Year: 2009

To Josh Sugarmann, Bryan Miller, and all the other gun control advocates out there who are using the murder of Meleanie Hain at the hands of her husband to make a point about guns and self-defense, let me offer you an analogy and turn the tables. If Paul Helmke were gunned down in a robbery in the District, would pro-gun people be assholes for pointing out that’s what happens when you don’t carry a firearm?  I would argue they absolutely would be, and would be just as indignant toward anyone on my side who suggested as much. I think most other prominent people in the RKBA movement would too. It would be no more illustrative of the notion that everyone needs a gun to protect themselves than the suggestion that Meleanie Hain’s case is illustrative of the fact that guns are just bad news.

But why is that? I think because we really don’t believe a gun is for everyone. It’s a matter of individual choice and circumstance as to how one chooses, or does not choose, to protect themselves. To the other side, guns are always the wrong solution, for everyone, everywhere, and in every situation, and that’s why you shouldn’t have one. But they don’t advocate the choice, they advocate compulsion.

… of those gun control advocates who’s keepin’ it classy:

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. Is it too bold to think that if she had survived her husband’s attack by shooting him to death she would have offered his killing as proof of the effectiveness of the self-defense handgun? Based on 25 years in the gun control debate I don’t think so.

Look, Josh, it’s not any secret that I was not a fan of Meleanie’s activism, but I won’t presume to assume what she did and didn’t dismiss, and smear her with all the standard bugaboos anti-gun folks have for pro-gun folks. But you’re right about one thing Josh, if would have been an example of the effectiveness of self-defense had she been able to successfully defend herself against her husband. Because she’d be alive, and her three children would still have a mother. Surely that would not be a tragedy in your world view just because we would get to make a point? Sometimes I wonder.

There’s not many anti-gun people I would say I truly despise. Most of them are good Americans with a different opinion about how to deal with the problem of violence, and maybe some phobias to go along with it, but Bryan Miller is not among people I count in that category. A good person’s reaction to someone being killed in a domestic violence incident is not “Well, you know, I was right and she was wrong, clearly.”  But here’s what Bryan said:

“Ms. Hain’s position was that guns make people safer. I thought at the time that she was incorrect. I’m very sad to say events seem to have sadly shown that I was correct,” Miller said.

Asshole.

The Freedom States Alliance tries to make the point I figured anti-gun groups would try to make. The Brady Campaign deserves kudos for tastefully staying out of it, rather than try to score political points.

But one wonders what political point the Freedom States Alliance is trying to make?  Scott Hain was a law enforcement officer. He is the kind of person who would have guns even if FSA got their dream of total civilian disarmament.  Does FSA want to argue that battered spouses of law enforcement officers are better off with no protection at all?

According to forum accounts from people who knew her, Meleanie Hain did indeed understand there was a “danger lurking inside her own home”, but that danger was Scott Hain. There is a lesson here, but it’s not the lesson that FSA is trying to sell by exploiting the Hain murder.