jamjam wrote:No matter how crazy these guys got, he kept his cool (except for maybe a bird).
That's not keeping his cool. Bad move:
PC §42.01. DISORDERLY CONDUCT. (a) A person commits an offense if he intentionally or knowingly:
(1) uses abusive, indecent, profane, or vulgar language in a public place, and the language by its very utterance tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace;
(2) makes an offensive gesture or display in a public place, and the gesture or display tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace...
PC §9.31. SELF-DEFENSE. (a) Except as provided in Subsection (b), a person is justified in using force against another when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect the actor against the other's use or attempted use of unlawful force. The actor's belief that the force was immediately necessary as described by this subsection is presumed to be reasonable if the actor:
...(2) did not provoke the person against whom the force was used...
The same text about provocation also appears in PC §9.32 (b)(2).
If your brother was honest about the one-fingered salute, or if the guys in the truck snapped a cell phone picture of it as evidence, then he was probably guilty of disorderly conduct
before he displayed his firearm. That likely would have negated the protection the law affords for use of force or deadly force in self-defense should your brother have had to actually use his firearm. And it certainly doesn't help his unlawful display charge.
I won't keep hammering home that your brother should have been the first to call 911. He should have. That he displayed his firearm made a 911 call absolutely mandatory for any reasonable person.
That he was texting while driving during this event leaves me more than a little disturbed. Trust me, you do not want my full opinion on texting while driving. However, distracted driving could also come back to haunt him at his trial.
From a completely different perspective, handguns are of little use in moving vehicle confrontations...despite all the rolling shootouts we see in the movies. Typical defensive handgun rounds just aren't powerful enough to offer
effective penetration through most cars' bodies. If they strike perfectly so that they hit at a 90-degree angle and don't touch any additional metal in support struts, lock mechanisms, etc., a handgun round could prove effective against a vehicle's occupant. Defensive rounds are designed to expand when they meet resistance, so even a perfect 90-degree-angle shot through the least possible material will still likely see significant bullet deformation and reduce the effectiveness of the round as it passes through the body of the car.
Mind you, that said your car door is concealment,
not cover. Many handgun rounds will penetrate. They may lose a lot of energy after they do so, but you still don't want to get hit by one.
Glass is even more unpredictable. Modern automobile glass is curved, meaning it's almost impossible to get a flat-on impact. If hit, the safety glass will crackle--which can be a good thing if you're trying to obscure visibility--but the round will almost certainly end up someplace it was not aimed.
Leads us to accuracy. Kinda like shooting while riding a horse was a spray-and-pray situation for our Texican ancestors, so is trying to shoot left-handed and unsighted out the driver's-side window while driving a car. Unless you pull up parallel to the other vehicle and match speed--which exposes you as much as them--you can pretty much forget about accuracy.
Oh, and shooting at the engine block? A myth. There's more and thicker metal there than anywhere else in the vehicle. Poking a coil in the radiator is only useful if you intend to outrun the chase car until it "bleeds out"; just like driving your car low on radiator coolant, vehicle disability is far from instantaneous...again, despite what the movies depict.
The best defensive weapon when driving a vehicle of typical weight? The vehicle itself. It can run faster than you can, can take more hits than you can, and can even be an offensive weapon if need be.
Just MHO only. It seems your brother made several decisions that were probably poorly chosen.
