jokes on you, they’re in the back seat and he’s actually arresting them
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I don’t see how the driver is being written off as an idiot. It diminishes the fact that he’s clearly unhinged enough to jump out of a vehicle with a deadly weapon and move towards someone with it. Yeah it’s “just” a knife, but plenty of people get killed with knives too. I’m not saying that shooting was justified but downplaying the severity of the motorist’s willing to quickly escalate to possible deadly force undermines the whole argument.
The whole “knife to a gun fight” is a red herring. What we have is an unhinged psycho who immediately thought it was a good idea to pull a deadly weapon on a cyclist.
We don’t know his intentions.
We don’t know how close it was.
We don’t know what the possibility of flight was for the cyclist.
But I bet if I’m within 20 feet of you and I come at you with the intent to poke you with something I have a pretty decent chance of accomplishing it unless you have some specific training to prevent me from doing so.
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Yeah, dude got out of his car after someone said something, and tried to at least pretend to wanna fight. I’d say that this is not a bad outcome.
These poor kids will never live this down.
acab, even tiny little cute ones
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This morning, just as I was getting off my bike at work, a lady stopped her suv and said “don’t ride in the middle of the street” or something to that effect. I said “what?” as my entire maintenance crew, like six burly dudes who were standing outside the office, turned to look at her. She drove off real quick. It was pretty great.
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All I have to add, is that if anyone came at anyone I love with a knife, I would attempt to kill them. And if I was armed, I would succeed. There would be no warning shots or attempts to talk anyone down.
If I did this in Sweden, I would go to prison. I would still do it. I would be ethically and morally right to do it. I’ve been living with this possibility as a reality since my wife received a death threat from some Nazi pricks. I’ve thought this through many times.
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Yeah that’s why I keep using the word “wager.” I’m not a judge in court adjudicating this case, so I can be wildly speculative.
Yeah I’d shoot someone coming at a loved one with a knife too, but that’s not what we were talking about yesterday.
At least I wasn’t. I was saying that there wouldn’t have been a deadly confrontation if the gun owner wasn’t emboldened to clap back (Congrats to them that they were within their rights. Now they’ve killed someone), which is what happened based on the information provided to you and I in the above story. Rather than being wildly speculative, you’re ignoring a key component of the confrontation so it fits a narrative where killing someone is justified.
I think we disagree mostly because we are each thinking of a different hypothetical ways in which this went down. I bet that if we talked about each specific hypothetical one-by-one, there would be pretty close consensus? Not that I want to continue this!!
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This is the part where I get stuck.
I can’t get to the point where I care about the gun, given that this behavior is all too commonplace among motorists. Pretty sure that I’ve been threatened with a gun a couple times in my life, been threatened with a knife once. I’ve been threatened by unhinged motherfuckers in a car, way, way more often, and not just as a cyclist.
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I’m pretty critical of the paranoid self-defense gun culture these days because it is dominated by the least-vulnerable-among-us. Despite this, I think that there are vulnerable people out there that could benefit from being able to more effectively defend themselves, and since I do consider cars to be weapons I think that cyclists on public roads can typically consider themselves vulnerable to car drivers.
So while I’m not going to get strapped up to ride my bike to work I am not going to lose any sleep over an asshole in a SUV getting out of their SUV with a knife and then getting got. I do believe “duty to retreat” is reasonable before using deadly force but I’ve thought about this and I have no idea how a cyclist typically retreats from a driver (especially a 4x4 SUV) under many circumstances.
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That said, I have felt threatened by drivers plenty of times and have never wanted a gun. But I am also a bearded 260 pound white man and none of these drivers have ever got out of their car to confront me with a knife. I don’t ever plan on carrying.
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Tarck, I got coal rolled in the city limits today
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Nor do I.
Had a guy once threaten to pull a gun from his center console, but at that point, he was being accosted by two furious spandex-clad cyclists that were much bigger than he was, so I can kinda see why he felt threatened.
