The Last Gun (12 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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Hain's case became a cause célèbre, sparking news reports nationally and as far away as Australia.
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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,
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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.”
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“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.
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Nevertheless, clearly all was not well in the Hain household, “on their leafy street of neat 1½-story brick homes.”
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The couple had reportedly been fighting, and on Tuesday, October 6, 2009, Scott Hain left the home.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.

       
•
  
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.
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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.
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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.

What about the microcosm of bucolic Lebanon County? The record there also demonstrates just how toxic guns are to families in America. A review of news stories reporting the autopsy findings of Dr. Jeffrey Yocum—the Lebanon County coroner—reveals a deadly contour remarkably similar to that of the nation as a whole. In addition to the Hain (2009) and Bixa (2008) murder-suicides, Dr. Yocum conducted autopsies in a 2005 murder-suicide at a chicken processing plant, in which a common-law husband shot his wife to death with a small handgun.
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In 2010 there was another murder-suicide, when a thirty-five-year-old woman shot to death her thirty-nine-year-old boyfriend and then killed herself with the gun.
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In 2011, a thirty-three-year-old mother was shot to death by her husband, who briefly took
the couple's ten-year-old daughter hostage before state troopers subdued him.
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As of March 2012, there were no reports of any shooting in self-defense at soccer fields or anywhere else in Lebanon County.

But there were plenty of other shootings in Lebanon County, demonstrating the toxicity of the American domestic arms race. Dr. Slocum's annual report to the county commissioners details another scourge: suicide by gun. Over the five years from 2007 through 2011, the percentage of all suicides in Lebanon County committed by gun has rocketed from 45 percent in 2007 to 64 percent in 2011.
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This data is shown in table form in
figure 7
and graphically in
figure 8
.