Sitting on my front porch this morning, when the trash truck showed up and a half-dozen cars backed up behind him, I was (as usual) amazed that the noise from a trash truck, three pickups, and two cars were totally obliterated by one blubbering Hardly at the back of the line. I moved to this place to escape the I35 noise in the Twin Cities, but the biker noise on our county road is making me reconsider that move and I’ve been looking for a quieter place since; probably not in Minnesota where cops are not only terrified of biker gangbangers but are often among their grubby “club” memberships. If that isn’t a firing offense, cops are a long ways from being effectively “defunded.”
A while back an acquaintance trying to prove that people aren’t pissed off at motorcycle noise claimed that the rare Goldwing that passed through his small Wisconsin town with it’s idiot stereo system blasting was noisier and more irritating than the usual horde of idiots on Hardlys. He mentioned something about taking a shot at them and I wondered why that wasn’t happening all the time. He claimed there was some guy who had taken shots at bikers, “of all kinds,” and after a few days I decided to try and find that story. As best I can tell, it never happened. [His rebuttal is "This happened pre WWW, about 1988 and I believe between Poplar WI and Bayfield WI. At the time I was living in Duluth and it was my garbage man’s son who did the shooting. If memory serves me, which it sometimes doesn’t, his last name was 'Henderson.' If you could view the archives of the Duluth News Tribune I’m sure you would find the relevant stories as it was a bit of a sensational event in the region."]
And the question is, “Why not?” Americans shoot at every possible group of people, except actual bad guys. Gun nuts have slaughtered people in a dance club, people watching a country concert, people in churches (especially Black churches), high school kids, grade school kids, and, probably, pre-school kids, But actual assholes? Not so much. Where are you, John McClane, when your country really needs you?
If you do a Google search on “motorcycle” “shooting” (the quotes are necessary to get everything with “motorcycle” and “shooting” and nothing without both terms involved) you’ll get “About 25,900,000 results” with titles like “Woman dies following motorcycle gang shootout on I-4; Boyfriend charged with second-degree murder” and “Deputies investigate shooting at motorcycle club” and “Man, 22, was shot in the back of the head by motorcycle riders” and “Police investigating burglary suspect shooting, fatal ...” and lots more, but no one shooting at motorcyclists just because of the rage factor. Americans shoot each other when one person accidentally mows a bit of his neighbor’s weedy yard. Why aren’t there at least a few instances of guys going off the handle and opening up on a pack of biker gangbangers? Is there anything else in this country more irritating than some half-wit blasting the peace and quiet simply because his mommy didn’t love him and his daddy had the good sense to get the hell out of town when that moronic bimbo found herself pregnant?
I did find this story, which is pretty hilarious everywhere but the cops’ usual incompetence, “Deputies arrest 84-year-old woman who shot at neighbor's 'noisy' children.” I don’t know if the targets were actual “children” or just asshole teenagers with moron parents, but it’s pretty typical that the cops didn’t think of doing anything about a family of biker gangbangers. There is a not-unusual story about a drunken asshole biker who the cops found naked and rev’ing the engine of his hippobike because his neighbor had asked him to keep his dog quiet. There is no shortage of people complaining about this illegal behavior and a total absence of anything resembling law enforcement doing anything about it. As gun-loving as this country is and as much noise is made about “stand your ground” rights, you’d think someone would be cleaning the streets of these bozos. But you’d be wrong and disappointed.
Why is that?
There are some pretty sad reasons why cops don’t do the job they are paid to do. At least one ex-cop has an opinion, “The TRUTH About Loud Motorcycles, Automobiles, Trucks, the Police Won’t or Can’t Tell You." To sum him up, 49 of 50 states have laws that regulate the noise output of vehicles and “Mayors [and other political and bureaucratic city officials], motivated by political expediency and greed for the city coffer, opt to ignore the protective intent of well-established Federal and State muffler laws – laws enacted specifically for the “protection of the citizenry” within their jurisdiction – while these elected officials provide police protection and services for the law breakers i.e. the Loud Biker Cult[ure] and permit these narcissistic bullies to roam their municipalities unencumbered for days while the tax-paying citizenry suffers.”
I do not get why there aren’t occasional folks going off-the-rails and taking the actual law into their own hands, since the people paid to enforce laws are busy stuffing their maws with donuts. It almost seems un-American that the news stories aren’t filled with episodes about “ Good ‘ole Billy Bob just got tired of all that damn noise and shot up a bunch of bikes and burned down the biker bar with all of ‘em in it, pickin’ ‘em off when they came streaming out of the bar like a bunch of smoked-out ants, till the cops got there and took poor ‘ole Billy Bob down.” You’d think “’ole Billy Bob” would be a national hero with a parade attended by people from all over the country.
