Indiana State Police

Indianapolis might be one of the last places you’d expect be a hotbed of political violence, the setting of a successful sitcom, or the locus of much excitement at all, but that wasn’t the case this week. On Tuesday, a man driving a Dodge pickup truck on I-465 in the Hoosier State capital was attacked by a passenger in a nearby car. The driver was unharmed, but the motive may have been political. The truck had two flags flying over its bed: Old Glory and a “Make America Great Again” flag from the 2016 presidential campaign.

The victim and a witness informed police that a sedan pulled alongside the pickup truck and a passenger held a handgun out the window and began blasting away, firing five to seven shots according to reports given to the Indiana State Police.

Most of the shots went wide, but one bullet lodged in the driver’s side door frame of the pickup proudly flying the flags. The alleged perpetrators were in a white Chevy Malibu; according to Fox 59, “[t]he driver…was described as a black male around the age of 23. The passenger was described as a light skinned black male with a sleeve tattoo on his right arm.” The Malibu had Louisiana plates. No arrests have been made so far.

As a matter of self-defense, if one is attacked while driving, it’s good to remember that you have a weapon that weighs at least 3,000 lbs. and is capable of speeds in excess of 100 mph. While the temptation may be to fire back if you have a firearm handy, the best strategy is to get away from the other vehicle. Fast. If fighting back becomes necessary, see what I said above about a 3,000 lbs vehicle.

More details may yet come to light on this situation, but assuming this wasn’t an “ordinary” road rage incident, and the attempted murder was motivated by the symbolic speech of the truck driver displaying the flags, this fits the pattern of a disturbing trend toward political violence. That was made plain to everyone by the overtly political attack on the GOP Congressmen this week by a radicalized Socialist aiming to terrorize, but these attacks had been going on for quite some time now.

Indeed, multiple times this year, speeches and other events have been canceled or scaled because of the threat of political violence, most of it coming from the left or groups allied with thet left — from events in California by Milo Yiannopolous, to speeches by academics like Charles Murray. It’s hardly limited to this country, either — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim and victim of female genital mutilation, cancelled her speaking tour of Australia because of fears of violence. (A critic of hers said that she was being “held accountable for ‘divisive discourse’….”)

Make no mistake: a free people aren’t free when their speech is curtailed or suppressed by violence. In the 1980s, El Salvador had freedom of speech guaranteed in its constitution, too. But if you published the wrong thing, los escuadrones de la muerte would show up and burn down your newspaper. That was if you were lucky. They frequently tortured or shot you, too.

The Bill of Rights is a meaningless scrap of paper if one risks being torched by a mob for daring to fly Old Glory or expressing support for the President.

Keep your powder dry.

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48 COMMENTS

  2. I have an American flag decal in my rear window. NEVER political crap. And a flag above my mailbox. If you object to the flag FU…and DIE.

  3. All of this vile conduct can be laid at the feet of the progressive socialistic commie Democrats and the vile rhetoric they continue to spew. After Obama was elected, they said we should shut up and accept him. There were objections from the right, but, IMHO, nothing near the level espoused by Pelosi, Hillary, and so many others from the left. They keep their constituents stirred up to the point where their supporters act without thought. Reminds me of a Nazi rally where the level of sound kept rising until it became one voice.

  4. Political intimidation and violence is normal in American history. The issue is it normally it happens on the “rougher side” of town, so most people never hear of it. I understand in Chicago any person who displays a republican sign is subject to having their business safety inspected multiply times in a month. What would happen if you put an NRA sign out for people to see?

    I remember when the Log Cabin Republicans went to San Francisco back in the early 1980’s. They were physically attacked. Nothing has changed in the Gay Nazi city of San Francisco. You can walk around in public with a well fitted strap on dildo for outer wear attire.
    But try coming out of the closet as a gun owner even after the Pulse Nightclub attack. You could get fired from your job and or have your car tires slashed.

    • Log Cabin Republicans said some inflammatory stuff but most of these attacks are not political. Unless you have lived in the City (SF), your comments are your perception. If you avoid City Council meetings where the looneys come out, you can be a conservative and be accepted. Look at Michael Savage – very inflammatory conservative who lived in SF amd was not attacked

      • Savage was just attacked across the bridge at a restaurant in Sausalito this March. Having a glass of wine so no CCW that afternoon. It’s open season on libertarians, conservatives, 2A supporters etc..

        • A little bit of Google work shows that the attack on Savage on March 14 in Tiburon was actually a verbal argument that led to shoving. Both sides claimed the other shoved him. Police investigation into the assault and hate crimes found nothing. Sounds to me like a shouting match where both sides want the cops to punish the one they disagree with. Doesn’t sound like a legitimate physical assault

        • I’m sure if Savage wanted to get into a shoving match he could find somebody in the San Fran Gaystapo to do it every day of the year. Since that doesn’t happen I’m betting that the Leftist was the initiator. Today is too short to list all the times that the Left was the iniator in the violent events over the past year.

      • SurfGW, I lived in the city (at least a coupla weeks a month) for 4-ish years. Your only chance of being accepted as a ‘conservative’ is to get close to old political/monied classes – not that it matters, there’s dozens of 20-something millionaires for every one of them – and the noobs have the politics of Zuckerberg or worse.

