Meleanie Hain, open carry activist, mother, and general decent person was murdered yesterday. While the facts are still coming out, it appears that her husband was the shooter, and also took his own life after killing Meleanie. She will be missed in the PA gun rights community, and in the open carry community at the national level.
Several months ago, she had been a guest on Gun Nuts Radio, taking an opportunity to speak out about her activism and just being a mother that believed in self-defense. In the brief time I knew her, I found her to be intelligent, articulate, and banner carrier for 2nd Amendment rights and open carry. Our thoughts and prayers here at Gun Nuts go out to her family and especially to her children at this time.
Update: Sebastian has the details on the shooting.
I would like to nominate Meleanie for a Darwin award.
Hey, congratulations Bess. I was wondering if anyone would show up and make a completely tasteless, classless remark, and it’s nice to know I can count on the students of NYU to maintain a high level of absolutely reprehensible conduct.
fuck you, Bess.
I’m sorry, was that classless?
Yeah, shame on her for living with a cop. She got what’s coming to her, eh Bess? How some people live with themselves is beyond me…
Caleb, I saw this earlier today, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. This is personal.
RIP, Meleanie.
Gun toting nutjobs:0
Reaping what you sow:1
You know, I was going to delete comments like the ones from Bess or DamagedGentlemen, but then I realized that I’d rather not. These people are taking pleasure and enjoying the death of a human being, and by making these comments exposing themselves for the scumbags that they are.
Y’all stay classy!
Most people who question the common sense involved in going heeled to a child’s soccer game do not enjoy senseless death by weapon. I strongly believe in the right to keep and bear arms, and in fact believe Americans have a DUTY to own a firearm. However, being a combat veteran who knows first hand what happens to the human body when it meets bullets, I don’t know a single weapon owner (non-law enforcement) who would strap it on and go to ANY peaceful public gathering, much less a children’s gathering place. You get respect by giving respect, not by forcing your questionable choices on society at large, and not by veiled threats or intimidation.
When the screaming and finger pointing is replaced by cooperation and civil discourse, we’ll find we’re not so different after all. We all want to live in peace, raise our kids in safety, and make an honest wage for honest work.
Or is that too naïve?
Fuck you, Bess!
I 2nd that Breda. We have classless folks who can do nothing but denigrate a dead woman who it appears was the victim of an abusive husband.
She was a loving mother, law-abiding citizen, civil rights activist, and above all a decent, caring, well-mannered person by all accounts. Even in death these classless assholes are unable to show her even a modicum of decency or respect.
Thanks for not deleting their comments Caleb.
RIP Meleanie
You must not know a whole lot of gun owners, do you? There are literally millions of non-law enforcement people in this country that have made the decision to go about their daily lives armed when legally possible. They get concealed carry permits, or they open carry like Ms. Hain did. By and large, they’re among the most law abiding of Americans.
The only people that consider the open or concealed carry of a firearm to be “intimidation” are people that seemed to be scared of inanimate objects. There’s nothing scary, threatening, or inherently dangerous about an openly carried holstered firearm. A holstered firearm is a safe firearm, after all.
Like Jay, I was hit pretty hard by this news. I often spoke about Meleanie because of the constant match-up between Soccer Mom Her, and professional gun banners….and how she always came out on top!
I would like to thank Caleb and Breda for having Gun Nuts, listening to your interview with Meleanie this morning helped the pain.
Her husband was not a “cop.” Not that that helped keep the marriage from falling apart or her from telling people that she was going to get a protection from abuse order against Scott.
Too bad for the three orphans. What kind of parent would shoot the other parent in front of the kids?
Guess we now know why she always had to be armed.
more info at ldnews.com and pennlive.com
Too bad the kids weren’t armed. They could have had a stand-off with daddy until the law could be summoned.
sauer, my understanding is that her husband was an armed Parole/Probation Officer, which in the state of PA requires the person be a “sworn” individual, i.e. a Law Enforcement Officer. Cop is a generic term for all LEOs.
S.J. – nice to see you guys popping to keep it classy, you scumbag!
Meleanie was a champion for individual rights, and will be remembered as such. Hopefully the children will be well cared-for.
That said, while it continues to disgust me how atrociously some people can handle situations like these, thank you, Caleb, for not deleting the comments from Bess, DamnedGentleman, and S.J. Schaum – their words should be preserved forever, as a testament of how despicable some people can be.
