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Violent crime that strikes the Roanoke Valley usually occurs in the abstract.

Victims usually are "other people," you know? Rare is the day when it slaps you in the face.

Which is why what happened to Brenda Hale on Sunday sounds shocking when you hear her tell the story.

Hale, 63, is the Roanoke branch NAACP president, and she's no stranger to violence.

At age 7, she witnessed her father fatally shoot her mother in their home in the Hurt Park neighborhood.

Hale came face to face with it as a nurse in the military. And as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she has endured taunts that she should be lynched from self-styled Nazis.

Despite all that, she was still unnerved late Monday afternoon.

She hadn't slept a wink, Hale said, since she found herself involved in a wild car-to-car shooting that ended with one of those cars smashing into hers.

Read the rest of the column here.

Colin Goddard was one of the survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre. After graduation, he worked as a volunteer for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and he's now a paid staffer there.

This past summer, Goddard took a little trip to four gun shows in four states, where he and/or an associate purchased handguns and semiautomatic rifles from unlicensed sellers with no background check, no ID.

The resulting video is rather eye-opening: guns for cash with few questions asked.

The video is part of the Brady Campaign's efforts to close the so-called "gun show loophole," in which licensed sellers are required to perform "instant" background checks on handgun buyers, but unlicensed individuals who sell firearms there are not.

As others on this blog have already noted, some person-to-person gun transactions already happen that way. (Depending on the state, often those transactions are supposed to require ID and a minimum age).

Goddard isn't the only Virginia Tech survivor who's taking an activist stance on the proliferation of guns.

Last week, survivor Elita Habtu wrote a column in the Collegiate Times about how easy it is to get a concealed-carry permit in Virginia. Even if you've never touched a gun.

Wikimedia Commons

I am asking for your help, regulars and newbies, in writing my Thanksgiving Day column.  It will be your answers to the following broad question:

What are you thankful for?

Please write something from your heart, rather than from those liberal/conservative/atheist/fundamentalist/cynic/sexist/hunter/animal-rights activist/sarcastic, etc parts of your head.

Please DON'T tell us why you are happy that a Democrat is at long last in the White House, or why you're thankful that the GOP has reasserted itself in Virginia elections, or because abortion is legal or that you're thankful for Virginia's upcoming concealed weapons in bars legislation or any of those other like things.

A couple of notes:

1) Keep your entries to 50 words, give or take a few, and post them as comments to this blog, or in private emails to me at this link. Or, at dan(dot)casey(at)roanoke(dot)com with the subject line Thankful.

2) At the end of your 50 words include your first and last name and locality and state, like this: Dan Casey, Roanoke, Va. (I will not publish stuff in the column without a full name & locality.)

I will sort through these beginning Friday Nov. 20 and cull a wide-ranging bunch of heartfelt stuff for the column that appears on Thanksgiving.

I'll tell you one thing I'm thankful for: That I have a bunch of earnest and passionate readers of this blog who will help me write that day's column.

Cheers, and let's see the thanks pour in!

--dan

Joshuashearn/Wikicommons

One theory of the free-enterprise system holds that when capitalist A develops an in-demand product or service, he/she can pretty much set the price and reap a tidy profit -- at least until capitalist B comes along with a similar offering.

And I have no doubt that Bob Marcus, the owner of the Concealed Carry Institute, has been raking it in with all the publicity yours truly has been giving his nifty handgun diploma mill. (Bob, if you're reading this, you ought to make a sizable donation in my name to a charitable organization. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence works for me).

In terms of online concealed-carry courses, we now have Capitalist B. American Firearms Training offers a online streaming video course with which you can earn a certificate good enough to meet the "competence requirement" of Virginia's concealed-carry permit law.

Read more »

Sarah Palin is scheduled to be at Valley View Mall in Roanoke Sunday promoting her book "Going Rogue: An American Life," but you don't have to wait for that event to get a peek.

The book goes on sale today. Palin was on Oprah yesterday.

Huffington Post already has published a bunch of the more interesting excerpts. The Associated Press, meanwhile, has published a fact-check of the story under the headline: "Palin's book goes rogue on some facts."

And above is the YouTube video of one of the funnier moments of the campaign, when a couple of Montreal deejays phone-pranked her by pretending to to be French President Nicholas Sarkhozy.

Here's the exeprt Huffington Post has about that:

By that time I'd received calls from presidents of other countries and our own, and had met elder statesmen and other dignitaries, so it didn't surprise us too much that we'd be speaking with the French leader.

He's got to be drunk, I thought.

