Two permit holders pull guns on each other in road rage incident

[Seabeejason]

First one that pulled the gun should lose his permit, period.

When I have my firearm on me I am usually a bit more calm and collected. Pulling a gun on someone is a pretty big deal. I do not have any desire to be sitting in jail with felony charges. I have a family to provide for.

I can't believe how stupid some people can be.

[PolePosition]

Reminds me of something one of my instructors said in a class I took recently, "Make up in your mind where you draw the line in the sand" regarding when to draw. Implying of course, that it should take a LOT before you actually draw. Another thing he said was, "If you draw on someone, it means that you have put the value of their life equal to or below whatever you want to shoot them for. It's not worth it to end somebody's life over a TV or car or being offended, unless my life or the life of my family is at risk."

I think this story goes to show that the problem should be reduced on the front end. People need psych evals before being issued a permit, and I think people need MUCH more training and instruction before being issued a permit. I still remember some of the characters that were in my HCP class years ago. No rational person would have issued them a permit, no matter what the results on the written exam and shooting quals were. Granted, crazy people slip through the cracks all the time. But I'm sure we can greatly reduce these incidents.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Hi PolePosition

You make great points, except the psych evaluation thang.

In a perfect world maybe the psych evaluation would be good, but the current state of the art is not good enough to test "normal" people and reliably filter out the unstable ones, or the ones who might display suboptimal judgement under pressure.

It is "fairly easy" to identify someone obviously psychotic, in many cases. Of course even psychosis diagnosis sometimes requires institutional evaluation for days or weeks to merely approach a "good guess" on borderline cases of psychosis.

Maybe a "go-no-go" test for psychosis would be reliable, except you can't even get close in a one-hour interview on borderline, potential, or remission cases, and if the "go-no-go" psychosis test was law, then the first time a psychotic gets tested and falls thru the cracks and gets a carry license and goes amuck, the sheeple would demand ever-better tests to make sure nobody ever falls thru the cracks, so eventually you would have to spend a week in a psychiatric evaluation ward just to get a carry license, and even then psychotics would "fall thru the cracks", get licenses, and subsequently run amuck.

Among "relatively normal" non-psychotics, you just can't easily test which ones are idiots. You can test for idiot intelligence level, but even geniuses can have idiot judgement and that is currently near-impossible to reliably test.

Ain't sayin that because of paranoia about commie headshrinkers. I just have a psych degree but haven't used it many years, and it is admission that psych just isn't a very precise science at the moment.

[personDJ]

It seems odd to me that the first guy is alive.