When I was a kid, I used to love to ride in the back of my mom’s station wagon (who didn’t?), and I thought it was the greatest thing ever to stick my tongue out at the cars behind me. I don’t even think my mother was even aware of me doing so. Most drivers would just laugh, or make faces back.
Does that mean, if someone had gotten all hot and bothered, and rammed into our car, I would’ve been responsible?
Guess so.
Your mother would have been responsible for leaving you unsupervised in the back seat. She should be sitting back there with you while your father drove. Women have no business driving cars. Look what happens when you let women drive. Poor guys have no choice but to shoot at them.
Why are you letting the wench out of the kitchen?
While it is never ok to shoot at a car with humans in it, there is a point of distinction that has been thus far glossed over. Because there are two types of cars with humans in them, the more common being those which are not parked (i.e., in motion). Shooting at a parked car with humans in it is an awful thing to do, but shooting at a moving car (which almost always implies humans in it) is really never ever ok and is orders of magnitude worse. Well, maybe not orders of magnitude, but a lot worse.
I, on the other hand would hang an arm or leg limply out the window, hoping my father would get in trouble for transporting a child’s corpse.
It never worked, though. Stupid I-don’t-care drivers.
THIS… this is perfect. I’m stealing.
This never would have happened with a MAN MOM.
Yeah, when did flipping someone off become “road rage”? That’s stretching the definition pretty far solely for the purpose of blaming the victim.
It isn’t obvious? If someone does something that risks harm to themselves that is one thing. Putting their child at risk is something else. If I (man-father) am responsible for a minor child I am obligated to make decisions with their safety in mind. My risk tolerance should be different. Heck my behavior should reflect that I am modeling how I want my child to behave to others. Flipping other drivers off isn’t manly. Isn’t menschly.
Approaching and yelling at a feral dog wouldn’t be different doing it alone than if your six old was with you? What the dog did when provoked wasn’t your responsibility, you are under no obligation to not provoke, anyone who thinks you have some culpability if your six year old got hurt is victim blaming?
Raising your middle finger is telling someone to fuck off. That is more than impoliteness. Flipping off unknown strangers in public spaces over perceived impoliteness and offenses, getting in your way, slowing you down … is this really something you feel is okay, safe, to do? If someone routinely went around flipping off people they interacted with, in the post office, the drug store, the hot dog stand, on the street corners, in bars, are they blameless if it at some point results in an escalating conflict with someone with even more baseline anger and aggressiveness than they have, that ends up with someone, maybe an innocent bystander, hurt? Because they have no obligation to not provoke others and are not responsible for what happens when they provoke someone?
Or is it specifically okay and safe to do when dealing with people who don’t know each other hurtling near each other in thousands of tons of metal?
The world is full of people who are self-absorbed, stressed, sleep deprived, angry at baseline, sociopathic, and armed. There are rabid stray dogs. A rabid stray dog that attacks needs to be put down. A sociopathic human that attacks needs to be put away for a very long time. They are not excused because they were provoked. And. If you want to risk provoking either of them do it when not with your kid.
The person in question hurled a vehicle towards the mother, endangering her and her child at the beginning of the incident. That is what being cut off by someone in traffic means. So what is the appropriate reaction to having been put in danger of injury or death? To calmly accept it? The usual reaction to mortal danger is fight or flight and to expect someone to calmly consider all the alternatives at all times after having a close call is ridiculous. Yes, maybe it was not prudent to flip the other driver off, but it is completely understandable and even expected that you would make some kind of gesture or exclamation if someone deliberately endangers you and your child.
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So unladylike. Just lie back and enjoy it. Why make a big fuss. Guys gonna do what a guys gonna do.
But you have to assess risks realistically. Worrying that another driver might shoot you if you flip them off is not a reasonable fear. It’s the equivalent of not letting your child play outdoors because they might get mauled by a bear. These things could happen but they’re incredibly unlikely. If you start basing your decisions on million-to-one possibilities occurring, you won’t do anything (or let your child do anything).
There is an argument to be made for not flipping people off in front of your child because it provides them a bad role model. But this argument has nothing to do with the possibility of gunfire.
I’m not so sure I agree with this point, and it feels exceedingly important to me that we not appear to be blaming the mother.
I bicycle with a bike helmet on. Probably won’t hurt, might help.
