James Ian Sherrill, thirty-five, stood weeping before Judge James M. Graves Jr. on August 16, 2010.
“If I could go back and redo it, I would take the beating,” he sobbed.1
A resident of Fruitport Township, Michigan, Sherrill pleaded “no contest” a month earlier to a felony charge of assault with a dangerous weapon.2 Now he stood at the court’s bar, awaiting the judge’s sentence. Sherrill plainly regretted his moment of reckless anger. That furious instant arrived on May 15, 2010, when he jerked his concealed 9mm handgun out of its holster, pointed the loaded gun at another soccer dad, and said, “If you don’t back off, I’m gonna shoot you.”3 The threat in the parking lot of Fruitport’s Pine Park—still crowded with children and other parents—was the climax of a series of verbal exchanges between the two men that began during a league match among six- to eight-year-old children.4
“I’ve been suicidal because of this,” Sherrill said, making his tearful plea for leniency. He said he was on medication for panic attacks, and claimed that he had been scared ever since the incident, afraid to enter stores and restaurants.5 Indeed, a single moment of armed anger had changed Sherrill’s life forever.
Fruitport is yet another of the archetypical American small towns that clutter the map of gun violence in the United States. It lies on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, about a third of the way up the western coast of Michigan, across the lake from Milwaukee. The vast Manistee National Forest sprawls off to the northeast, within which members of the West Michigan Volunteer Militia flop around and shoot guns in the brush from time to time, training for Armageddon “because a well-armed citizenry is the best Homeland Security and can better deter crime, invasion, terrorism or tyranny.”6 In 2000 the township had a population of about 12,500, 97 percent of whom are white, and a median family income of $54,634. Only 6.6 percent of the population were below the poverty line.7 It was within this Michigan idyll that Sherrill built a solidly bourgeois life as a licensed counselor, a stay-at-home father with three young children, and a Cub Scout leader.8 By his sentencing day, however, Sherrill’s state counselor’s license had been suspended.9 His concealed-carry permit also would be permanently revoked the day after his sentencing.10
Amazing as it may seem to most Americans, Sherrill violated no law by simply bringing his hidden gun to a children’s soccer match. He had a concealed-weapons permit for the handgun he had on his person that day, and the park was not posted as a “no carry” zone.11 But after his arrest, he must certainly have pondered the same question that another family man, James Humphrey, forty-five, asked himself time and again after he shot a man to death in a moment of road rage following a night of drinking at bars. How does one go so quickly from “beloved family man with no criminal record” to violent criminal? “I’ve thought about it every day for the last 11 months,” Humphrey said. “There is no answer for how you go from there to here.”12
Actually, there is an answer. The presence of a gun in the midst of anger or other strong human emotion is a one-way ticket “from there to here.”
Take Sherrill’s case. Judge Graves concluded that he was “a basically decent person who overreacted” that day. “It’s just very sad that human emotions get out of control in this way . . . from a children’s game,” he said. Sherrill’s pulling his gun out was “greatly escalating the risk of potential harm and danger” with children nearby. He sentenced Sherrill to thirty days in the Muskegon County Jail, less two days already served, and eighteen months of probation, plus costs and fees.13 Putting aside his ruined life, Sherrill got off relatively easy. No one died or was injured.
