Apparent road rage fatality in Los Angeles.

[sharesunited]

Guns are great for immediate satisfaction of grievances.

I don't agree with how you are driving. Pop pop pop.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/police-identify-man-killed-in-freeway-shooting.html

[rrneck]

1. I cant decide

whether to unrec for sanctimonious spam or rec for hilarious cognitive dissonance.

The OP of course has nothing to do with the tragedy in the news report.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Straw Man]

7. Ad hominem, innuendo, and speculation.

You have absolutely no idea what occured in the original incident. That flapping sound is the shreds of your credibility being blown out the window.

[petronius]

13. You don't have the faintest idea what happened on that freeway. Why do you claim that you do?

"Cognitive dissonance" may not mean what you think it does...

[wtmusic]

4. The OP has of course everything to do with the tragedy

Heat-of-the-moment tragedies are what guns do best.

[Straw Man]

9. More random speculation.

How do you know this was "heat-of-the-moment"? I'm just asking.

[Euromutt]

17. It may be what they do best, but that doesn't they do it often

Such killings are, in fact, vanishingly rare. Sudden, unprovoked killings are typically committed by individuals with a prior record of violent behavior. Criminologists Don Kates and Daniel Polsby put it well in "The Myth of the 'Virgin Killer',":

What differentiates criminals and violent psychopaths from ordinary people is not their experiencing hatred or rage, but the ease with which those emotions are prompted and the acts to which they give rise. Killers exhibit an absence of impulse control and a seemingly inexplicable (to ordinary people) propensity to explode into extreme violence over the most trifling matters. On the one hand, ordinary people virtually never kill; on the other hand, the kind of person who murders often does so over things so trivial that we are left aghast not only at the fact of killing but at the inconsequential grievance that engendered it.

In incidents of intimate partner homicide or domestic murder-suicide, it almost invariably emerges after the fact that the killing did not occur in "the heat of the moment" but were premeditated. Gavin de Becker, in his invaluable book The Gift of Fear, puts it thus:

Though leaving is the best response to violence, it is in trying to leave that most women get killed. This dispels dangerous myth about spousal killings: that they happen in the heat of an argument. In fact, the majority of husbands who kill their wives stalk them first, and far from the "crime of passion" that it's so often called, killing a wife is usually a decision, not a loss of control. Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.

Even the phrase "crime of passion" has contributed to our widespread misunderstanding of this violence. That phrase is not the description of a crime -- it is the description of an excuse, a defense. Since 75 per cent of spousal murders happen after the woman leaves, it is estrangement, not argument, that begets the worst violence.

Given that it's illegal to transport a loaded handgun in a motor vehicle without a CCW permit, and that CCW permits are exceedingly rare in coastal SoCal, it is highly unlikely that the shooter in this case was a generally law-abiding person who snapped at the nth Prius driver behaving like an entitled dick. Rather, the shooter probably had the firearm in his car illegally, and had a prior history of violent behavior.

[rrneck]

23. The news article is about a tragedy

the reason it was posted is a tragedy of a different sort.

[katanalori]

2. more info about Ivan Spencer, the victim of the shooting

"The Long Beach Press-Telegram reports that Spencer lived in a gated community on Saddleback Road with 61-year-old Samantha Sanson, who owns a Gardena strip club called Starz (along with two other clubs in the South Bay)"

(snip)

"Spencer's death is essentially an L.A. driver's worst nightmare: Back in the late 1990s, a string of random, creepy freeway shootings threw the media into a frenzy and had traffic-jams full of paranoid L.A. commuters on pins and needles."

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/06/ivan_spencer_shot_dead_freeway.php

I see no mention/evidence that this was "road rage."

[xxqqqzme]

6. Highly unlikely

at 2:30AM - 2:30PM in 100 degree gridlock - maybe

[MyrnaLoy]

5. The unrec

flash mob will be on you in about 5 minutes. One showed up early.

[S_B_Jackson]

11. Don't you have a thread about a shooting in League City to attend to? (n/t)

[eqfan592]

25. The OP claims this to be something...

...that it has not yet proven to be. It is well deserving of an unrec just for that dishonesty. And if you weren't so disingenuous you would have unreced it yourself for the same reason.

