A Reddit user said the whole thing started while he was driving on the highway in moderate traffic. According to the thread, he had just made a lane change and the driver behind him did not like it. The other driver, who was in a truck or van, started honking and then stayed with him instead of just passing and moving on. The poster wrote that the man followed him off the main road and through the neighborhood, which was the point where he realized this had stopped being ordinary road rage and had turned into a person actively tracking him.
He said that once he knew the man was following him, he pulled his firearm and kept it in his lap as a precaution while still inside the car. He did not bring it up right away or point it out the window. He kept it low and waited to see whether the other driver was just going to keep yelling or was actually going to get out and come at him. According to the post, that answer came quickly.
The angry driver stopped close by, opened his door, and stepped halfway out. Then he pulled what the poster described as a very large screwdriver and started pointing it at him through the window while yelling what looked like, “I’m gonna f*** you up!” The commenter estimated the distance at only about 10 feet. So now he had a man partly out of his car, brandishing a long screwdriver like a weapon, yelling threats, and close enough that the whole thing felt like it could cross into an attack in the next second.
That was when the Reddit user picked up his pistol from his lap and showed it through the windshield. He made a point of saying that he did not point it directly at the man. He just made sure the other driver could see it. According to his account, that changed the entire scene immediately. The man saw the gun, dropped back into his vehicle, and drove off. No shots were fired. No one rushed the car after that. The whole encounter ended the second the weapon came into view.
Afterward, the poster said he did not enjoy any part of it and felt weird about the fact that he had displayed the gun without fully drawing down on the man. That was the whole reason he posted. He wanted to talk through whether he had handled it correctly. But the actual sequence he described was straightforward: highway slight, driver gets enraged, follows him through the neighborhood, stops close, produces a large screwdriver, starts threatening him from about 10 feet away, and only backs off once the gun is shown through the windshield.
What do you think — if a road-rage driver followed you into the neighborhood, stepped halfway out of his car, and started waving a huge screwdriver at you from 10 feet away, would showing the gun be enough for you too, or would you already be assuming it was about to get physical?
Original Reddit post: Brandished to de-escalate road rage. Did not enjoy it.