I didn't want to offend the president of France, but this was getting stupid. I kept thinking, surely, someone will pop up and say something like, "Okay, the five minutes are up," but the call just went on and on and on. By now, I was thinking exit strategy. And I kept trying to laugh, even though it was increasingly unfunny.

Right away, the phones started ringing. One of the first calls was Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. "How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?!"

Good question, I thought. Weren't you the ones who set this up?"

Make sure you watch/listen to the video. It's an oldie but a goodie.

Meanwhile, Palin tells ABC's Barbara Walters that she wants to play a major role in national politics, "if people will have me."

Here's one for you readers: What questions would YOU ask of the expected throngs who show up at Valley View Mall Sunday?

Bonus points for funny suggestions!

We get lots of feedback here at column central. It comes as phone calls, voice mails, e-mails and, yes, in comments to the blog.

Certainly it's one of the most fun parts of this job. Today, we'll review some excerpts.

Many readers commented on my recent musings about upcoming renovations to the Roanoke City Market Building.

One of those bemoaned the onslaught of money-excreting tourists who followed "improvements" to the City Dock area of Annapolis, Md., my hometown.

That brought back both good and bad memories for Richard Anderson, an ex-Annapolitan who for the past 25 years has called Rockbridge County home.

"The resulting congestion [in Annapolis] of people and traffic, especially in the summer time, encouraged us, reluctantly, to relocate from Annapolis to the Shenandoah Valley," Anderson wrote. "And now, whenever we have an occasion to revisit Annapolis, we know we made the correct decision."

Read the rest of the column here.

Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Charlottesville

Oops!

Looks like the Danville Tea Party is NOT going to burn Tom Perriello in effigy after all. The event is off.

Greg Sargent has the story:

Nigel Coleman, chairman of the Danville Tea Party, says the local property owner hosting the rally asked him to pull the plug.

“We will not be going forward with the plan,” a crestfallen Coleman told me by phone moments ago. “We had to cancel it. The property owner won’t allow us to do it. The media attention was something that he didn’t want.”

Coleman said he was upset that people had gotten the wrong idea about his plan. “I’m disappointed that the story got out of hand and people misinterpreted something we thought would be a little historical lesson. They made people believe that we were committing an act of violence,” he said, adding that the “they” in question were the “liberal blogs.”

Coleman told The News & Advance in Lynchburg that he really boned the publicity for the event, and suggested it had given Tea Parties elsewhere a black eye:

“I feel like I obviously handled this poorly, as far as the press goes,” Coleman said. “We really should have thought this through more ... and seen how this was going to affect not only us, but other TEA parties and the TEA party movement in general.”

Check out the Danville Tea Party's Web site for more on their defense of what they were planning to do.

Note: In an earlier post I wrote the Tea Party/effigy burning was slated for this past Saturday. It's unclear to me whether that was correct. The Chatham Star-Tribune report suggested it was slated for Saturday Nov. 14. But The News & Advance report says it was for Saturday Nov. 21.

The legend of Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis and the no hitter he pitched on LSD against the San Diego Padres on June 12, 1970 is an enduring one. There's spare corroborating evidence for it, of course -- it is Ellis' story and his alone. Now, we have a hilarious animation that illustrates it, with accompanying audio in which Ellis describes that interesting day.

"Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid," reads an excerpt from the text on the video's YouTube page.

Btw: It's doubtful that the acid provided any kind of magic groove that helped Ellis pitch flawlessly that day. He struck out six, walked eight (and hit at least two batters). According to Ellis, he could see catcher Jerry May's signals only because May put reflective tape on his fingers.

Enjoy!

Here's a case that likely would never happen in America:

A British man was convicting of possessing a sawed-off shotgun -- which he found discarded in his yard -- when turned it into police. From This is Surrey Today:

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty".

Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.

Law professor Jonathan Turley says it's a case that cried out for jury nullification.

The judge disagreed. He said "The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant."

Gosh, this is as wrongheaded and dumb as granting concealed-carry permits to people who have never touched a handgun before. And btw: I'm not the only one who did THAT.

Thank you, Jason, for the tip!

It is not even Thanksgiving yet and we already have a boycott! This may be one festive holiday season indeed.

The American Family Association has called for a boycott on Old Navy, The Gap and Banana Republic, three chain stores that are all owned by the same company.

The reason? Said retailing company has consistently refused to use the word "Christmas" in its late-in-the-year advertisements, opting instead for the unAmerican, highly suspicious term "holiday." (Watch this YouTube video to see how wrong the AFA is about that).

Joe McCarthy would be proud. From the AFA Web site:

For years, Gap has refused to use the word Christmas in its television commercials, newspaper ads and in-store promotions, despite tens of thousands of consumer requests to recognize Christmas and in spite of repeated requests from AFA to do the same.

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