Kirkwood Shooter

[Ben Woods]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080208/D8UM7S103.html

instead of "Shoot the Mayer" he should have yelled out "RonPaul2008.com" all press is good press Eh?... Seriously though, I think he went a bit too far, I don't draw my land in the sand up that far. They were taking his property (money) because he was 'illegally' parking on 'their' streets. But he could have found a less expensive way for both his parking and retribution problem.

[fedup100]

More of this and they may get a clue as to the limits of their taking.

[Redcard]

This guy had a LOT of mental problems.

[Ben Woods]

Yes, a couple hundred Charles Thornton's and it'd be a violent revolution. To what ends though? The revolution must be peaceful and volitional to have a resulting peaceful and free civilization. The ends don't justify the means, it is the means that determine the ends.

[rockwell]

Nations bomb people to make a point, how is this different?

(not that I endorse either, but you cannot preach measured reponses to the citizenry when the government itself sets the example of committing violence to resolve disagreements)

[Kregener]

http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s167/Kregener/BCDCover.jpg

Live Free or Die: How Many More Carl Dregas?

By Vin Suprynowicz

Special to The Libertarian Enterprise

"A well-regulated population being necessary to the security of a police state, the right of the Government to seize and destroy arms shall not be infringed."

Go where the land meets the water, anywhere in New England, and you will begin to understand how deeply the region of my birth lies in bondage to the Cult of the Omnipotent State.

Town and state governments throughout New England traditionally buy and dump tons of sea sand -- or whatever will pass for it -- along the shorelines of their municipal beaches and parks. It doesn't matter whether the shoreline of the lake, river or ocean cove in question was originally a reeded marshland, naturally filtering away pollutants while offering pristine habitat to waterfowl and a hundred other creatures -- the kind of place in which I (for one) would far rather spend my time communing with nature during that nine months of the year when it's not "time to turn, so you won't burn."

No matter: what the majority of taxpayers want is a sandy beach for picnicking and sunbathing (in fact, precious little "swimming" ever transpires), and that is what they darned well get.

Actually, the institutionalized destruction goes much deeper than this. "Urban Renewal," in New England, often includes development of new office complexes and highways on "unused" or "blighted" land. For 40 years now, the larger New England cities have bulldozed interstate highways through the "seedy, decrepit" areas of docks and profitable but low-rent private businesses which used to line their waterfronts, throwing small business owners on the dole and erecting their new throughways atop impassable 20-foot concrete embankments, until two whole generations have grown up within a mile or two of the ocean or the navigable Connecticut River in Hartford, Springfield, New Haven or Boston, without so much as seeing the water that gave their cities birth, except as a distant glitter far below the highway bridge they take to work.

But let a private citizen try to turn a slice of his own private, rocky shoreline into a boat dock, a sliver of sandy beach, or even a well-intentioned but "unpermitted" refuge for turtles and wood ducks (yes, I know of just such cases, in Connecticut and New Jersey) -- let him try to similarly adjust nature to his needs or wishes -- and suddenly the state authorities descend like locusts, seizing and destroying the privately-held turtles, demanding to see all the required permits, showering liens and injunctions like a freak April snow shower.

What's more, the very populace who blithely speed along on the shore-destroying freeways, who consider it their civic right to lie in pure white sand where geese and fox and a hundred other creatures used to raise their young, cheer with glee as these "greedy" private "despoilers of nature" are brought low, for daring to offend against the state-enforced religion of Environmentalism ... on their own property.

How dare such troglodytes tamper with sacred resources belonging to all the people, doing whatever they please with no more justification than the fact they happen to hold some bogus "private deed"?

Of course, the notion that one need only "apply for a permit" is nothing but misdirection, equivalent to telling the Jews as they boarded the trains to the East that they should be careful to "label your luggage carefully for when you return."

Big commercial developers who make big campaign contributions may well get some kind of hypocritical "certificate of environmental compliance" for their plans to pave and channelize the local waterfront ... requiring yet more government seizure of private property for another big "flood control project" upstream ... but the little guy faces years of hoop-jumping as his permit applications are lost, or returned for re-filing on updated forms, before they're finally denied.

At which point, the poor sad sack will learn to his dismay that it's too late to declare, "Well then, your whole permitting process is bogus, and I'm going ahead anyway."

At that point, the long-suffering citizen will be advised by a stern-voiced judge that he waived his right to appeal the validity of the permitting process when he filed his application (way back in the days when he was told "That's all there is to it,") thus tacitly acknowledging the right of the state to either grant or withhold its permission for the project in question!

Just ask 67-year-old carpenter Carl Drega, of Columbia, N.H.

