A colleague recently said to me, “Every biker that rides past me acts like an a**hole!”
That’s probably an over-statement but it’s her perspective and there are enough dangerous and reckless riders out there to make her wary of motorcycles. I’d wager there are more crummy car drivers, simply because there are more of them. And if every motorist was wary of bikes perhaps there would be fewer collisions with them. But I digress.
This little news item came from the This Is True newsletter from a news article in the Myrtle Beach Sun. It’s another bit of evidence that some bikers are total tools. They can ruin it for the rest of us.
“Horry County, S.C., was sick of the motorcycle “burnouts” being done at a biker bar in Murrells Inlet, so it passed a new ordinance prohibiting the practice, where bikers get the rear wheel spinning to burn rubber, calling it a “public nuisance” because of the smoke and noise generated. Now, the biker bar in question has made a federal case out of it — literally. The bar, Suck Bang Blow (yes, really: the newspaper likes to abbreviate that to SBB), filed a lawsuit to challenge the law on the grounds that burnouts are Constitutional “free speech.” The county has had the case moved to federal court, since it deals with a Constitutional issue. SBB “believes that providing these expressive performances to the public is a beneficial social activity which enhances individuals’ conscious ability to assimilate,” the lawsuit says. Burnouts, the suit continues, are about the bikers “expressing their manliness and macho, as all males are prone and inclined to do to a greater or lesser degree.”