I think the odds of somebody you just flipped off in traffic killing your grade school-aged child are ridiculously small.
But I can still manage not to flip that person off.
A few decades ago, in Southern California, I advised my hot-headed brother to stop giving other drivers the finger. “One of them may well have a gun,” I told him.
Some risk. No appreciable reward.
I want the shooters found, tried, and executed. I don’t blame the mother in this case.
But I would have tried my best to get away from that sought-after white car, and done it as quickly and ‘imperceptibly’ as possible.
People are nuts. The freeway shootings in SoCal are virtually epidemic right now.
I’ll call it a teachable moment, and I believe that I can learn from what happened here without blaming the mother.
I agree with the argument that you shouldn’t flip other people off because it’s rude. And you shouldn’t do it around your child because it teaches them a bad lesson about being rude.
But I don’t support the argument that you shouldn’t flip people off because they might shoot you in response. If your local traffic has reached the point that you can realistically assume you might get shot by another drive, then the reasonable response is you shouldn’t be driving a car at all. If there’s that kind of reckless gunfire going on in your community, your child might get shot by a stray bullet while they’re sleeping in their bed. Or grow up to think that shooting guns at people is normal behavior and engage in it the way other people might flip somebody off.
Enlightened contrarians can’t help themselves.
I’m going to humbly refer you to a response I made to – gulp – Octopus:
I want to live in an infinitely better world than the one we currently live in, and I’ll work hard to help us get there.
But logical consistency requires that I not adamantly deny the reality of the world I do live in.
Nobody anywhere, ever, should be decapitated for drawing images of Muslim deities. Nobody should ever be shot/have their child killed for flipping the bird on a freeway.
And I’ll crack a cold one when we get there.
But we aren’t there.
I disagree. I think there are no end of things you can do and not do that will minimize your risk in these situations apart from never leaving the house.
Another example:
A pedestrian pushes the button to walk across an intersection. His light turns green, he gets the ‘walk’ signal.
So he blissfully walks across the street, only to be plowed into by a distracted driver who blew right through the red light and killed the pedestrian.
The pedestrian is now what is often referred to as “dead right.”
The distracted driver is likely going to court, and may go to jail, but …
Nobody was saying that the pedestrian was to blame or that the driver is not to blame.
Note that there are degrees of being “cut off” on the highway. It might simply mean that someone merged into your lane not allowing what you perceive as a safe distance, whether or not you have to brake or drive evasively. Some people get hugely bent out of shape over “an invasion of my space”. In the following case, the “offenders” apparently were unaware they had committed an unpardonable provocation.
DSeid: “The world is full of people who are self-absorbed, stressed, sleep deprived, angry at baseline, sociopathic, and armed.”
Yes. And some of those people will react with violence to a brief touch of the horn, flashing of brights or even being glanced at in what they think is an unfriendly way (true, the classic middle finger is often viewed as being an even worse affront).
You can’t completely immunize yourself from road rage. I find myself more and more apt just to let things go. This tragic incident reinforces that view.
Given that one person in this incident shot at the other and killed a third, I find it beyond bizarre that someone (not you) is bending himself into a pretzel to come up with the most charitable interpretation of the unknowns (and in the absence of dashcam footage or TV CSI level investigation magic) unknowable aspects of the incident in favor of the shooter.
Twenty years ago, when I was young and impetuous, I was playing a mixed doubles tennis match with my wife. My wife was killing them (FIGURATIVELY) at the net on my serve. The response from the male party on the other side was to take wild swings trying to hit my wife. Not trying to get the ball in the court (most of his attempts hit the back fence on the full) but just trying to hit her in the head to get her off the net. Simultaneously his partner was standing right on the center line, trying to dissuade me from serving down the T.
I walked to the net, told her that my wife could take care of herself, but I was going to serve down the T whenever I bloody well felt like it and if she was hit on the full, it’s our point, and any injury she suffered would be her lookout.
Given that the male partner had already shown a propensity for boorish and violent behavior, should I have been worried that he’d go to his bag retrieve a Glock and blow me away?
Seems like some here would be looking to “fairly apportion the blame” if that happened. I mean a tennis match isn’t worth all that much. It wasn’t even a playoff match.
Was there a rash of tennis court shootings (ETA: around that area), around the time that game was being played ?