Gun-totin' soccer mom

What can anyone possibly add to this?


Woman who carried gun to daughter's football match found shot and killed

A US woman who caused a stir last year by packing a pistol on her hip at her five-year-old daughter's football match was found shot to death in her home late yesterday with her husband. Police in Lebanon, Pennsylvania said they were not looking for a suspect in the killings.

Meleanie Hain, 31, and her husband Scott Hain, 33, had been having marital trouble lately, a neighbour told local news media. Neighbours reported hearing a boom and children screaming about 6pm; the couple's three children were home at the time but were unharmed.

Hain, a Lebanon, Pennsylvania gun enthusiast, last September wore a high-powered Glock pistol on her hip to a youth football match at a public park, alarming parents and children. After the game the opposing coach confronted Hain, who replied by giving him a pamphlet explaining her gun rights under the US constitution. Organisers of the football league told her to keep her gun away from future games and warned if she brought it again they would call police.

Meleanie Hain wears a loaded Glock 26 to her 5-year-old daughter's football match in Pennsylvania in September 2008. Photo: Jim Zengerle/AP

Parents complain to local authorities, and six days after the game Sheriff Michael DeLeo revoked Hain's license to carry a firearm. He cited a provision in Pennsylvania gun law forbidding individuals whose character and reputation portend a likelihood to threaten public safety from having a license.

Hain sued and a judge restored the license, though he questioned her judgement and asked her to keep the gun concealed if she brought it again to the football pitch.

Hain believed DeLeo violated her constitutional rights and targeted her unfairly. She said publicity surrounding the case had caused clients to pull their children from her baby sitting business, and said she had been ostracised by her neighbours. In November, she sued him, seeking $1m in damages.

The Brady Centre to Prevent Gun Violence, a national advocacy group, offered to defend DeLeo for free.

"It is a case that calls out for common sense," Brady Center attorney Daniel Vice said at the time. "It's ridiculous to bring a gun to a child's soccer game."
The case was delayed when an attorney was injured in an auto accident.

Hain became a heroine to gun rights advocates who favour loosening restrictions on carrying firearms, but her practice of carrying the gun when she went about town provoked a dim response from her neighbours.

"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," she told the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot News last year.

Bill to allow loaded guns in parks

The Democratic-controlled Congress is moving to restore a Bush administration policy that allowed loaded guns in national parks. The Senate voted Tuesday to allow guns in national parks and wildlife refuges, and the House could follow suit as soon as Wednesday.

Loaded guns in national parks. Democratic-controlled chambers passing such legislation gives lie to the right-wing charge of a monolithic government.

The measure is included in a popular bill imposing new restrictions on credit card companies. Democratic leaders have said they hope to send a final version to the White House for the president's signature by week's end.

Perfect example of tit-for-tat, horse trading.

The Senate vote is a stark reversal from what many gun-control advocates expected when a federal judge blocked the Bush policy in March. The decision reinstated restrictions that had been in place since the Reagan administration. The rules severely restrict guns in the national parks, generally requiring them to be locked or stored.

Another example of Bush not being a Reagan Republican.

The Obama administration accepted the March 19 ruling, saying that the Interior Department would review the policy over the next several months.

Political calculation: why take on the NRA now? It will have to wait.

Never mind that Harry Reid hides behind "second amendment rights" to cover his ass for the upcoming Senate election campaign where he will seek re-election, and is currently in a not-ver-strong position, and that the NRA dissimulates it influence. Get this next one.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican, who inserted an amendment to the credit card bill that would allow concealed, loaded guns in parks and refuges, said the gun measure protects every American's Second Amendment rights and also protects the rights of states to pass laws that apply to their entire state, including public lands.

"Visitors to national parks should have the right to defend themselves in accordance with the laws of their states," Mr. Coburn said.

Huh? What threat is there that visitors need loaded, concealed weapons in national parks, and, if such threats exist,, isn't that a sad commentary on our parks and on the National Park Service?

Headline news

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President Obama appears likely to sign a provision, added to a measure on credit cards, that would allow loaded and concealed weapons in national parks.

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U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican Cartels

Thomas G. Mangan, a spokesman for the A.T.F., with an assault rifle popular with drug cartels.

U.S. Moves Against Top Mexican Drug Cartel

A gun tied to a killing in Mexico and a dealer in Phoenix.



The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them. When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns. Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would send them to adrug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.

Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico. Mexican civilians must get approval from the military to buy guns and they cannot own large-caliber rifles or high-powered pistols, which are considered military weapons.

How ironic: gun laws are tougher in Mexico, so the narcos go over the border to the US to get weapons to protect their business of providing US noses with coke. Permission from the military to buy guns; imagine that. There could still be corruption, of course, but that ensures much greater control. And military weapons are restricted to the military.

The ease with which Mr. Iknadosian and two other men transported weapons to Mexico over a two-year period illustrates just how difficult it is to stop the illicit trade, law enforcement officials here say.

A native of Egypt who spent much of his life in California, Mr. Iknadosian moved his gun-selling operation to Arizona in 2004, because the gun laws were more lenient, prosecutors said.

He moved to where gun laws were more lenient.

Over the two years leading up to his arrest last May, he sold more than 700 weapons of the kind currently sought by drug dealers in Mexico, including 515 AK-47 rifles and one .50 caliber rifle that can penetrate an engine block or bulletproof glass, the A.T.F. said.

Why does a civilian need a .50 caliber weapon? Not to shoot deer, or even bear.

Miss Sinaloa

Un juez federal concedió a la miss Sinaloa 2008, Laura Zúñiga Huizar, y a otras ocho personas un arraigo de 40 días por delitos de delincuencia organizada, contra la salud, violación a la ley de armas de fuego y operaciones con recursos de procedencia ilícita | Ver nota

Supremes OK heat

How might the Daily News of the New York Post front page look tomorrow? Supremes OK heat is my guess.

Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights

Divided Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Ban

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The 5-4 ruling was the first ever to directly address the meaning of the Second Amendment’s ambiguous text, but the decision left open the possibility that less restrictive state laws were permissible.

• Text of the Decision (pdf)
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Huntin' Hillary?

Now this is how he should be doing it. Attack her for her inconsistencies and 'misspeaking' and lying. Do not cede the initiative.

Barack Obama hammered rival Hillary Clinton for her denunciation of his comments at a fundraiser in San Francisco, and he criticized her recent admission over the weekend that she was a hunter:

"Shame on her," Obama said, echoing one of Clinton's own atacks on him. "Shame on her, she knows better."

Obama said he was disappointed with her for her response and then launched into a new criticism of Clinton over her recent admission of being a hunter, and compared her sarcastically to Annie Oakley.

"She's running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsmen, how she values the Second Amendment, she's talking like she's Annie Oakley! Hillary Clinton's out there like she's on the duck blind every Sunday, she's packin' a six shooter! C'mon! She knows better. That's some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blinds."