[Ben Woods]

Yes Vin Suprynowicz is a great libertarian writer and The Ballad of Carl Drega is a great book. Still the means will determine the ends. I don't think violent revolution is practical, and I don't think it will get us to where we want to go. We must 'engineer freedom' in various ways.

[kgiese]

First of all this is tragic and my symathy goes out to the family. How are you linking this to Dr. Paul? There is good and evil everywhere. When good people do nothing evil prospers. It seems that our political process failed us again resulting in more violence. It is a shame.

[fedup100]

Yes Vin Suprynowicz is a great libertarian writer and The Ballad of Carl Drega is a great book. Still the means will determine the ends. I don't think violent revolution is practical, and I don't think it will get us to where we want to go. We must 'engineer freedom' in various ways.

uh huh, that's what Jefferson would tell us. How much shit do you think the true patriots are going to take being crammed down their throats. This man wasn't mental, the note on his bed said it all.

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Feature-Article.htm?InfoNo=029888

Read it before it disappears.......the only reason they haven't branded him a nut case patriot is because he was black.




Gunman's note: `The truth will come out'

Powell Gammill
Website: Gammill For Congress
Blog: Fascist Nation
Date: Feb. 8, 2008
Subject: Revolution

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, Associated Press Writer 46 minutes ago

A gunman carrying a grudge against City Hall left a suicide note on his bed warning "The truth will come out in the end," before he went on a deadly shooting spree at a council meeting, his brother told The Associated Press Friday.

Arthur Thornton, 42, said in an interview at the family's home that he knew his brother was responsible for the killings when he read the one-line note.

"It looks like my brother is going crazy, but he's just trying to get people's attention," Thornton said, explaining he believed the note reflected his brother's growing frustration with local leaders. Police have the note, he said.

After storming the meeting and killing five people Thursday night, Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton was fatally shot by law enforcers. Friends and relatives said he had a long-standing feud with the city, and he had lost a federal free-speech lawsuit against the St. Louis suburb just 10 days earlier. At earlier meetings, he said he had received 150 tickets against his business.

The victims were identified Friday as Public Works Director Kenneth Yost, Officer Tom Ballman, Officer William Biggs and council members Michael H.T. Lynch and Connie Karr. Flowers and balloons were placed outside City Hall Friday in their honor.

The city's mayor, Mike Swoboda, was in critical at an intensive care unit, St. John's Mercy Medical Center spokeswoman Lynne Beck said. Another victim, Suburban Journals newspaper reporter Todd Smith, was in satisfactory condition, Beck said.

"This is such an incredible shock to all of us. It's a tragedy of untold magnitude," Tim Griffin, Kirkwood's deputy mayor, said at a news conference. "The business of the city will continue and we will recover but we will never be the same."

The meeting had just started when the shooter opened fire, said Janet McNichols, a reporter covering the meeting for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The gunman killed one officer outside City Hall, then walked into the council chambers, shot another and continued pulling the trigger, St. Louis County Police spokeswoman Tracy Panus said Friday. A witness said the gunman yelled "Shoot the mayor!" as he fired shots in the chambers.

As the man fired at City Attorney John Hessel, Hessel tried to fight off the attacker by throwing chairs, McNichols said. The shooter then moved behind the desk where the council sits and fired more shots at council members.

"We crawled under the chairs and just laid there," McNichols told ABC's "Good Morning America." "We heard Cookie shooting, and then we heard some shouting, and the police, the Kirkwood police had heard what was going on, and they ran in, and they shot him."

Thornton was often a contentious presence at the council's meetings; he had twice been convicted of disorderly conduct for disrupting meetings in May 2006.

The city had ticketed Thornton's demolition and asphalt business, Cookco Construction, for parking his commercial vehicles in the neighborhood, said Ron Hodges, a friend who lives in the community. The tickets were "eating at him," Hodges said.

"He felt that as a black contractor he was being singled out," said Hodges, who is black. "I guess he thought mentally he had no more recourse. That's not an excuse."

The weekly Webster-Kirkwood Times quoted [Mayor] Swoboda as saying in June 2006 that Thornton's contentious remarks over the years created "one of the most embarrassing situations that I have experienced in my many years of public service."

The mayor's comments came during a meeting attended by Thornton two weeks after he was forcibly removed from the chambers. Swoboda had said the council considered banning Thornton from future meetings but decided against it.

In a federal lawsuit stemming from his arrests during two meetings just weeks apart, Thornton insisted that Kirkwood officials violated his constitutional rights to free speech by barring him from speaking at the meetings.

But a judge in St. Louis tossed out the lawsuit Jan. 28, writing that "any restrictions on Thornton's speech were reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and served important governmental interests."

Another brother, Gerald Thornton, said the legal setback may have been his brother's final straw. "He has (spoken) on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue," he said.