But his intemperate act is a chilling example of what Brooke de Lench called “an endless series” of tales of angry parents out of control at youth events, of which “most go undocumented.”14 De Lench, the founder of MomsTeam.com, a website for parents, and a youth sports expert, cites a survey that “supports the view that the reports of misbehaving parents in the media are not isolated events.”15 Add a gun to the mix, and an argument goes from angry to deadly in seconds. A sports official in Lubbock, Texas—where angry parents had pulled guns at youth events three times within a decade—said, “It seems to be getting worse every year. Parents have become more and more abusive.”16
In Roanoke, Virginia, Charles David Akers, thirty-six, was convicted of brandishing an AR-15 assault rifle at a girls’ soccer match. According to witnesses, when his daughter did not make the soccer team, Akers became angry and made threatening remarks to the coach. He drove off, returned, pulled the assault rifle from his trunk, and made a sweeping motion around the field with the gun for several moments.17 In Lubbock, Texas, Tye Burke, twenty-five, a concealed-carry weapons (CCW) permit holder, pulled his gun at a soccer game for seven- to eight-year-old girls. According to witnesses in news reports, Burke was yelling at the girls’ team coach. The coach’s husband confronted Burke, the two started arguing, and the husband shoved Burke. Burke then pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the husband’s head. An off-duty prison guard tackled Burke and disarmed him.18 A Lubbock grand jury declined to indict Burke.19
In Philadelphia, Wayne Derkotch, forty, also a CCW permit holder, got into a fistfight with his son’s coach at a five- to six-year-olds football game. Witnesses said the fight started after Derkotch complained about his son not getting enough playing time. Derkotch pulled out his .357 Magnum revolver after the coach apparently got the better of him in the fight—he lost a tooth and his eye was swollen. A judge later acquitted him of criminal charges, ruling that he acted in self-defense.20 In Memphis, Tennessee, yet another CCW permit holder, Nicholis Williams, twenty-nine, was accused of pointing his handgun at his ten-year-old son’s baseball coach. Williams was reportedly annoyed because his son did not get as many times at bat as other children. After the game, the coach approached Williams in the parking lot and asked him not to curse in front of the kids. Williams told the coach to “shut the fuck up,” pulled his gun out from under a car mat, loaded it, and pointed it at the coach. The coach disarmed Williams, who left the scene. Williams was later arrested and charged with aggravated assault. His CCW permit was suspended after the incident and had not been restored as of March 2012.21
The prospect of perturbed parents packing pistols at children’s sports events understandably frightens other parents. “Everybody is worried about the safety of children,” a Salem, Virginia, detective said after the Akers assault rifle incident. “If I were a parent, I’d be nervous.”22 The Memphis Commercial Appeal called the Williams incident “an alarming wake-up call about what can happen when emotions explode and a handgun is handy.”23
In North Carolina, Carol Coulter, a member of the Ashe County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, pointed out a classic problem with CCW vigilantism. “I’ve had ample opportunity to observe people in the stands at sporting events and it never ceases to amaze me how adults can act in such childish ways,” she said. “I fear that by having access to a concealed weapon, in a thoughtless moment of rage a gun will be pulled and in response to that, others with concealed weapons will also pull their guns and perhaps if someone didn’t see who pulled the gun first then you’ve got people pointing guns and they don’t even know who they should be pointing at.”24 Coulter’s concern is far from academic. On Long Island, New York, a federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agent was unintentionally killed by a retired police officer who rushed up to the scene as the agent struggled with a robber outside a pharmacy. The retired officer shot the wrong man.25 A related danger is stray shots hitting innocent bystanders. In May 2012 in Houston, Texas, a store customer and CCW holder pulled out his gun and exchanged gunfire with two armed robbers. The would-be defender accidentally shot and killed a twenty-six-year-old store clerk.26
But not everyone agrees that kids and guns don’t mix. “Gun rights” activists—with the help of the NRA, the gun lobby, and blinkered judges—have relentlessly pushed back the boundaries of common sense to ensure their “right” to bring their guns to their children’s Pee Wee Football, Little League baseball, and soccer—not to mention public parks, bars, churches, and schools. “The speed at which guns laws are being relaxed is increasing,” said John Pierce, a co-founder of OpenCarry.org. “We’re very happy about it.”27 An example of the kind of counterfactual wisdom propelling these victories can be found in the following harangue that enthusiasts of mixing guns, kids, and parks in Forsyth County, North Carolina, asked their supporters to send to officials who opposed lax gun-carry rules:
Free Americans have the God-given right to bear arms EVERYWHERE.
The evidence is clear: where these rights are restricted are [sic] dangerous.
Where have mass-murders occurred? Where have child abductions, rapes and murders most often occurred? Claiming no reason for citizens to be lawfully armed in parks is wrong. Every American has personal responsibility for self-defense and the defense of family.