So I take it from the consensus of the blood dancers that Meleanie Hain’s death was caused by the fact that she carried a gun to a soccer game last year, and furthermore she deserved it.
I doubt I could force myself think that way even with practice.
So, her gun really helped her out a lot here, eh? A case study for the open carry case, I’d say.
People who worship violence often fall victim to it. Got a bad marriage? Bring guns, that’ll help.
“There’s nothing scary, threatening, or inherently dangerous about an openly carried holstered firearm. A holstered firearm is a safe firearm, after all.”
Do you actually believe that stuff, or are you tipsy? Nothing inherently dangerous about the presence of a machine that is made for destroying life? What planet are you from, R2D2?
How come every time I look at the news, some nice, calm, legal gun owner like Meleanie or her hubby is going berserk and killing people? And how come I never hear about them saving their soccer playing kids from crazed zombie meth addicts or terrorists or meth addicted terrorists? Must be a media conspiracy thing.
Gun nuts. You said it, not me. But I see what you mean.
“We all want to live in peace, raise our kids in safety, and make an honest wage for honest work.
Or is that too naïve?”
See, that’s where you’re wrong. Some people (on this page, they have conveniently called themselves “gun nuts”) want society to work like the OK Corral and they want to intimidate and get off on a power trip over other people by bringing lethal weapons to kids’ soccer games. They don’t want peace. They want to be in a comic book, or in some campy WWII movie, really desperately, so desperately that they just don’t care if they endanger your life or your kid’s life by showing up to the soccer game as though they were getting ready to hit some al-Qaeda in the Afghan hills.
“Nice goal, Junior, come give Momma a hug! Careful, Junior, watch the pistol!” Bang! “Sorry about your kid, Mrs. Johnson, but it’s my right after all! And Junior was excited about his goal. C’mon, be a sport, accidents happen! I’ll go halfsies on the funeral.”
What a sad bunch of people here. I hope you all can eventually find a way to feel good about yourselves that doesn’t involve childish power trips over others.
Harrison, have you ever actually shot a gun, or did you just learn everything you know about them from movies and Michael Moore? About the only thing you managed to get right was that Ms. Hain’s gun didn’t help her, but even then, you drew the completely wrong conclusion. A gun is not some magical talisman of defense that shields you from harm, and few people expect their spouse (or boyfriend/girlfriend, fiance/fiancee) to suddenly decide to shoot them. I could be armed with a magic death-ray on each hip and a bandoleer of grenades across my chest, but if my wife decided tonight that she was tired of watching bad sci-fi movies with me, and that the only way out was a bullet through my brain, I’d never have time to move my hands.
Yes, guys like Caleb do believe that there’s nothing inherently dangerous about an inert piece of metal and plastic that requires human hands and brains to load bullets into, human hands and brain to aim at a target, and human hands and a brain to squeeze a trigger and launch a projectile. Or at the least, it’s no more inherently dangerous or evil than a car, which, incidentially, kills a lot more people every year in the U.S. than guns do.
I don’t currently own any guns, but I do know plenty of people personally, including Caleb, who do. And they actually are serious when they say that all they want is to “live in peace, raise our kids in safety, and make an honest wage for honest work.” But they also know that sometimes, there are bad people around, and it is far, far better to have a gun and never need to use it in defense, than to need a gun, and not have it.
Oh, and one more, personal note. I trust Caleb to look out for my kids, and that they’re safe with him. I work with people who have similar views to yours, Harrison, and I wouldn’t trust them with my cats. And I’m not terribly fond of my cats.
I wonder if Meleanie was armed when shot? Cop or not, households with guns get this kind of atrocity. People get mad, I mean REAL mad at each other. A severe ass beating is bad enough, a death by bullet is worse.
So you’re suggesting that somehow, had she not had a gun, her allegedly abusive husband wouldn’t have killed her? If you are, then you’re not too bright.
That’s exactly what he’s suggesting, and you’re the one who’s not too bright if you don’t get how much easier it is for violence to get to fatal when guns are involved. Oh, but I forgot–it’s just a tool. Right. A tool that makes it REALLY easy to kill people, even to kill lots of them really quickly and effortlessly. A toothbrush is a tool too, and could probably be used to kill, given enough time and a docile enough victim. But are you seriously dumb enough not to see the difference, or have you just rehearsed your moronic line from the gun lobby playbook so much that you actually cannot any longer think outside of the stupidity to be found there?
