A Reddit user said the whole thing started on what should have been a completely forgettable drive to dinner with a friend. According to his post, he got cut off badly by a silver Buick LaCrosse. He wrote that the other driver came so close to his front bumper that he thought contact might actually have happened. Then the Buick immediately pulled over. The poster assumed the man either wanted to check for damage or apologize, so he followed him into a Wendy’s parking lot. He pulled in about 15 feet behind the car and rolled his windows down.
That was when the whole thing went from annoying traffic to something a lot worse.
He wrote that the other driver jumped out and started screaming from near his own driver door. The poster said that, in that instant, one of the first thoughts that hit him was how badly positioned he was if things got ugly. His gun was at his hip, under a shirt, under a seat belt, and he admitted he had never practiced for a situation like this. He was still in the car, still strapped in, and already behind the curve. He said he tried to answer the man by saying, “Hey, I thought you hit my car,” but that did not slow anything down.
According to the post, the man turned, reached under his seat, pulled out a holstered Glock 19 — or at least what looked like one to the poster — drew it, and started bringing it up toward him through the windshield. The driver later added that “Glock 19” was his best guess based on having seen plenty of them, but he acknowledged it could have been something else. What mattered in the moment was not the exact model. It was that the guy had a pistol in his hand and was beginning to aim it at him through the glass.
He said he did not try to draw. Instead, he scrambled to slam the car into reverse and floored it backward into the road behind him. Then he pulled into a different parking lot around the corner. From the way he told it, the whole reaction was instinctive, not some polished response he had ever rehearsed. He also made it clear afterward that he knew just how thin the margin had been. In his own words, the other driver could have e
After he got clear, the poster called police and filed a report. He sounded rattled enough in the thread that you can tell the stress did not just evaporate once he got away. He even wrote later that he was a little more shaken up than he first thought and was glad other people were telling him he had done the right thing. The comments piled in behind him saying the same basic thing: don’t try to outdraw a gun that is already coming up on you if you have another way out. Several people told him retreating with the vehicle was the best move available, especially because he was belted in, had not trained for that exact setup, and would almost certainly have lost a straight race against a gun that was already in hand.
A lot of the thread then turned toward what he should do next, and one piece of advice came up again and again: buy a dash cam. He replied that he was already looking at them that same day and said the incident had given him about 50 reasons to finally get one. Other commenters told him that without video, the case might turn into little more than “he said, he said,” especially since everything had happened fast and he had to back out so quickly. The poster did not argue with that at all. He sounded like someone who knew how lucky he had been to get away clean and also knew how little hard evidence he now had beyond his own report.
The story he told was straightforward and ugly in the way road-rage stories often are. A bad cut-off made him think he might have been hit. He followed the other car into a Wendy’s lot thinking it was going to be a normal damage check. The other driver got out screaming, reached under the seat, pulled a handgun, and started bringing it up toward the windshield. The poster realized too late how badly positioned he was to draw from inside the car, reversed out as hard as he could, and got away without shots being fired. Then he called the police, filed the report, and started shopping for a dash cam because he never wanted to be in that kind of situation again without one.
What do you think — if you were seat-belted in and a man in the next car pulled a pistol from under his seat and started bringing it up at your windshield, would reverse be your first instinct too, or would you still be tempted to reach for your own gun?
Original Reddit post: Road rage that led to a man pointing a gun at me
