Having mingled with the gun community for some time, there are a lot of level-headed people among gun owners but there are also a worrying amount of terminally fearful people with violent ideation. Many are likely one bad life event, one half-cocked response to an uncertain situation from being a mugshot on a news story like this prick.

Yeah. I have friends that won't even let their kids walk a quarter mile to school, in one of the safest communities in the entire state. It's insane. The media has put the fear of "but what if..." into so many people.

You've got better odds winning the lottery than what these people are afraid of. Be smart, be savvy, be aware of your surroundings and watch out for the oblivions as you go about your business. But there's no need to be afraid of everything around you.

Everything is a threat. Thank you Faux News and the rest.

Different color skin - threat

Gay - threat

Trans - threat

Environmental rules - threat

Immigration - thread

Vegetarian - threat

Equality - threat

Atheism - threat

Non-western religion - threat

Woke - threat

Electric cars - threat

The list is endless. Everything is a threat to them. Their pocketbooks, their marriage, their jobs, their theism, their TV, their guns…

An endless barrage of threats that they are constantly reminded of.

What can they do against all these threats? Elect a Strong Man that will crack skulls, He Has All The Answers. But those pesky libs keep getting in the way, so you gotta take matters into your own hands. Thank god and the good ol’ USA you can have a personal arsenal at arm’s reach to instantly panic-fire at that dark-skinned person pulling into your driveway who wants to steal your TV.

The "I feared for my life" rhetoric is just an excuse to shoot people, borrowed from police when they wanted to shoot people. You don't have to politely believe them just because they said it.

A diet of fear mongering media with a heaping helping of social isolation.

Antisocial monsters are made surprisingly easily.

Maybe they just want to kill someone.

I thought he wash damaging my car, so I attempted to damage it more with bullet holes.

It isn't in there. What is in there is a legal provision allowing states to quickly raise an army to deal with a crisis.

Dude fired seven times, and three hit the car. What a menace, should have been charged with attempted murder.

I don't understand why he wasn't charged with attempted murder. This is a bullshit defense.

Babcock said he went outside and "began shooting at the truck" to "disable" it...

Yes, killing the driver would do that.

Nevermind the racial part.

Your scenario actually highlights a good point, what kind of society do we want to live in? Some western everyone for them selves, shoot first talk later, or do we want to live in a civilized society?

My belief is that guns in general make us less safe. Both of the individuals in this story would be safer if neither had any guns. As well as the entire neighborhood, would also be safer without guns.

If the driver had a gun, and the neighbors had guns then this would have never happened....

/s

You know what this guy was before he tried to kill someone for the first time?

A responsible gun owner.

Fox.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway-might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

• music
• movies
• microcode (software)
• high-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved-but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

-- Snow Crash

Yep, delivery drivers are twice as likely to be shot at as cops. Always respect the thin bread crust.

It absolutely is and the people who shoot at others for showing up on their property are 100% paranoid assholes watching too much Fox News. Hell, you can even legally camp on private property as long as you're not within view of the house. I don't suggest doing that, on account of the crazies.