I was crawling through downtown Austin traffic the other day, late for my meeting with a potential food blogger (new project). The taxi in front of me was driving me crazy. Cutting me off, switching lanes to block me, letting lights turn red in front of him. Feeling the red mist descend, I pulled over, relaxed my breathing and gathered my thoughts. So I know what’s it’s like to get your four-wheeled dander up.

As New Mexico’s WCMH reports, Ms. Aragon (sp?) failed to chill when a man stood in the middle of an otherwise empty parking space. Ms. Aragon hit the man with her car. Angry words were exchanged. Her antagonist threw a cup of coffee on her vehicle. Ms. Aragon drew her .380 pistol, earning TTAG’s Irresponsible Gun Owner of the Day award.

Note: the parking spot defender may have posed a legitimate threat of grievous bodily harm or death to the aspiring casino goer. At that point, Ms. Aragon would have been within her rights to opt for armed defense. Ish. As the instigator of the conflict, she would have had/will have a very difficult time in court — especially if she’d discharged her weapon.

Bottom line: don’t road rage, even when you’re in the right.

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42 COMMENTS

    • Such lowlife heap disgrace on law abiding gun owners and cause harm to others. Hope she’ll get stiff sentence. Maybe she’ll learn something, tho I doubt it. Let’s hope she’ll never again be granted gun ownership Bottom feeder.

    • If you’re going to run with a new pseudonym, you should maybe go all the way and drop the “Zim” garbage, Potato.

  3. “I was crawling through downtown Austin traffic the other day, late for my meeting with a potential food blogger (new project).”

    I’m not sure how many folks can handle or even want to know the truth about food…TTAF

    • I don’t know about Food, or Restaurants, but if there’s any industry that could benefit from the spotlight of truth endemic to Mr. Farago’s brand it’s RVs.

      As a relative noob to RV camping I’m somewhat appalled at how the RV industry today is still somewhat reminiscent of 1960s Detroit’s automobile industry. Too many brands from few manufacturers, horrible dealers/service and really short warranties, inbred manufacturers with excessive geographical focus, and general poor quality. I’ve read in any number of RV forums in threads for beginners quotes to the effect of “all RVs are junk until you fix them.” I even wrote the manufacturer of my travel trailer online because I couldn’t find documentation of what wheel bearings my camper used, and they non-answered me with “contact the axle manufacturer.”

      • Tents. I would rather stay in a tent than haul a prone to trouble RV around with me. RV’s look like a great idea til you get one.

        Or a camper on a ford. I prefer a tent but a camper works too.

      • I already have a “motel” prepositioned within a mile or 2 of 99% of the places I might ever want to go. Most are within spitting distance of a restaurant. When I’m not using them, they cost me nothing.

  5. CF on so many levels on both sides.
    If there is one place you can encounter someone who is street cat crazy, it’s on roads and parking lots. Here’s a thought, just let it go!

  6. It’s hard to get road rage about somebody slowing you down if you’re never in a hurry.
    The wonderful thing about never being in a hurry is that it gives you options. Like with somebody standing in a parking spot…
    You can move on to another parking spot and have a nice little walk, or you can sit there blowing your horn at the guy standing in the spot until he moves and since you’re in your car blocking the spot, the car he’s waiting on can’t get in either. See? Options.

    • A lot of people submit themselves to the increased stress, cost of living, crowdedness, and crime of big metro areas thinking the trade-off is worth it not realizing the toll it takes nor that their income increases less than the cost of living. Go to a cost of living calculator and you’ll see that the drop income to leave them is more than made up for the even lower cost of living and reduction of stress. I left theSilicon Valley several years ago and wish I had done it decades before. Lower stress, more disposable income, kids went to better schools, better home on more land, etc. the only mistake was not moving far enough: still in anti-gun anti-liberty statist California. But looming retirement will fix that with a move to a free state in the West. My advice: do it while you are young and live your whole life in liberty and happiness just as Jefferson said in his draft of the Declaration of Independence:

      “We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness; ” — Thomas Jefferson, First Draft of the Declaration of Independence

      • I did a cost of living comparison today between Seattle and San Antonio. To match the standard of living of someone making $80,000 per year in Seattle, a San Antonio resident need only earn $48,000 a year. That’s giving up 40% in salary and living the same lifestyle. That’s mind blowing.

