Don't honk the horn; don't go looking for trouble

Via Huffington Post:

"A Las Vegas mother of four killed in a road rage shooting last week got in her car with her adult son and his gun and drove around their neighborhood looking for the assailant who ended up shooting her in a residential cul-de-sac, police said Tuesday.

In a change from earlier accounts, police Lt. Ray Steiber said 44-year-old Tammy Meyers had her teenage daughter run in the house to fetch her armed son, who then went with her as she drove to find the driver who had earlier stopped his car in front of hers, got out and approached her with angry words."

1.  If you can get home, then stay at home.  Do not go looking for the person who just cut you off or flipped you off.  If all the person did was drive by you, yell at you, make gestures at you, stop in font of you and use harsh language, then they are not really an "assailant" yet.  Find a safe place and stay there.  If need be, call the police.  Do not take the law into your own hands.

"Mrs. Meyers is scared, but she's upset," Steiber said, adding that the intent appeared to be "so they can find who frightened them on the roadway."

2.  If you are scared, stay at home.  Do not allow yourself to start talking to yourself - convincing yourself that "He can't do that to me!  I'll show him!" Don't go looking for trouble - call the police.

"I would never say that anybody went looking for trouble," Steiber said when asked to characterize Tammy Meyers' five-to-10 minute drive through the neighborhood. He said she found, and for a time followed, the vehicle she had apparently been looking for."

3.  Sadly, she did go looking for trouble.  First, it found her when she was driving.  She then got home safety.  Then she went looking for it.  Then she followed it.  Then, apparently, it followed her.

"Unfortunately I cannot say what was in Tammy's mind," the police lieutenant said. "Tammy is the victim."

4.  Yes, she is the victim, but she did not need to be; she foolishly chose this, made herself vulnerable.

"Steiber said the initial road rage incident happened while Tammy Myers drove slowly home from a school parking lot, where she had been teaching her teenage daughter to drive. The girl didn't have a learner's permit.

Steiber said the daughter told police a car sped up to them from behind and then pulled alongside. The daughter reached over from the passenger seat and honked the car horn at the car as it passed."

"She figured this person was speeding, and right or wrong, they needed to be corrected," Steiber said of the girl, who he said is 15. "She honked the horn."

5.  There's your problem.  The car horn is not a communication device, it is an emergency device.  You do not use to to symbolically call people "assholes" for doing things you do not like. You are not the police, not in a position to offer social commentary, it is not your place to be correcting others. This foolish adolescent behavior started a chain of events that got her mother killed.

"Despite earlier police accounts, Steiber said homicide detectives don't believe the suspect's car and Meyers' green Buick Park Avenue sedan ever collided, or that the suspects initially followed Meyers and her daughter home."

6.  So there it is; First, it started with someone honking their horn at a speeder.  There was no collision, no accident, no damage, she had driven away and gotten home to safety without being followed.  Apparently, the only damage was to her ego and then she decided to recruit her son and seek retribution, go find danger.

Should she have been killed for this? Of course not!  That is not what I am saying.  But there are assholes in the world, some of them are violent assholes, who do not follow the law, do not care for rules, for whom life does not matter, who are always on the lookout for people who will foolishly offer themselves up for killing.  If would be great if it were not so, but insisting on that does nothing.  They will misbehave, they will challenge you, they will piss you off.  You want to be prepared to defend yourself if they find you, but you do not want to seek them out.

It behooves all of us to remember this as we go through our daily lives. One small misguided decision, one lapse of reason, can start us on a path that ends with our demise.