing the use of firearms in a dwelling.” The article warns that the results of “exhaustive studies about what pistol and shotgun projectiles do when fired indoors” are “very interesting (and not in a good way).” Contrary to the uninformed belief of many gun enthusiasts that overpenetration is not an issue with handguns, “Such is not the case. Drywall sheets and hollow-core doors (which are what you’ll find in the majority of homes and apartments in this country) offer almost no resistance to bullets. Unless brick or cinderblock was used somewhere in your construction, any pistol cartridge powerful enough to be thought of as suitable for self-defense is likely to fly completely through every wall in your abode.”34
The point here is neither to deny the reality of burglary nor to diminish its trauma. The point is rather to ask: what is the better defense against burglary, to bring a gun into the home or to better secure one’s residence? This is the balance that the gun industry and its advocates never consider.
One of the more vociferous advocates of the right to carry handguns anytime, anywhere was Meleanie Hain. The mother of three children, Hain lived in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.35 If the seat of Lebanon County sounds familiar to the reader, it should. Lebanon is the town in which—on the morning the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Heller striking down the District of Columbia handgun law—Raymond Zegowitz shot to death his girlfriend Khrystina Bixa, then committed suicide.36
Meleanie Hain achieved a certain prominence as the “pistol-packin’ soccer mama” and hero of the gun rights movement. Hain’s firearms-rights flame flared up on September 11, 2008, when she wore a loaded Glock 26 semiautomatic pistol on her hip, openly displaying it at her five-year-old daughter’s soccer game. Quite naturally, other parents were troubled. Controversy ensued. “What’s the difference between a bulldog and a soccer mom?” a local newspaper writer scribbled. “In the case of Meleanie Hain, it’s a loaded sidearm.”37
Glock calls Hain’s gun of choice for four- to five-year-olds’ soccer games its “Baby” Glock, a “triumphant advance . . . specially developed for concealed carry. . . previously a domain of 5-round snub nose revolvers.” The Austrian semiautomatic pistol maker boasts of the gun’s “magazine capacity of 10 rounds as standard and [its] highly accurate firing characteristics.”38
Settled in 1723 by German farmers, Lebanon County is described by its government website as a place where “residential, commercial and industrial development” is going on amid “its pastoral landscape, attractive farms and outstanding dairy and pork products, especially Lebanon Bologna.”39 But the pastoral landscape of Lebanon’s rolling Pennsylvania Dutch country was not reassuring to Hain. A vegetarian and self-described “pseudo devotee” of the Hare Krishna sect,40 she professed to have been haunted by fears for the safety of herself and her children. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hain saw danger “lurking around every corner.”41
In most accounts, Hain described the source of her vague but ubiquitous fear as a near-fatal automobile accident, which the Inquirer reported “destroyed her sense of security and convinced her that the worst can happen.”42 According to a newspaper brief, in April 2006 a van driven by Hain collided with a pickup truck. Hain, her two-year-old child, the driver of the truck, and his passenger were all taken to the hospital. Four days after the accident, Hain was described as in “fair” condition.43 In another report by the Patriot News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, however, Hain is reported to have told a judge that she carried a gun “because her husband works in law enforcement.”44
Whatever the reason, Hain decided that a gun was the answer to her fears. “I thought, ‘What more can I do to ensure the safety of myself and my children,?” she told the Inquirer. “It’s not a matter of being paranoid. People have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers in their homes. They’re not paranoid; they’re prepared.”45
“Being prepared” for Hain first meant getting a permit to carry her gun concealed on her person. But at some point Hain decided to go beyond discreetly carrying her gun. She started packing it on her hip, in plain view, everywhere she went. “I don’t really need anything extra in the way of the gun if I’m going to have to pull it out and I’m holding a baby and trying to shuttle two or three other kids,” she said in a 2008 newspaper interview.46
Although Hain claimed she had worn the holstered gun openly without incident before, parents at Lebanon’s Optimist Park on that September 11 noticed her wearing the gun and complained to Charlie Jones, a coach who was also the county’s public defender.47 “More than one parent was upset,” Jones told the local newspaper.48 In another interview, he said that he told Hain, “Kids are more in danger of falling off a piece of playground equipment or getting hit by a car in the parking lot than anybody coming and doing anything where you need a gun to defend yourself.”49
The day after the incident, Hain got an e-mail from Nigel Foundling, director of the Lebanon soccer program. Foundling wrote that carrying guns to the games was against the soccer program’s policy. “A responsible adult would realize that such behavior has no place at a soccer game,” Foundling wrote. He told Hain that if she persisted in packing heat, she would be banned from the games, and that he would tell police about the incident. Within a few days, Hain got a letter from county sheriff Mike DeLeo, who had been contacted by another child’s parent. DeLeo revoked Hain’s concealed-carry permit, based on his assessment that her actions showed a lack of judgment.50 The revocation of Hain’s permit had the odd result that if Hain wished to continue to go about armed, she could do it only with her gun in plain sight, just as she had been doing. Such “open carry” is legal in most of Pennsylvania.