  8. IN ALL FIFTY STATES, AND U.S. TERRITORIES AND HOLDINGS, THE RULE IS:

    S L O W E R

    T R A F F I C

    K E E P

    R I G H T (GIVE WAY)

    Don’t be a road cone. If you are not a traffic light, traffic sign, or a traffic cop, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO DIRECT TRAFFIC. The person behind you could have an arterial bleed, PULL OVER FOR TRAFFIC TRYING TO PASS. IF YOU ARE PASSED ON THE RIGHT, Y O U ARE WRONG.

    IF YOU ARE BRAKING FOR SOMETHING
    B E H I N D – Y O U
    YOU ARE A TOTAL POS, AND YOU NEED A WET FLIP-FLOP BEATING ! ! ! IF YOU GET SHOT INSTEAD, THAT’S ON YOU.

    ROAD RAGE COMES FROM YOU.

      • Funny thing is (well, kinda funny) ALL CAPS IS NOT “SHOUTING” TO YOUR BRAIN. YOUR BRAIN STORES IT AUTOMATICALLY AS
        S O M E T H I N G
        I M P O R T A N T.

        If you scanned down the postings here AND NOTICED THAT MY POST HAD SOME WORDS IN-ALL-CAPS, YOUR BRAIN RECORDED IT, FLAGGED IT AS “IMPORTANT”, AND PART OF YOUR PSYCHE (the part of your consciousness that is grateful that I tried to help it to more quickly sort out what’s important [of what I wrote]) HAS BECOME MORE OPEN TO WHAT I TYPED. Part of your brain made you think that I WAS YELLING, but not the part that actually stores the info. Look through a graphic design / marketing textbook, it’ll be in the first or second chapter.

        I AM NOT YELLING.

        I AM (also) NOT ATTEMPTING TO HARM YOU. It’s a PSA.

        • You know, Joe, the fact that you keep having this argument over whether or not you’re yelling should tell you something:

          You’re misusing the internet, and you’re the only one who doesn’t realize it.

          Get a fucking clue.

        • If all caps was yelling (ONLY YELLING) it might be abusive use, I grant you. If ALL CAPS, makes you look at and store the information that I am trying to convey, then it’s not more abusive than what I am typing, and it shortens/lessens the frequency that I would need to do it. That might be abusive, but that doesn’t make sense to me that it would be.

          I don’t know. Say it again in ALL CAPS, and I might come closer to agreeing with you.

    • take a breath, that vein in your forehead is getting very prominent.

      While I agree with most of your points, I also have to agree with Soccerchainsaw. While I know there are a lot of people that don’t know the ‘rules of the road’ or even the laws, life gets a little less stressful if you assume that the person riding the left lane is there for a reason and you just do the best you can to take care of your own issues.

      Have I been passed on the right? Yes, a number of times and most of those were because I had good reason to stay right where I was. Even if that reason was simply that the guy or girl that was passing on the right while cussing a blue streak and flipping me off, came up on me so fast that I figured it was better to let them figure out what they were going to do rather than get in their way. I also figure that they were already overtly angry and just needed to vent. Usually it’s not until people have purposely tried (yes, I said purposely) to run me off the road that I get my knickers in a knot. So far though, none of these situations has required a firearm.

      I am however a strong advocate for using paintball guns on the roads with different colors for different offenses. Granted some people would need rainbow paintballs. Just think, some cars in the rust belt would never rust. It’s a win – win proposition, you relieve stress and their car gets painted. You need a paint job? Start driving like an idiot.

      • From an old comedy LP of my Dad’s (I believe George Carlin): “Everybody gets a dart gun with a little flag on it. You see someone doin’ something stupid, you shoot their trunk with one of them flags. Cop sees a car with four or five of these flags on him, pulls ‘im over, gives ‘im a ticket for being an asshole!”