Do you expect a 120 lb mother to defend herself and children against 250 lb criminals unarmed? If you believe that Forsyth County parks are immune to abductions/ rapes/murders you are mistaken. It is not a matter of if, but when.28
To the denizens of this dark universe, a gun is an amulet that magically transforms the bearer into a righteous and invulnerable defender of all that is good, right, and holy, not a human being carrying a lethal weapon who is full of the emotions and chemicals that drive rage, fright, depression, anger, revenge, and jealousy. In the real world, that “120 lb mother” is much more likely to be shot and killed by her “250 lb” husband or boyfriend than ever to use a gun to defend herself from a criminal stranger.29 Guns easily turn domestic violence into domestic homicide. A federal study on homicide among intimate partners found that female intimate partners are more likely to be murdered with a firearm than all other means combined, concluding that “the figures demonstrate the importance of reducing access to firearms in households affected by IPV [intimate partner violence]. ”30
The fact that a gun will more likely be used wrongly in a moment of rage, jealousy, depression, or mistaken perception than for some righteous purpose has been demonstrated from analysis of real-world data, collected decade after decade from the grim records of death and injury in America. Firearms are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes. Instead, they are all too often used to inflict harm on the very people they were intended to protect. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports, in 2009 there were only 261 justifiable homicides committed by private citizens. Of these, only 21 involved women killing men. Of those, only 13 involved firearms, with 10 of the 13 involving handguns.31
It is easier, and frankly more effective, for gun enthusiasts to spin fictional Fright Night tales than integrate such facts into their thinking. Supreme Court Justice Scalia pinned his statement on the utility of handguns in Heller largely to a familiar gun rights canard: “What if a burglar breaks into your home?” What Scalia did not write, and perhaps did not know, is that most household burglaries occur when no household member is in the home. A Justice Department study of household burglaries between 2003 and 2007 found that no one was home in 72.4 percent of household burglaries.32 What’s more, even when someone was at home and was a victim of violent crime, almost two thirds (65.1 percent) of the offenders were not strangers. Of those violent burglars who were not strangers, 31.1 percent were intimates or former intimates (girlfriends, boyfriends, or spouses), while 34 percent were either relatives or acquaintances of the victim.33
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.
• 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.
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.85 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.86 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.87
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 2011.88 This data is shown in table form in figure 7 and graphically in figure 8.
Figure 7. Suicides in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 2007–2011
“Suicides Up by 1 in 2011,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 3, 2012; “Coroner Reports on 2010 Deaths,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 27, 2011; letter dated Jan. 18, 2010, from Jeffrey A. Yocum, coroner, to Lebanon County commissioners, summarizing coroner’s cases for 2009, in files of Violence Policy Center; “Coroner: County Suicides Up in 2008,” Lebanon Daily News, Jan. 23, 2009; “Report Profiles ’07 Coroner Cases,” Lebanon Daily News, Feb. 1, 2008.
In spite of all of this evidence, the gun lobby continues to pitch its deadly products to women. The reason is simple. “When it comes to buying strength, women are no longer a niche market,” Shooting Industry, the premier gun trade magazine, advised its readers in 2009.89 The industry and a network of “shooting sports” groups see women as a key to profiting from the sale of firearms and related products to the whole family. “If you teach a man to hunt, he goes hunting. If you teach a woman to hunt, the entire family goes hunting,” said the director of an Alabama program oriented toward women.90
Figure 8. Gun Suicides in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 2007–2011
The “effort to get more women shooting is a collaborative effort for all within the firearms industry”91 Trade associations, manufacturers, the “gun press,” and local gun dealers and shooting clubs are locked into a nationwide daisy chain to get a gun in every woman’s hand in America. “We believe that a meaningful percentage of recent firearm sales are being made to first time gun purchasers, particularly women,” the Freedom Group, a consolidated group of firearm manufacturers assembled by Cerberus Capital Management, stated in its annual report for fiscal year 2011.92
The NRA has a full clip of interlocking programs it aims at women.93 The NSSF, which has women in the sights of its own programs, collegially reinforces the NRA’s pitch. For example, NSSF’s website boosts the NRA’s “Women’s Wilderness Escape” program. “Launched in 2008,” the NSSF blurb gushes, “this eight-day camp is led by some of the nation’s most experienced instructors and is dedicated to introducing women, ages 18 and older, regardless of experience level, to the countless forms of outdoor recreation awaiting them, all of which relate directly or indirectly to our shooting and hunting traditions.”94
Gun manufacturers have their own lures for women. A number—including Taurus, Charter Arms, and Smith & Wesson—make handguns in pink colors. According to one gun dealer, this hits women right where their dollars are. “Women get all excited about pink guns, even if they don’t buy one,” he said. “Women will come in and buy a Beretta pink visor. They might not even have a gun; they just think the visor is cool.”95 Glock—the maker of Meleanie Hain’s “Baby” Glock 26—sponsored a “GLOCK Girl Shootout, the first ever ladies only match,” in Reevesville, South Carolina. Not coincidentally, Lisa Marie Judy, whose “vision” the GLOCK Girl Shootout was, is also the owner of B.E.L.T Training, where the event was held in 2011.96 “Just because I am a girl, it doesn’t mean I can’t Rock out with my GLOCK out!” Judy was quoted as saying in a Glock media release.97