Hain was not inclined to back down. Because the soccer games were played on public property, she asserted, the league did not have the power to curtail her right to bear arms. She also appealed Sheriff DeLeo’s suspension of her concealed-carry permit. The battle lines were drawn. Within a month, Hain won her license back. In a courtroom packed with Hain’s supporters, Judge Robert J. Eby ordered her license returned but questioned her common sense. “What is the purpose [at] an event where 5-year-olds are playing soccer?” he asked. “To make other people afraid of you? Fear doesn’t belong at a kids’ soccer game. For protection? I absolutely hope we don’t feel we need to be protected at a 5-year-old soccer game. . . . What if everyone came packing, so you’d have a visibly armed force on both sides?”51
“There’s no question we all have rights under the Second Amendment,” Judge Eby observed. “But with these rights come responsibilities. There are limitations on what rights you have, and there has to be a balancing . . . a balance between the rule of law and common sense.”52 The judge’s lecture to Hain went on. “Society is replacing right versus wrong with legal versus illegal,” he said. “They are not the same thing. They never were and it is my hope they never will be. There are times when someone’s conduct may be perfectly legal, but it is still wrong.”53
Eby’s cautionary advice was like water off a duck’s back. Hain promptly and publicly dismissed the judge’s views as “only his opinion.”54 She intended to keep packing her gun wherever and whenever she wanted. As to his question about the purpose of it all? The headstrong Hain didn’t need a purpose because “the Constitution has guaranteed me a right, and there is nothing more to say about it.”55 And what about the other parents? What if they wanted gun-free soccer games? Greg Rotz of Pennsylvania Open Carry, a group that loudly backed Hain, had a simple answer. “They don’t have that right,” he said.56 As judges complied and politicians surrendered to the demands of Pennsylvania’s gun toters, it looked as if Rotz was right. After consulting with lawyers, Tom Dougherty, the president of the Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer Association, said,
“We could put a rule in our books, but we can’t enforce it. We’re really kind of powerless.” In this upside-down world of “gun rights,” Sharon Gregg-Bolognese, the president of the Central Pennsylvania Youth Soccer League, began telling parents to abandon a game if they didn’t feel safe. “We don’t want kids at risk. Sometimes canceling the game is the only option,” she said.57
Hain’s case became a cause célèbre, sparking news reports nationally and as far away as Australia.58 Not satisfied with her easy victory, Hain and her husband, Scott, hired Matthew Weisberg, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and sued Sheriff DeLeo, the Office of the Lebanon County Sheriff, and Lebanon County in federal court. The pair claimed that DeLeo and the local government had violated their civil rights. They asked for more than $1 million in damages to cover lost income from Hain’s home baby-sitting service, which had gone from three clients to one in the wake of the controversy, “emotional distress,” and attorneys’ fees.59
Meleanie Hain now began to be painted as victim rather than provocateur. “She has been stigmatized unfairly,” said Weisberg,60 whose website says his law practice concentrates on “Consumer Fraud and Financial Injury based litigation, Mortgage Foreclosure, Professional Negligence (including Legal Malpractice) and Civil Rights.”61 Parents who didn’t like Hain’s packing to five-year-olds’ soccer games, Weisberg told the press, should have transferred their children to another team, rather than force Hain to “bear the result of their disapproval.”62
“I am a victim of Sheriff [Michael] DeLeo’s,” Hain claimed. “I am a victim of those in society as a direct result of his actions as well. The way people look at me sometimes when I am out running errands, I feel as if I am wearing a scarlet letter, and really, it’s a Glock 26.”63
