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Two incidents that happened to me between 12/1999 and 04/2006, both during my regular commute home from work. I don’t remember which one happened first. One could suggest that I should have taken a different route to and from work, and I could have done that, but it would have tripled the time and distance of my commute.

1. On my way home from work, and I’m caught behind a slow-moving RTD bus in the right hand lane, and there’s another motorist behind me. Neither of us can pull around the bus to pass it because of cars zooming by us in the left lane. That traffic clears, and both the guy behind me and I pull into the left lane at the same moment to pass the bus. Apparently, that was a federal offense. He goes ape-poopy and aggressively tailgates me all the way to the next stoplight, where he whips around to the right lane, next to me, and produces a large framed semiauto and waves it at me. As the light turns green and we start moving through the intersection, he starts shouting to me to pull over. Like hell! He pulls over on the far side of the intersection, expecting that I’m stupid enough to play his game, and I keep going. When he tries to pull back into traffic to follow me, he can’t, and now there’s 20 or more cars between me and him, headed up a canyon road (La Tuna Canyon Rd, in Sun Valley). After the 1st or 2nd turn, I can’t see him in my rear view mirror anymore. That’s the last I saw of him, but after that I started keeping a 1911 in my car for a while, since I had no idea if I’d run into him again after that. (This was in California, and having loaded and unsecured gun in the car was a legal liability that discouraged me having one in the car all the time as a matter of habit. I only did it when I anticipated a specific possible threat.)

2. Same route home from work, same place right where the road enters the canyon, and a youngish guy in a sedan parks himself at the head of the traffic entering the canyon, at 25 mph in what is a 45 mph zone. I’m the second car behind him, and he’s ignoring people honking at him to pick up the pace. When a straightaway opens up, the road is clear, and I pull out and pass both him and the car behind him, and head on up the road at normal speed. This was a mountain road, and I was focusing on my driving, so I did NOT flip him the bird or anything like that as I passed him. Well, getting passed evidently lit a fire under his butt, and he sped way up and and almost caught up to me before I entered the freeway at the top of the canyon. I thought I lost him on the freeway, but evidently not. Unknown to me, the idiot had followed me all the way home. I had pulled into my driveway, and as I exited my car, I saw him roll up and come to a stop in front of my house! I unlocked my front door, and ducked inside far enough to grab the baseball bat I kept behind the door. NOT THE SMARTEST THING I'VE EVER DONE, but I walked out toward his car with the bat in my hands, shouting "You followed me HOME you {INSERT LOTS OF BAD WORDS HERE}!?!?!?" as he was starting to open his car door.....whereupon he pulled his car door closed and drove off, at a rate faster than the 25 mph limit he had tried to impose on everyone else 20 minutes earlier.

I’m fortunate that neither of these incidents escalated beyond their eventual outcomes. In the first one, I was a completely passive victim of another person's aggression. Evasive driving until I could get to a safe place was all I could have done. In the second one, I had done nothing wrong right up to the point where I grabbed the baseball bat, and then walked outside with it. What I should have done was gone inside, locked the door, armed myself, called the police, and taken some photos of him and his car and license plate through my front window to document things until the cops got there.

The absolute best response to another driver with road rage is to refuse to engage with him or her on any level....unless you are forced into it with your back against a wall. Then do whatever you have to do.