You know Harrison, I was going to argue with you. The problem is, you can’t be reasoned with. You’ve made your mind that GUNS R BAD, and I can present all the facts, statistics, and well reasoned arguments about safety and self-defense in the world, and it wouldn’t do anything to change your poor little closed mind.
That’s kind of sad, because I once believed that people like you could be rehabilitated, and see that firearms are not some kind of evil talisman that only causes death; but the fact that you’re willing to use the tragic death of a kind hearted woman to score talking points in some imaginary debate just goes to show exactly how far gone people like you are.
If you ever decide you want to actually have an open mind about other people’s opinions, myself and the rest of the self-defense and pro-individual rights bloggers will still be here.
I was listening to the podcast at work before sunrise and came home to hear about this tragedy. So far……..
1. They revel in the blood of victims, not even the person who made the attack but the victim.
2. They joke about the children who witnessed the murder/suicide of their parents.
3. You fought in war, to that I say thank you. So when you swore to uphold the Constitution you said but only the parts I really feel like?
4. They mock a victim of spousal abuse like she deserved it. She had a gun, ohhh she really had it coming.
Let’s see you’ve offered up attacks against everyone but the assailant. It’s like you think he was right. You sick bastards are celebrating an innocent woman’s death and you dare to say we’re the nuts? You people wanted something like this to happen. I think I’ve figured it out, you think we all want to kill and are just waiting to “waste some thug” when we pray every day that we never have to use our sidearms. But you hypocritical bastards see someone exercising their god given rights and think to yourself I hope they die, I hope something horrible happens to them. All this verbal diarrhea just spews out of your self-righteous minds and mouths I am shocked you claim to be the civilized side.
You should disable the interview because Meleanie sounded borderline paranoid and slightly disabled. Did she have learning problems?
Nice. So in your world, I guess either A) armed women who are killed by their armed spouse have it coming or B) she should have shot her husband? Nice going, blood-dancers.
I’m sure you’d all be happier if he’d beat her to death with a tire iron, then gassed himself with the car exhaust.
If this had been a gay couple, if they’d got in the news for holding hands at their kid’s soccer match and getting arrested for it and if, a year later, they were involved in a murder/suicide, would you be gloating how gayness kills?
Mrs. Hain did something legal but unpopular. Her husband did something illegal and immoral. Try to dope out the difference.
Mr. Hain would have had a firearm in any case; parole officers are generally armed even in states with restrictive gun laws. Mrs. Hain, not so much. Once again, you blame the tool and not the workman.
Belinda Gomez, on October 9th, 2009 at 00:44 Said:
“You should disable the interview because Meleanie sounded borderline paranoid and slightly disabled. Did she have learning problems?”
She was a good deal better than her critics in her ability to communicate. Also: you can’t use that line after someone has actually been murdered. (See, as it turns out, someone was trying to kill her…. I- I don’t know if you picked up on that part of the story.)
Wow this thread is OUT there. Caleb, your sitemeter or compatible give you any idea where these sick creatures are coming from?
Mostly google searches. Apparently I’m on the first page of results for “meleanie hain”. Yay for having google juice.
Hilariously enough, I’m actually higher on the Google index right now than those commies at HuffPo.
It just goes to show how hard it is to discern a qualified gun owner and an unqualified one. Even Ms. Hain could not predict that her own husband would be the one to kill her. Apply that to the parents of those soccer kids and you understand why an open carry permit makes people uncomfortable. Who knows when people will snap… even at a soccer game where parents are always civil to each other (yes, I’m being sarcastic).
First I’d like to say that it is horrific that this happened at all. Second you can’t blame Meleanie for doing what is perfectly legal and to use her murder to try to make the claim that it was the fault of the gun is simply moronic at best. Further to make the claim that her children were unsafe because her gun was in a backpack or even in the home is simply dumb. I think her 6 and 10 y.o. had probably already been taught proper firearms safety as I had been at that age. I think thats where I will leave it as I need to prepare my gear for my CCW class tomorrow morning.
Goodbye Meleanie, may you rest in peace.