Gun dealers and shooting ranges also sponsor special “ladies days” and classes, billed as introductory training, but actually designed to generate buying traffic.98 “Work with a local range and hold an introductory event,” Shooting Industry advises gun stores. “NSSF’s First Shots program is specifically designed to build customer traffic at shooting ranges. That traffic will transfer to your store when those participants need equipment.”99 Apparel and accessories for women have also become an important follow-on market for the gun industry. “The growth is with women,” Shelah Zmigrosky, owner of Foxy Huntress, told Shooting Industry. “Men have their toys and clothes, and now women want their own.”100 A website devoted to women’s shooting accessories is called GunGoddess.com. “Move over boring black and olive drab green, because the shooting range is about to get a lot more colorful! At GunGoddess.com you’ll find ladies’ shooting accessories, apparel and gifts in fun, feminine fabrics and colors.”101 Shooting Industry has another idea, suggesting that “dealers have a new venue for offering women’s hunting clothing that doesn’t take up one bit of their sales floor—the Camp Wild Girls Home Hunting Party.”102
The gun industry’s obsession with women has another, seamier side. While on the one hand the industry is trying to lure women as customers, often arguing that guns are empowering, on the other a number of its denizens exploit women as cheesecake. Unabashed examples abound, some distributed on the floor of the NSSF’s annual SHOT Show extravaganza. Ads in Shotgun News—a widely circulated national gun advertising tabloid—regularly feature women in provocative dress and poses. In the June 1, 2012, edition, for example, the importer American Tactical Imports posted an ad for its FX45 Thunderbolt semiautomatic pistol. The ad features a buxom young woman clad in a brassiere, midriff bare, holding a pistol in each hand. The tagline reads, “Enhanced For Your Pleasure.”103 In the same edition, a full-page ad for European American Armory Corporation (EAA) displays another young woman with a bare midriff and cocked hips, clad in tightly fitting clothes and holding a Baikal shotgun. Below the woman appears the phrase, “XOXO Candy!” and to the side, the logo “See It All.”104 EAA also sells pinup calendars, displaying guns and women in titillating poses, for current and past years, from its Internet website.105
In spite of the industry’s strenuous efforts to promote guns and its intermittent revival every few years of the entirely specious canard that gun sales to women are soaring, the hard fact is that female personal gun ownership remains relatively rare. It fluctuates within a narrow range, with no recent signs of increase. In 2010, only one out often American females reported personally owning a gun. Female personal gun ownership peaked at 14.3 percent in 1982. In 2010, the female personal gun ownership rate was 9.9 percent.106
The industry just as cynically targets children as its future consumers. It has ginned up “youth-oriented” campaigns for girls, similar to those for women but aimed at a younger demographic. The first “National Take Your Daughters to the Range Day,” for example, was scheduled to be held on June 9, 2012. “This event will be an opportunity for gun ranges throughout the nation to introduce many young women to a sport that may just become a life-long hobby, or even a profession,” one promoter claimed in a leadup to the event. “Boys learn to shoot in Scouts or with their Dads,” Lynne Finch, National Take Your Daughters to The Range Day co-founder and firearms instructor, was quoted as saying. “Often, the girls are left behind because shooting isn’t ‘girly’ Well, we can, and do shoot, and well.”107
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, National Wild Turkey Federation, Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, and the National Rifle Association sponsor a program called Families Afield: An Initiative for the Future of Hunting.108 The reason for this national “initiative” (marketing campaign) is simple. The number of kids who are drawn into hunting has been shrinking dramatically for years. Hunting is one of the prime ways that long-term future buyers are introduced to guns. Fewer young hunters equals fewer future gun buyers.109
The gun industry coalition attempting to reverse this trend has manufactured a nationwide lobbying campaign to pressure state legislatures to lower the legal hunting age. “Studies show that children’s interests and leisure time are set by age 12. We wanted to get to them before soccer, hockey and other organized sports,” a Michigan Department of Natural Resources employee explained about the purpose of the younger-hunter programs.110
It is no surprise that the gun industry’s goal is to lower safety standards to the cellar in pursuit of profits. “Our goal is to have all fifty states in the least restrictive category,” a Families Afield report stated.111 The “least restrictive” category means states that have “regulations or laws that 1) permit youth hunting largely at the parents’ discretion and 2) hunter education requirements that largely permit youth participation before passing hunter education tests. None of these states have a minimum hunting age.”112
Can this feverish marketing of guns to kids be good in the long run for America’s children? The answer is clearly no. This book has already described several stories of children who were killed or maimed by guns in America. One of them was the four-year-old boy in Hampton, Arkansas, who found a loaded handgun in a living room cabinet and shot his five-year-old sister to death on the day the Supreme Court handed down its wisdom in Heller.113 The tide of tragedy continues without ebb.
