Maybe Heinlein Was Right

The obligatory link: Flying Beverage Cup Has Another Driver In Hot Water

Actually, I've thought this way for a while, but there really may be something to the whole "an armed society is a polite society" idea. After all, if you think about it, isn't road rage a whole lot like some of the rants floating around the internet? You know, the kinds of things that wouldn't happen if there was the barest chance that the target could fight back, whether or not they did?

It's a project beyond me, but looking into the decline of such things as individual weapon ownership and pistols at dawn in relation to the statistics of assault, the rise of road rage, and so on. The level of insanity needed to do such things would likely rise as the chances of the target being armed rose, at the very least.

Just to touch on a different part of this story for a bit, it should be interesting to see what kind of a sentence this guy gets (the maximum is ten years, according to the article), since the previous instance mentioned involved a woman who got sentenced to the minimum (two years) and then let out after seven weeks. For some reason, I'm not expecting a comparable sentence.