I don’t think you’ve ruined your reputation, but your arguments definitely come off as blaming the victim to me. Sure, you say you don’t want to blame the mother, but then make an argument that would make her partially to blame. You claim that it is a teachable moment, and give reasons why one should not flip someone off in the situation the mother was in. That is in effect blaming her.
You can more easily tell with the two examples you gave. People do in fact blame the victim in both scenarios. Someone who ostentatiously displays their wealth with easily removable items in an area known for thievery is very often partially blamed for the resulting theft. And of course the pedestrian who didn’t actually look both ways is considered partially at fault: even I can’t disagree with that one. They could get wind up hurt even if the driver was not at fault.
Both of those are situations where the consequences are foreseeable. But flipping someone off does not reasonably lead to someone shooting at you. In the time it took me to compose this post, I’m sure at least hundreds of people have flipped people off in their car without being shot at. And I’m not sure I’m not off by orders of magnitude.
Our country would have to degenerate much, much further before I would ever think that someone shooting at you was a foreseeable consequence to flipping someone off for cutting you off in traffic, or really any other situation except when someone is actually brandishing a gun.
Like @LittleNemo, I do not see what the mother did as having any bearing on the shooting at all. Someone who would shoot her for that would do so for her simply driving in a way they didn’t approve of. It just is not reasonable to use this as a reason that someone should never flip someone off.
And I say that as someone who can count on one hand the number of times he has flipped anyone off in a non-joking manner.