        That was the state of affairs when I left 15 years ago. I know damned good and well which way it goes, and how bad it is. Go, wear a MAGA hat and walk Market down through the Castro – if you don’t get slapped to death or worse, you’ll likely lose your job, and you’ll be lucky if the goon squad didn’t follow you home, or dox you and try to ruin your life.

        From Burning Man to Bay to Breakers, there are many things I miss about SF, it’s denizens, it’s restaurants, etc. But there are batsh1t crazy terrorists there, and they’re allowed to run wild. The Bay Area hasn’t really been conservative since the ’80s, and now the people with money (who set the agenda and run stuff) are unadulterated pure evil on the level of Google and Facebook. If Gavin wasn’t proof of that, I don’t know what you need.

    • I have both NRA and ISRA stickers on my truck’s back window. (And a “gun family” sticker). I work in Chicago quite often. Last three weeks I have been working in Chicago’s uptown. No problems yet. My next job is in 400N block Wabash downtown. The commute sucks, but other than that I still don’t expect any troubles.

  5. Crazy people do crazy things. The flag had nothing to do with it. Usually a crazy person is looking to attack someone and whatever they see is a pretense. Even if the perps were Hillary supporters, they didn’t do this because they like Hillary – they did it because they are crazy.

      • Indeed. I keep hearing about how the Alexandria failed assassin was crazy. Other than holding liberal views and acting on them, I have seen no evidence that he was mentally ill. If you believe everything the left says about the right, then there is a strong argument for political violence.

    • I expect Indy to be closed at 5:00pm on Sunday,if past experience is a predictor of future performance.

      • Naptown certainly earned the name back in the day but it’s livened up a fair bit in the past decade. Would you prefer it to be even more like NYC or LA?

        • I neither live there nor visit often, so I have no opinion about the direction Indianapolis should head. It seems a relatively inoffensive, if uninteresting, city.

    • I would also urge the author to avoid the east side. The experience would certainly disabuse him of his inaccurate notions of Naptown, but he might not survive the encounter.

    • Hit the brakes, yes. Your brakes will alter your speed far quicker than your engine will.
      Do a PIT? They aren’t as easy as most people think. Plus, the downside is injury/damage to innocent drivers and their cars. And if you do the PIT and cause that injury and damage, guess who’s losing his insurance, and possibly freedom?
      Sometime what we would LIKE to do isn’t a good thing.

      • How would I be liable? “Golly, officer, that guy started shooting and I was scared so bad I swerved into him. Sure glad you managed to scrape up what was left of him.”

        • Liability concern isn’t for the attackers, but for any innocent people who may be driving nearby. Vehicles at high speed can move unpredictably. For example, a couple of years back, a man tried to kill himself driving into a rock outcropping on I-89S in Lebanon, NH, and managed to miss the rock and fly into a couple driving on I-89N; sadly, both of them were killed while he survived.

  8. The foot soldiers of the left have been on a path of escalating violence for several years now. I’ll let the pretty blonde make the case: https://youtu.be/t0f6tDoP5Fw

    Bottom line is that the Democrats/media are doubling down on their strategy of dehumanizing the people on the right to legitimize violence against us. So we can expect more attacks, especially in Democrat strongholds were the authorities are given stand down orders and/or told to look the other way.

  9. Indianapolis might be one of the last places you’d expect be a hotbed of political violence,

    No, that’s exactly what I’d expect. Indy has a growing black underclass that seems intent on emulating Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore.

  12. If the shooter’s car had Louisiana plates, they were probably just passing through, not Indy natives.
    Louisiana has pretty high crime and murder rates due to unfortunate demographics.

  13. There are times I regret driving a Honda Fit. Most of my life, I drove huge cars, tanks. They really were an effective weapon.

    • I’ve wanted to purchase a retired armored bank truck. Just the models with a single rear axle weigh upwards of 6 tons empty.

      Great vehicle for commandeering a lane.

  14. When will the right grow some balls and do the speeches anyway? There are any number of people willing and able to provide security and let the leftists throw the first punch/rock. Time to use their own book against them.

  15. Who cares what the motive was? if someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back.

  16. I’m inclined to not believe his story, simply because I fail to see how someone in passenger seat of the Malibu could have managed to miss a truck that would have been about 6 feet away (given normal passing distance) that many times. That’s seriously approaching the proverbial “unable to hit the broadside of a barn from inside the barn” for accuracy. I’d be willing to be this guy NDed into his truck and decided to try to get his 15 minutes of fame using that as a prop.

    • You ever shoot out of a moving car at another moving car? Ever read the stories of drive-by shootings where 20+ rounds were fired and only two people get hit? Thats Chicago on a weekend night.

      Lots of things going on when you try to shoot from a moving vehicle. Nerves, motion of the vehicle, noise of the gun going off, etc. I’d bet that the guy didn’t have much practice at drive-by shooting.

  17. My old rust bucket weighs ~4,200 pounds, is nearing 30 years old, and wasn’t that powerful to begin with. It’s not going to outrun a younger, lighter car. No, I wouldn’t have tried to outrun him. I would have to use the significant weight difference to my advantage.

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