Caleb I don’t know if I want the google juice, the antis posting here are barbarians. The cruelty of blaming the victim for her death astounds me. Then there is the other logic disconnect the killer was an armed LEO, who even if guns were banned would still have one (That’s right Harrison the actual sociopath would still have the tool he used to kill his wife) , he would still out weigh her by probably 75 or more lbs, still be almost guaranteed to win in any physical fight and still be a fucking sociopath bent on forcing his will on her, you vicious god damned morons. DamnedGentleman (not so much) and Harrison your hatred of women is showing perhaps you would prefer Saudi Arabia or some other third world shithole where women are treated as chattel to be used and killed when inconvenient. You Syphilitic pussbags. Bess I don’t know what to say to you, I think Breda pretty much summed it up.
Project much, Scott?
Those who live by the sword die by the sword….I’m sure I’m not the only one who found humor in this. The only good thing that might come out of this sad event is that the kids will now be raised by people who haven’t such a warped view of the world – kids shouldn’t to be raised by people who think its a good idea to bring a gun to a soccer match. God, who moves in mysterious ways, has given the kids the chance of a better life.
You found it funny that a woman was shot to death from behind while her kids watched?
Don’t be so sure, Father Bob. One of the family members might get the kids, and there’s a good chance some of them are gun-crazed too.
Hey Father Bob, I just checked with Jesus (He and I are tight, we go way back) and He told me that He doesn’t think murder is funny under any circumstances, and that if anyone ever told you they were murdering in His name, that they were a liar.
I continue to be appalled by the utter lack of character that you people are showing. A human being, a mother was murdered in front of her children and at best you regard that as nothing but fodder for scoring points in some imaginary argument; the worst of you seem to take some perverse pleasure in it.
Just so we are all on the same page, “Father” Bob, I want to clarify something: you are, by your own claims, amused at the untimely, violent, and unfortunate death of an innocent woman? And you feel somehow vindicated in this amusement simply because the woman in question happened to exercise a Constitutionally-protected, natural right?
… Good Lord. Words cannot adequately express how heinously disgusting you and people like you really are…
Caleb, do you say anything that isn’t right out of the NRA playbook? They must vet all of you nuts on the web to be sure you’ll all spew the same talking points over and over.
The “dancing in the blood of the dead” thing is way stupid, obviously just an attempt to defuse any criticism of the actual role guns play in the real world. Something horrible happens to someone, and it can reasonably be traced to the proliferation of guns, so the gun-crazed all start squawking “Don’t use this in a partisan way, we just wants to mourn the dead.” It would be funny if it weren’t so evil.
If you vampires cared about the dead, you’d talk about how the gun lobby’s efforts help ensure high murder rates in the US, and especially among racial minorities. Compared to the rest of the Western world, we’re at the top, and omnipresent guns are the main reason why.
But you don’t really care about the dead, do you? (and especially if they’re not white). Nope, not for a minute. All you care about is your ‘right’ to have an arsenal in the hopes that it will help you feel less paranoid about all the evil monsters you think are lurking out there, waiting to do you harm. Guess what, Caleb? You might better turn your gaze internally if it’s evil monsters you want to find.
And this is why you fail. Her husband was an armed law enforcement officer. Not a private citizen. He was one of the people that you guys say is “okay” to have a gun, and yet he still managed to kill his wife. That’s not “traced to the proliferation of guns” any more than if he had hit her with a cop car would be traced to the “proliferation of powerful automobiles.”
Here’s more fail! There is not one shred of evidence that “gun lobby” has done anything to contribute to the rate of violent crime in America. In fact, the places with the highest rates of violent crime remain the places with the most gun control laws, but don’t let facts intrude on your fantasy world. You want to find someone to blame for inner city violence, or the horrible crimes that so often seem to stem from minorities? Blame the education system that ignores inner cities, blame a welfare system that encourages people to not get productive jobs, blame the ever present drug culture fueled by ineffective law enforcement, or maybe just maybe blame the gangsters, thieves, murderers, rapists, and other criminals that break the laws.
But you cant do that, can you? Because if blame people for their own actions, the next thing you know you’ll have to start accepting responsibility for your words and actions. If people starting owning their own lives, then they can’t be victims, they can’t be dependent on someone else to tell them what’s better for them.
