Category Archives: Look About

A Monumental Tragedy At Virginia Tech

By now it’s all over the news, and the news just keeps getting worse:

Thirty-two people have reportedly been killed and more than two dozen others injured during a shooting rampage this morning at Virginia Tech, making it the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history, according to law enforcement sources.

This is all that will be talked about on the news tonight, and probably discussed here and elsewhere in the days to come I’m sure. There is an obvious gun control/right to keep and bear arms discussion that will probably develop out of this story, but, for now, I would like it if everyone just followed Radley Balko’s advice:

I guess all I have to say is that what happened at Virginia Tech today is horrible and heartbreaking. Now’s not the time for debates about gun control or campus access, or security. Now’s the time for sympathy and grieving. What a terrible story.

There will be enough grieving across Virginia, and across the nation, in the days to come. Let’s leave the political debate for another time.

For those interested, I’m updating when I can with information from Virginia bloggers over at Below The Beltway.

Update: Similar thoughts from Rick Moran:

In a perfect world, gun control laws would have kept the weapons out of the shooter’s hands. Also in a perfect world, one of his potential victims would have been armed and cut short his quest for glory. Despite the fact we don’t live in a perfect world and there’s no sign of one emerging any time soon, we can count on the idiots in Congress and the media to start the political posturing, dying to make speeches and write columns telling us about how wrong the opposition is and how this shooting proves this or that about America, or Americans with guns, or violence in America, or how our schools are screwed up, or even blame the victims for not dodging the bullet that killed them.

I’m not near a television right now, and don’t have access to CNN, Fox or MSNBC, I’m sure that’s what’s happening already and that, tonight, Anderson Cooper, Larry King, Nancy Grace, Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olberman, and Sean Hannity, will all be using this tragedy to advance their particular positions.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a time and a place for a gun control debate, I’m just saying that perhaps we should wait for more than a day to pass before it starts.

Fighting City Hall….And Winning

Today’s Washington Post tells the story of a man who dared to take on one of Virginia’s largest counties on his own, and won:

The Great Virginia Parking Ticket Battle began with a burst of expletives one Saturday morning in October 2000, when Woodbridge resident Robert W. Eberth, a retired Navy captain, found a $35 citation on the windshield of his 1990 Ford Taurus. NO VALID STATE INSPECTION, it said.

Eberth had been ticketed under Prince William County Code 13-322, mandating up-to-date inspection stickers for vehicles parked on public roads. True, Eberth had allowed the Taurus’s registration to lapse. But he was saving the car for his teenage son and had parked it in the private lot of his apartment complex.

Eberth examined the ticket. He cursed a little more. Then he looked up 13-322 on the Internet.

“Something is very wrong with this picture,” he said to himself. He checked the box marked “contest.”

Over the next six years, representing himself in multiple court battles, Eberth took his parking-ticket dispute all the way to the Virginia Court of Appeals. Last month, he won.

A three-judge panel in Alexandria went even further than Eberth had imagined, ruling that Prince William had no authority to ticket vehicles with expired inspection stickers parked on private — or public — property. The ruling by Judge Robert J. Humphreys said state law prohibits only the operation of a vehicle with an expired inspection sticker, casting doubt on whether police anywhere in Virginia can ticket parked vehicles with expired stickers.

Because Prince William’s code dates to at least 1965, the ruling suggests that the county has been erroneously citing drivers for more than four decades. Since 2000 alone — the year Eberth got his first of three tickets — Prince William has written 29,871 citations under Code 13-322, for fines totaling more than $1 million.

Cheers to Mr. Eberth for winning one for the little guys.

New Libertarian Social News Site

Many of you are familiar with Digg.com, a news aggregator site where the actions of the community of readers propel “worthy” stories ahead of the rest. Essentially, they’re designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unfortunately, Digg has some inherent biases and a herd mentality that usually forces smaller blogs and news items, despite their worth, to be overlooked. That being said, several of us here have submitted stories there regularly, because every new reader which happens upon this site is valued.

Recently a new site devoted to the libertarian side of the internet has opened. Liberty Loop operates on the same sort of principle as Digg, but the content is mostly libertarian-oriented. It’s also a new site, so submitted stories are more able to rise to the top and be seen than on the larger sites, and based on it’s libertarian theme, the stories are likely to be seen by their true target audience. Check it out, I’ve been browsing a bit already and it looks like there’s some good content over there.

Hat Tip: Hit & Run

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