      • I had a guy come up fast on my tail in the left lane of Rt 17 in Middlesex, VA. He passed on the right, laid on the horn, and gave me the one finger salute. I had a left turn coming up (it’s a rural highway) and was about to put my signal on but never got the chance before he went full asshole.

    • Whenever I have the opportunity to converse with a highway cop, I assert my well-researched opinion that if they wrote as many tickets for driving too slow in the left lane, as they do for speeding, the highways would be safer, and happier, for all.

      Of course, if all those idiots driving slower than me, and all those maniacs driving faster than me, would just stay the hell off the road, that would be even better.

  9. While I enjoy a good parking spot as much as the next obese American, I never understood the point of getting upset or trolling parking lots for decent spaces. I’d rather park far out in the first row I enter and hike my tubby behind into the store than waste a few minutes looking for a good parking space that may never materialize. Besides, you experience so much more of the world outside of your air conditioned bubble… smell the roses, or realize how terrible your hometown is and move/do something about it.

    Be thankful you get to experience the inconvenience of a long walk from the parking lot, many people are cursed with an inability to walk altogether.

  10. The guy was a dick for trying to claim a parking spot by standing in it (why? Why wasn’t there already a car with him?), but just call him an asshole and find a different, possibly farther away, spot.

    Sure, she might have had to spend a little more time walking, but just think how much walking she could have accomplished while she’s bunking it in lock-up.

  11. This place is actually kinda sketchy and kinda awesome at the same time. Years back I locked my keys in the car at the refueling station outside this casino. I thought I was going to have to call the police to get the door open.

    Nope, some Hispanic guy who barely spoke English comes up out of nowhere and asks if I need help. When I told him what happened he produced a slim jim from under his coat and popped open my door. Then he put the slim jim back in his coat, shook my hand and walked away into the parking lot.

    OK, that was cool of him but WTF is he doing wandering around the parking lot with a slim jim?

    • A gentleman. A thief with a code of honor. You may have met the last one. He was certainly more helpful than any congressman I’ve ever met.

      • I don’t know if he was a thief. He wasn’t, as far as I could tell, in possession of a bunch of stolen stuff. I just found it rather odd. The Albuquerque area in has a lot of odd ducks and I saw some strange stuff there but in reality most of NM is like that. All sorts of strange.

    • Maybe his car is so broken that the only way he can unlock the doors is with such tools. There are a lot of Mexicans out here in Texas, they aren’t too wealthy and tend to drive whatever they can get. Getting a new beater car every few months for a few hundred bucks is a lot cheaper than a car payment.

      “Island beaters” are $500 in Hawaii, roughly, salty air, not the place of expensive vehicles.

      Maybe he was lifting stuff from peoples cars, who knows? You can buy the tools from just about any firefighters store, breaching hammers, etc.

      • You have to admit that regardless of what he was actually up to wandering around with a jacket modified to carry a slim jim (which his coat most certainly was) is at least eyebrow raising.

        I don’t really care what he was up to, he helped me out and that’s what matters to me. These days I have a full auto lockout kit in my trunk… which of course doesn’t help me if I lock my keys in the car but that’s not the point of having it. On the other hand I don’t wander around with a slim jim on my person.

        He was damn good. Took him all of 3 seconds to open the door on my ’91 XJ so I imagine he had some experience using that tool.

  12. If you’re driving a clunker, as so many in a casino parking lot are, just ease slowly into the spot while filming him with your phone. If he begins damaging your clunker call 911. But *hitting* him is unacceptable.

  13. Trying to save a parking space at a casino is lame at best. Pulling a gun over such nonsense is way worse. That casino has a huge parking lot in back. Exercise is better for you than jail.

  14. We had an incident here in AZ where a woman followed her husband in a pickup truck after he fled the house to a Circle K. After confronting him in the parking lot, they argued again, and he took off in his motorcycle. Apparently, that pissed her off to no end because she pursued him in the truck and deliberately smashed into him down the road, sending him 65 miles into a telephone pole. No gun needed apparently.

    She’s in jail, facing charges of manslaughter.

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