This morning on my way to work, I listened to a bell tolling for the victims of the Virginia Tech murders. CNN radio was playing the remembrance ceremony live, and I felt obligated to listen. Personally, it is a matter of respect for all of those victims who were gunned down by a lunatic. Listening to the bell toll for every one of them is the very least I could do, while thinking, reflecting and praying for all affected by these losses.

Perhaps it was the loss of my aunt and cousins in the train wreck, but I do feel that I can empathize on some level with these people. Losing someone is a horrible experience. Losing multiple people at once is almost unbearable. Fortunately, we had great support and made it through the trying times. I pray that those affected by this tragedy can do the same.

An unfortunate activity that has made me extremely upset is the fact that so many are using this incident to further their personal agendas. An amazing example is all of the anti-video game people blaming video game violence for this atrocity. I take issue with that logic – there were no video games found in his room. How did games cause this when there were none?

Next up, we have the anti-weapon people screaming that we should eliminate any possession of guns by anyone but perhaps police and the military. I take great issue with that branch of thought. Our constitution provides for us to lawfully own weapons with good reason. This country is still very young, and our country’s creators knew that try as they might, the republic they created could fail. The government could fall into a state like what they fought to escape, and the people may need to rise up and overtake their government.

We hope that type of situation never occurs, but it may, and I would like to be prepared. In a more practical sense, weapons serve the purpose of hunting and home/personal defense. People should face the reality that criminals will use weapons, illegal or not, and I should be able to defend my home and property with one. I’m not saying I need an M-16, but my pistol should suffice.

Over the next few weeks, some will mourn, some will try to capitalize, but everyone will move forward. One great commonality of the human spirit is that however we cope with an event, we will carry on and move forward.

I now have a fully (and properly) working blog and classified ads section. There were minor bugs in both the blog and ads, but all have been ironed out and everything seems to be coming up rosy.

My blog has gone through a MAJOR growth spurt. I have been steadily gaining viewers, but last month was un-freaking-believable. In January I had about 450 readers. Im February I had about 650 unique readers. However, at the end of last month I had almost 1,150 unique readers. Granted, about 100 of them were probably 0-30 seconds, and maybe 50 of them were search engine spiders, but that’s still pretty impressive to me.

As a result of the major increase in traffic, I will be using RSS feeds through Feedburner to try and keep track of how many subscribers I have. Please, if you haven’t done so, subscribe to the RSS feed. Especially if you have Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. They both have built-in readers.

The classified ads section is very simple and blank at this point. I am putting it up as an experiment. It is 100% free to use, and pretty simple once you register. The ads must be approved by me, but I’m pretty lenient. About the only thing that will be censored is blatant spam. Otherwise, lets promote it and sell some stuff! It is there for the sole purpose of creating a local version of “craigslist” or an online version of the print paper’s classified section.

Please reply with any ideas or comments you may have. I’m still amazed at the unique visitors to the ole blog.