A Reddit user said one of the worst moments he ever had with a gun started at highway speed in rush-hour traffic. According to his comment in the thread, an old man in a work van used the van to sideswipe him and push him across three lanes of traffic onto the shoulder. He wrote that it happened at 55-plus miles per hour and screwed his car up badly, though not quite as badly as he first thought in the moment. That detail mattered because it explains why he did not just flee right away. From his seat, after the van forced him onto the shoulder, it looked like the other driver had finally realized he had gone way too far and might just sit tight until police got there.
He said both vehicles stopped on the shoulder, and for about a minute the other driver did nothing. That pause convinced him things might calm down. He picked up the phone and called the police non-emergency line, thinking he could report the crash and wait it out. That was when the whole thing turned. While he was still on the phone, the man in the van came barging up to the car screaming and demanding a fight. The commenter made a point of saying this was all happening just feet away from active traffic, with cars still flying by while this older guy was raging on the shoulder.
According to the story, that was when he drew.
He did not describe some long back-and-forth or a gradual escalation. The man was at the car, screaming, and the driver brought the gun out while still inside the vehicle. Then it got even worse. The angry driver beat on the car, grabbed the driver’s door, and ripped it open. The Reddit user said the force of it actually broke the locks. So now this was no longer a road-rage lunatic outside the window. It was a raging man who had physically opened the door and was right there with the traffic screaming past only a few feet away.
He wrote that the change in the man was immediate the second he realized there was a pistol pointed at him. In the poster’s words, the old man “magically sobers down.” He stopped the screaming, stopped the attempt to force the issue, and walked back to his van. There was no fight after that. The gun ended the confrontation as soon as the attacker understood what was waiting for him inside the car.
The driver then hung up on non-emergency and switched to 911. He said police took 45 minutes to arrive. And when they finally did, things somehow got even more frustrating. According to the comment, officers recorded basically the opposite version of the story and left out the near-violence and the firearm part entirely. So after being sideswiped across three lanes, forced onto the shoulder, rushed at while on the phone, and having his driver’s door ripped open by a screaming man, he ended up with a report that did not reflect what he said had actually happened.
That was the story he told. An old man in a work van shoved him across three lanes of rush-hour traffic and onto the shoulder. Both vehicles stopped. The driver thought maybe the guy had cooled off and called police. Instead, the man stormed up screaming, beat on the car, ripped the driver’s door open hard enough to break the locks, and only stopped once he saw a pistol pointed at him from inside. Then he backed off, went to his van, and the police arrived 45 minutes later to write up a version of events the victim said barely matched what had just happened.
What do you think — if someone had already sideswiped you across three lanes and then ripped your driver’s door open on the shoulder, would you have assumed the fight was coming no matter what he said next?
Original Reddit post: What was a time you had to draw but not shoot?
