The Conservative Cat

On Thursday, February 7, 2008, Charles Lee Thornton killed six people at a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Missouri, before being shot to death by police. The killing spree brought to an end a ten-year dispute over the difference between parking a car and illegal advertising.

You can read the story of the shooting here. The salient paragraph is this one.

Thornton had developed an especially tense relationship with [Directory of Public Works Kenneth] Yost, his brother Arthur said. Yost would often complain that Thornton was parking his commercial vehicles in residential neighborhoods. Some were parked in Thornton's driveway, some in a lot across the street.

Nowadays, we have things like Mapquest to help us find obscure retail stores located in suburban shopping plazas, but in the old days, large signs near the street were key to the whole process. Unfortunately, these signs are considered ugly, so a lot of suburbs and small towns made them illegal back in the Seventies and Eighties. It didn't take long, however, for business owners to realize that there was an alternative to the big sign next to the street: you buy a van, paint your message on the side, and park it outside your store.

Well, there's only one possible result to that sort of thing, and it is now illegal to park labeled commercial vehicles in public view unless there's a job in progress. You can, of course, buy magnetic signs that can be removed when you need to park your company van in your residential driveway. If, on the other hand, you decide to paint your van because you think free speech and common sense will prevail, then you're just asking for an endless stream of parking fines. If you're a sane person, you'll quit early on in the struggle or get help from these guys. If you're not a sane person, you'll dig yourself into a financial hole from which there is no escape but bankruptcy or death.

Big chain stores and franchises don't have to worry about such things, because they benefit from being part of a greater whole that has access to national advertising. As soon as you see golden arches, you know exactly what to expect and how much it's going to cost. With Pete's Burger Joint, you are flying blind. The little guy's only hope is that the local government will give him a break. Charles Thornton's story started when the construction contract he'd been promised turned out to be less lucrative than he'd expected. If things had gone the other way, then perhaps instead of a shooting we'd be talking about a corruption scandal.

Conservatives have known about this sort of problem for a long time. Thornton, however, lived in the illusory world of modern liberalism where government power is about protecting the little guy instead of "stomping all over him. In such a world, common sense and parking laws can coexist peacefully.

That ain't the world we live in.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat