This week, Jon Meis bravely stopped an awful situation from getting worse when he tackled and pepper-sprayed Seattle Pacific University shooter Aaron Ybarra as he was reloading his weapon. Though other students helped Meis keep Ybarra pinned to the ground until the police arrived, the 22-year-old volunteer security guard and engineering student is being hailed as the incident’s main hero. And it turns out that Meis is getting married soon, which means that all the people demoralized by the seemingly constant news of mass shootings have a chance to do something nice for a person who stopped one.
Links to Meis and his fiancé’s Target and Crate and Barrel wedding registries began circulating on the internet soon after his name became public. Seattle’s KIRO reports that, by the beginning of the weekend, almost every registry item available online had been purchased for the couple. Meanwhile, Jessamyn McIntyre, a Seattle ESPN producer who wanted to thank Meis, set up a fundraising page to pay for his honeymoon. Over $25,000 has been donated so far. While it would be nice if the promise of extra wedding gifts was enough to inspire more people to act as Meis did, the fact that it probably won’t means that he deserves this stuff that much more.