The appearance of Scott Hain’s name on the lawsuit was an anomaly. He had lain low throughout most of the drama. “My husband has been supportive all along,” Meleanie Hain wrote in an e-mail answering questions from the Harrisburg Patriot News in December 2008. “He has just kept himself out of the public eye because of the sensitive nature of his employment.”64 When the Philadelphia Inquirer interviewed Meleanie Hain for a profile, it reported that “her husband, who taught her to shoot, works in law enforcement but stays out of the fray, fearing it will cost him his job. She won’t say where he works and in fact, he sat in his car while a reporter and photographer were in his house with Hain.”65 Scott Hain’s mysterious employment was as a state probation officer in neighboring Berks County. A former prison guard, he also worked part time for Lebanon County Central Booking.66
Sometime within the next six months, Meleanie told her lawyer that she and Scott were having marital problems and said Scott should be dropped from the lawsuit. She later told Weisberg that she was going to get a protective order against her husband. Neither of these things happened—Scott’s name stayed on the lawsuit and Meleanie never got a protective order.67
Nevertheless, clearly all was not well in the Hain household, “on their leafy street of neat 1½-story brick homes.”68 The couple had reportedly been fighting, and on Tuesday, October 6, 2009, Scott Hain left the home.69 He returned the following day. According to a neighbor, at about three thirty P.M. on Wednesday, “He was mowing his lawn, and the dog was outside. There was nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t seem strange at all.”70
At about six twenty P.M., Meleanie was chatting on a webcam with an unidentified male, who was said by police to be a mutual friend of the Hains. The friend turned away from his computer for a moment. He heard a gunshot and a scream, and turned back. “The person saw Scott Hain standing over the location he had previously seen Meleanie Hain and pulling the trigger several times on a handgun,” the Lebanon police chief told a press conference.71 The friend called 911. At the same time, the Hains’ three children—ages two, six, and ten—ran from the house screaming, “Daddy shot Mommy!”72
Lebanon police, complete with SWAT team, responded and took positions surrounding the deathly quiet house. When repeated attempts to contact Scott failed, police went in. Meleanie was lying in the kitchen, Scott in an upstairs room. Shortly after eight thirty P.M., Lebanon County coroner Dr. Jeffrey Yocum pronounced them both dead.73 After conducting autopsies, Yocum pronounced the shootings a case of murder-suicide. Scott had pumped six rounds into Meleanie with a handgun found in his pocket, then gone upstairs and killed himself with a shotgun.74
Meleanie’s “Baby” Glock 26 was found, fully loaded, in a backpack hanging on a hook on the back of the house’s front door. Several other handguns, a shotgun, two rifles, and several hundred rounds of ammunition were also found in the Hain residence.75
“It’s a Shakespearean, ironic tragedy,” Matthew Weisberg observed. “The first irony is she was killed by a gun. The second irony is, she was fighting for the right to defend herself by carrying a gun, and she could not defend herself.”76
Shakespearean, Greek, or Wagnerian, the tragedy went far beyond the ironic murder of a gun rights champion. My colleague, Josh Sugarmann, observed:
As an advocate who debated gun control supporters, Hain was well aware of the facts presented in opposition to her views. Yet she parried them as irrelevant to her world, in the same way that the concerns of her fellow Pennsylvania soccer moms were dismissed as the intellectual flotsam of the anti-gun mind. To this mindset, gun homicides, unintentional deaths and suicides were events that happened to other people who lacked the temperament, training or personal fortitude to own a gun. In essence, Hain, like many of her fellow pro-gun advocates, lacked an ability to think in the abstract: Her gun experience was positive and whatever negative effects others felt from firearms, the gun, and gun owners like herself, were never to blame.77
Meleanie Hain’s story was not—indeed still is not—over. Like a legal zombie, the lawsuit she and Scott filed lurched forward. Matthew Weisberg continued to press the case on behalf of their children until Chief Judge Yvette Kane of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania drove a stake through the lawsuit’s heart, dismissing all of its claims.78 Pro-gun groups in the Middle Atlantic area still hold “memorial shoots” and “memorial dinners” to honor Hain’s memory and ostensibly to raise money for her children.79