I promise I attempted to deescalate. I think I said something like, “ARE YOU GOING TO MURDER SOMEONE FOR RIDING THE STREET, MOTHERFUCKER? COME ON, DO IT!”
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I’ve been threatened by way more cars than any other kind of weapon, I’ve been threatened with guns too. I never felt like getting strapped until someone I loved got threatened, by a group I know will absolutely resort to life threatening violence. My wife would never tolerate me owning or carrying a gun, now would I with children in my house.
One can tolerate far more risk to one’s self, than one can to their family. Come at me and I’ll retreat or talk you down. Come at them and I can’t take that chance. I think everyone must feel something similar.
This is getting unrelated and kind of personal, but when my wife stepped away from politics recently it was among the greatest reliefs of my life. I still look over our shoulders and make sure we’re not being followed home, but I think we’re off their radar for now. Hearing that story brought it all back a bit and I’ve run through that scenario many times in my head. There were always going to be more of them and likely bigger, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to maim or kill in as quick and viscous ways as possible, to give my family time to escape. A gun would solve that specific problem for sure, but that’s a non starter here.
Sorry for the vent. Carry on.
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I’m too lazy to read this thread and I assume it has turned into some political bullshit like everything I read on the internet.
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No no far more emotional than that: American gun fantasy vs. reality but the reality supported this fantasy once, sort of, which is hard to deal with.
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Today had a fun interaction. Out for a planned long one. We’re 30ish miles in and a bike trail in the NW part of town, just chilling and chatting. Dude passes us on the trail and motions us to join? Not really sure what he was after. We got back onto the road and he was never more than 50 feet in front of us. We were rolling up on him, still in z2 hr and minding our owns. This dude starts SPRINTING, but only in like 5 sec intervals. Like, we were still only like 15 feet behind him at this point and we were not picking up the pace. He maybe put another 5 feet on us. As we were cresting a small rise and toward a stop sign, dude sits up, and I swear did his best Sagan impression., including FINGER GUNS. We passed him and he said something like “I got you! Next time, guys” or whatever. Hahahahhaha. Cat 6 at its best. Anyways, we keep it going. The few that were still behind us said this guy was completely hunched over the bars and breathing heavily.
A few miles later, I get a flat and shift down my cassette to remove my wheel. Suddenly, my shifter is stuck and not shifting at all. I’m stuck in the 11t. I figure, #thanksshimano, my cable died or something. Roll to the closest shop: they’re closed. We aborted the rest of the planned ride and started heading back. 12miles and 800’ in either 36/11 or 52/11. At least my hr stayed low? Got to shop I help out at/our sponsor and looks like I just shifted too quickly and the cable head popped out. 2 min later I had all the gears again.
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I think stuff like this plays out in reality on a fairly regular basis. Generally it doesn’t get much media coverage, except from heavily biased anti-gun control outlets.
Note that I’m not making a case for an armed citizenry, just pointing out that it does happen, in much the same way that mass shootings happen regularly.
“Regularly” and “as a proportion of the gun violence committed in a timespan” are two measures that may have vastly different meanings and which are likely almost impossible to accurately determine.
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There’s not sufficient data to draw much of a conclusion about the total number of incidents, firearms are successfully used in self defense, some anti-gun-control folks speculate that the actual numbers are way higher than the reported numbers given that many incidents go unreported if there’s no actual violence. By “regularly”, I literally mean, that if you look into the reports, you can find evidence of these things happening on a fairly regular basis. My point is that it does happen and that it’s not rare.
On average in 1987-92 about 83,000 crime victims per year used a
firearm to defend themselves or their property.
Stuff like that. That’s like 227 incidents per day, which is not insignificant. I could look for recent data if you think it’s relevant. My point is that I don’t think it survives the characterization of “fantasy”.
By comparison, there are approximately 41 fatalities per day by gun violence in 2019 excluding suicides, which is kinda funny, because suicide by gun is massive in the US and outstrips any other kind of gun violence by a wide margin.