A Reddit user said he had recently moved from Memphis to southeast Minnesota and had gotten careless about carrying because the new area felt so much safer. He wrote that his permit had expired and he had not bothered to renew it. Then one night, while he was driving with his girlfriend, he came up on a scene that changed his mind fast.
According to the post, they were coming through an area where a crash had just happened. A woman was outside waving them down frantically, trying to get someone to stop. He said he pulled over to see what was going on. The woman told them a man had crashed into her car and was now trying to get into her vehicle. From the way he described it, the whole thing was messy and moving quickly, with the woman shaken and trying to get help while the man was still nearby in the dark.
The Reddit user said that as he was trying to figure out what was happening, the man suddenly came charging out of the darkness and headed straight toward the woman’s car. He wrote that the guy was trying to get into it and was acting aggressive enough that he believed the woman was in real danger. That was when he drew. He did not tell it like some long standoff with a lot of shouting. He described it more like a few fast seconds where a woman was trying to keep a man out of her car and he decided he had to stop the man before it got worse.
He said the gun coming out was enough. The man stopped, the situation broke, and police were called. No shots were fired. But the event stuck with him because it happened at exactly the point in his life when he had started convincing himself he did not need to carry as much anymore. By the time it was over, he said that idea was gone.
The poster also said the whole thing made him go get his permit renewed. In his telling, that was really the lasting consequence. He had moved somewhere quieter, let himself feel too comfortable, and then wound up in the middle of a roadside situation where a woman was trying to get help and a man was trying to force his way into her car in the dark. He made it clear he was done assuming “safe area” meant “nothing bad will happen.”
What do you think — if you stopped to help after a crash and saw a man suddenly come out of the dark and try to force his way into a woman’s car, would you step in like he did, or stay back and wait for police?
Original Reddit post: I had to draw a gun.
