nosh

If a guy ever walks toward you in a parking lot carrying a wrench, the smartest thing you can do is stand there with your hands at your sides. I know how that sounds. AAA did a big survey on road rage and figured about 7.6 million American drivers got out of their cars to go confront somebody in a single year, and the guys most likely to do it were between 19 and 39. The kid in this clip is right in that age range, and he just plants his feet by his open car door and keeps his arms down. There's a guy named Rory Miller who worked in corrections for years and wrote a whole book about how fights between men actually start. He says they almost always follow the same script. One guy stares you down, then he says something, then he walks up into your space, then he shoves you, and only after all of that does somebody throw a punch. Miller calls it the monkey dance, and the whole thing falls apart when the other guy won't dance. Look at the kid's hands. The old man has walked all the way over holding a wrench, and the kid gives him nothing to work with. If the kid squares up, the old man gets a fight he can blame on him. Standing there calm leaves the guy holding a wrench in the middle of a parking lot with a camera on him and nowhere to go. Miller says backing down without some way to save face is one of the hardest things a young guy can do. This kid held his ground without ever raising his hands, which is a lot rarer than it looks. The legal side works out even better for him. Under the Model Penal Code, which a lot of state laws are built on, pretty much anything counts as a deadly weapon if you use it in a way that could kill or badly hurt someone, and that includes a wrench you're carrying toward a person. Almost every state also says whoever starts it loses the right to claim self-defense. So the second the old man started walking over with that tool, he became the aggressor, and if he'd swung, the law would have been on the kid's side. Law students all learn this from a 1972 case out of DC called United States v. Peterson. A guy caught a man stealing the windshield wipers off his car, went inside, grabbed a pistol and came back out. The other man picked up a lug wrench and came at him with it raised, and Peterson shot him. Peterson still got convicted of manslaughter, because the court said he was the one who started things back up when he walked out with the gun. People get shot over this stuff every day. The Gun Violence Archive counted at least 357 road rage incidents last year where somebody got shot and hurt or killed, about one a day. The old man had no idea what that kid had in his car, and almost nobody who walks up on a stranger ever does. Most of us like to think we'd be the calm one in that parking lot, and the numbers say most guys his age wouldn't be. He kept his arms at his sides with a wrench coming at him, and that probably kept both of them out of the hospital.