I think the most appalling thing about gun control at the end of it all is how degrading and racist it is. At the base of all your arguments about inner city crime is the assumption that black people are so stupid and easily swayed that the evil gun lobby and all our evil guns shoot out some kind of mind control rays that just make them turn into criminals, as if they had no free will of their own. It’s appalling that human beings, especially those who claim to champion the rights of minorities are as backwards in their thinking as you have repeatedly demonstrated yourself to be.
The number of people gleefully splashing the blood of a dead mother on their socks here is just amazing.
I fucking DOUBLE DOG DARE “Father Bob”, “DamnedGentleman”, “Harrison Fishbach”, and “Bess Fergusen” (all using their real names, I’m sure) to cc their sensitive missives to the surviving children.
May each and every one of you barbaric fuckers choke on your own bile.
“You guys”? I haven’t said a word about whether Hain’s husband should have had a gun or not, but Caleb, NRA playbook clutched in his sweating palm, throws out the required lines. We get more NRA rightwing nutjob playbook from him later on–bad, bad welfare for luring people away from work. We can assume what Caleb’s alternative would be–let the poor go die in the street, preferably quickly (and therefore all the more reason to make a sea of guns available cheaply). Typical American middleclass white boy vision of the world: “I was born on third base, what’s everyone else’s problem??!?!?!”
Harrison, it’s unwise to make assumptions about people that you’re not in a position to make.
Hain’s husband’s firearms ownership status is relevant – unless you believe that no one should have guns, not even cops.
Hey, it’s kind of neat to watch you completely ignore the points I make that don’t fit in your comfy stereotype of what I’m arguing about. But by all means, continue to flail about. You haven’t made any actual points since your first post, and even then that was a pretty loose argument. I may be an NRA apologist or whatever it is you think I am, but hey, at least I can string together an actual argument using facts.
You should try that sometime.
“It’s unwise to make assumptions about people that you’re not in a position to make.”
Oh, you mean, like “He was one of the people that you guys say is “okay” to have a gun”? Assuming that someone is one of the “you guys” the NRA has told you about?
What a numbskull.
“An actual argument using facts”? You crack me up. You mean, like, the “fact” that welfare causes people not to work? You mean the kind of “facts” that pathetic rightwing drones like you dream up in your hate-filled minds (no, sorry, you haven’t even dreamed those stupidities up yourselves–you read about it on some Repugnantcan website somewhere) and which have almost nothing whatever to do with the world existing outside your head?
I’m constantly amused at how smug you morons are. For people who haven’t thought for five minutes in their entire lives (memorizing your NRA playbook lines doesn’t count), you really seem to believe you know something.
Okay Harrison, you’ve been fun and everything, but now you’re just acting like a run-of-the-mill DailyKos troll, and not a particularly entertaining troll at that.
So here’s the deal. Your next post had better actually present an argument, backed up by more than name calling and insults as to how any of the “common sense gun laws” as proposed by the Brady Campaign or Mayors Against Illegal guns would have prevented this tragedy. If you can do that, I’ll be more than happy to continue the conversation with you.
Or, you can continue to sling the same old tired insults. If you do that, I’d appreciate if you’d call me a “Rethuglican” next, because you haven’t done that yet.
How many people are killed with guns in France every year, Caleb? How about in Germany? Or just about anywhere else in the Western world where sane gun control exists and people who spout NRA-type rhetoric are recognized as the fringe maniacs they are and ignored at the level of political policy?
Game. Set. Match.
Thanks for playing, Harrison. I hope you can find something else to amuse yourself tonight. You had a chance, but you couldn’t actually bring a valid argument to the table. England: lots of gun control, and higher violent crime than the US. France: lots of gun control, higher rate of violent crime than the US. Same with Germany. And the best part is, I can back those claims up with reports and documents from Interpol. I’m guessing you don’t have documentation from the international LE community to back up your claims?
NRA has a Playbook? I never got that one with my membership! Did I loose it, or will I just have to wait until my Life member package arrives?
Caleb, I know people like Harrison are annoying as hell to read their comments, especially on such a serious and grave topic of Ms. Hain’s untimely death.
But they are quite useful idiots, as the saying goes, to point out the mindless chanting, and logical fallacies that comes with being a supporter of gun control laws!