On March 14, 2012, a traveling family stopped for gas near Tacoma, Washington. The father put his pistol under the seat and got out to pump gas. The mother went inside the station. A three-year-old boy in the car climbed out of his child seat, found the gun, and shot himself to death. “It is incredible in light of the other ones,” said Tacoma police officer Naveed Benjamin. “You would think people would take more care, not less.”114
The “other ones” to whom Officer Benjamin referred were two other children who had been shot within a month’s time in Washington State. On February 22, 2012, an unidentified nine-year-old “75-pound boy with the buzz cut and blue eyes” brought a loaded 45 caliber semiautomatic pistol in a backpack to his third-grade class in Bremerton, Washington. When he dropped the pack on his desk, the gun fired. A bullet struck eight-year-old Amina Kocer-Bowman near her spine, causing serious injuries. As of March 2012, she had undergone five surgeries and remained in serious condition. The boy had taken the gun from the home of his mother and her boyfriend.115
The third shooting gives the lie to the gun enthusiasts’ tired argument that such tragedies happen only to people who lack, in Josh Sugarmann’s words, “the temperament, training or personal fortitude to own a gun.”116 On March 10, 2012, seven-year-old Jenna Carlile, the daughter of a Marysville, Washington, police officer, was playing with her three younger siblings in the family’s silver Volkswagen van. The parents were nearby. Jenna’s younger brother found a loaded gun in the glove compartment and accidentally shot her in the torso. She died of her injury the next day.117
It was not the first time the child of a law enforcement officer—a class of persons society presumes to have the proper training and temperament to be trusted with guns—was killed in Washington State by a sibling. Neighbors of Clark County Sheriff Sergeant Craig Randall complained for fourteen years about the lax handling of guns around the family home and about incidents involving some of the six Randall children and guns. Among other things, Sergeant Randall kept his semiautomatic pistol at home and unlocked. On January 13, 2003, ten-year-old Emilee Joy Randall, the youngest of the children and only daughter, whom the family called Princess, was shot in the head and killed by her older brother, Matthew. Her brother, who was already on probation for a gun-related conviction, had picked up his father’s gun from a bedroom dresser.118
Sadly, these few anecdotes from a single state reflect the national data. A 2002 study at the Harvard School of Public Health found that “children 5–14 years old were more likely to die from unintentional firearm injuries, suicides and homicides if they lived in states (or regions) with more rather than fewer guns.” Other types of violence against children—specifically nonfirearm homicides and nonfirearm suicides—were “not significantly associated with the availability of guns.”119 The relationship between more guns and shattered children’s lives was true regardless of state-level poverty, education, and urbanization. The study’s authors concluded that “where there are more guns children are not protected from becoming, but are rather much more likely to become, victims of lethal violence.”120
The gun lobby does not let the lives of children get in the way of its resolute opposition to even the most tepid laws or regulations restricting access to guns. In Washington, State Senator Adam Kline sponsored legislation to simply require owners to have trigger locks and safes for their guns. “The NRA gets up in arms and says, ‘Oh my God, this is the end of the Second Amendment. This is total violation of everything that Western civilization stands for.’ The fact is it would’ve saved this girl’s health and it would save the lives of kids,” Kline said, referring to the shooting of Amina Kocer-Bowman.121
It may be that gun enthusiasts believe, as the gun industry and its front groups cynically pretend, that by mixing kids and guns they are continuing a historical ethic of self-reliance and promoting traditional values. If that is so, they are blind to the consequences, which are thrown into high relief by looking at the rest of the world.
In contrast, children in other industrialized nations are not dying from guns. Compared with children 5–14 years old in other industrialized nations, the firearm-related homicide rate in the United States is 17 times higher, the firearm related suicide rate 10 times higher, and the unintentional firearm-related death rate 9 times higher. Overall, before a child in the United States reaches 15 years of age, he or she is 5 times more likely than a child in the rest of the industrialized world to be murdered, 2 times as likely to commit suicide and 12 times more likely to die a firearm-related death.122
The obvious question is, why is the gun industry doing this to America, and especially to its women and children? The next section answers that question, going beyond the motivation of mere greed to explain the method behind the industry’s dark madness.