As dramatic as Hain’s story may be, it was anything but exceptional. Meleanie Hain simply wrote large and in relatively slow motion what public health scholars already know. Guns in the home are much more likely to be used against occupants of that home—especially women—than against invaders from the outside. While two-thirds of women who own guns acquired them “primarily for protection against crime,” the results of a California analysis show that “purchasing a handgun provides no protection against homicide among women and is associated with an increase in their risk for intimate partner homicide.”80 A 2003 study about the risks of firearms in the home found that females living with a gun in the home were nearly three times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun in the home.81 There is more. Another study reports that women who were murdered were more likely, not less likely, to have purchased a handgun in the three years prior to their deaths, again invalidating the idea that a handgun has a protective effect against homicide.82
Meleanie Hain’s saga fits precisely into this grim reality. In 2009—the year in which her husband shot her to death—1,818 females were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents that were submitted to the FBI for its Supplementary Homicide Report. Examination of that data dispels many of the myths regarding the nature of lethal violence against females:
•For homicides in which the victim-to-offender relationship could be identified, 93 percent of female victims (1,579 out of 1,693) were murdered by a male they knew.
•Nearly fourteen times as many females were murdered by a male they knew (1,579 victims) as were killed by male strangers (114 victims).
•For victims who knew their offenders, 63 percent (989) of female homicide victims were wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers.<
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•There were 296 women shot and killed by either their husband or intimate acquaintance during the course of an argument.
•Nationwide, for homicides in which the weapon could be determined (1,654), more female homicides were committed with firearms (52 percent) than with any other weapon. Knives and other cutting instruments accounted for 22 percent of all female murders, bodily force 13 percent, and murder by blunt object 7 percent. Of the homicides committed with firearms, 69 percent were committed with handguns.83
In the context of the year, Hain’s murder was thus clearly not exceptional. Nor was it exceptional that Scott Hain then took his own life. The event fit the national pattern for murder-suicide. The most prevalent type of murder-suicide is between two intimate partners, the man killing his wife or girlfriend. Such events are commonly the result of a breakdown in the relationship.84
Unfortunately, no national database or tracking system exists to systematically document the toll in death and injury of murder-suicide in the United States. But starting in 2002, the Violence Policy Center (VPC) began collecting and analyzing news reports of murder-suicides in order to more fully understand the human costs. Since then it has published a series of studies titled American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States. Medical studies estimate that between 1,000 and 1,500 deaths per year in the United States are the result of murder-suicide. All of the VPC’s reported analyses support this estimate. All major murder-suicide studies in the United States completed since 1950 have shown that firearms are by far the most common method of committing homicide, with the offender choosing the firearm for suicide as well. Estimates of firearms being used range from 80 percent to 94 percent of cases.
Studies analyzing murder-suicide, including those of the VPC, have found that most perpetrators of murder-suicide are male—more than 90 percent in recent studies of the United States. A study that looked only at murder-suicides involving couples noted that more than 90 percent were perpetrated by men. This is consistent with homicides in general, of which 89 percent are committed by males. However, most homicides involve male victims killed by male offenders (65 percent), whereas a male victim being specifically targeted by a male offender in a murder-suicide is relatively rare.