[SoCalDemGrrl]

8. It doesnt say road rage-the guy worked at a strip club-that may have to do

with the circumstance of his death. To say ROAD RAGE is

premature until all the investigation has been completed.

[gejohnston]

10. the article said it could have happend on an on ramp

There is no evidence that it was road rage, other than it happened in a car on the road. While everyone else is speculating road rage, I could speculate it was a professional hit with equal likelihood based on the article. Given that it is LA, the probability of it being a CCW holder gone bad is as close to zero as you can get without it being someplace in Illinois or Wisconsin.

[petronius]

12. If you think that shooting someone is a great "immediate satisfaction" of a driving grievance, then

I suggest you never own a gun. Or drive.

[TheMadMonk]

14. Great advice for all the gun owners who tell us to our faces...

...that if they feel threatened in any way, they will shoot first and establish facts later.

[Straw Man]

15. I'm sure you could cite dozens of those, right?

So let's see them.

(Hint: "threatened in any way" is not equivalent to "facing imminent death.")

[TheMadMonk]

16. Don't spend enough time in the Gungeon to know the names off the top of my head.

However, I have seen on several occasions, individuals here openly state that they will shoot first if a stranger is on their property under "questionable" circumstance. (ie. in the dark.) And also several who stated that they WOULD shoot an escaping "uninvited guest" in the back without remorse.

[Euromutt]

18. So we're talking about statements made regarding residential burglars

That's not quite the same as (by which I mean "it is completely different from") threatening to shoot some stranger on a public thoroughfare for looking at you in a peculiar fashion, or behaving like all too many smug, self-entitled Prius drivers.

[TheMadMonk]

19. Hmm, IIRC there was a case only a week or 2 ago of a legitimate...

...gun owner (a pollie) threatening another with his gun in a public place.

And there have been plenty of road rage incidents over the years involving legally owned guns.

And in the home, or on the street, much the same mentality prevails: "I have a gun. I am empowered to act."

[DonP]

20. Kind of like "I have a keyboard and I am empowered to make shit up"

So you don't come here often, but you are sure that you have seen people posting here regularly that they will "shoot first and ask questions later".

But you can't be bothered to find any examples to support it.

Yeah we believe that. Now make up a nice story for us about unicorns and fairy princesses.

[eqfan592]

26. That's pretty much how it always is with these folks.

They bounce in, make a wild claim that they know all of us "gungeoners" are blood thirsty maniacs, then when asked to support it with evidence state that they can't be bothered to do so.

Seriously, what a fucking joke. If you are going to make a claim about people, be ready to back it up with some supporting evidence. Otherwise STFU.

[AtheistCrusader]

27. I'd have trouble citing it too, if the search engine only turned up my own hyperbole.

[Euromutt]

32. How about you stop moving the goalposts?

First you make a claim about "all the gun owners who tell us to our faces that if they feel threatened in any way, they will shoot first and establish facts later." You haven't actually managed to provide an example of that, only some things that are superficially similar. Somebody stating that he will shoot at a nocturnal intruder isn't exactly someone who feels threatened "in any way," but in a very specific and, frankly, justified way. And some asshole brandishing a firearm on the highway isn't an example of a gun owner on this board "shooting first and establishing facts later"; in fact, it's not example of someone shooting first at all.

[cleanhippie]

28. 100% bullshit. You have fabricated that out of thin air.

Or you could support your ridiculous assertions with FACTS if you want to.

But we both know you can't.

[jeepnstein]

21. Seeing as California...

has some really tight controls on firearms and Concealed Carry is almost impossible to obtain in L.A., I'm going to go with "Criminals doing things criminals do for $100, Alex". The victim could very well be pure as the driven snow but I'm willing to bet the shooter has a history of violence and has been through the system a time or two. Most people don't just jump from hollering at cars in traffic to homicide all at once. Killing is a thing humans don't really do to each other all that well. It takes time and effort to turn a human into a murderer.

[DWC]

22. "several gunshot wounds to his upper body"...

Administered between two moving vehicles pretty much defines the weapon as a sub-machine gun or more probably a shotgun. Further, to deploy either from a moving vehicle would require 2 people; a driver and a shooter.

With 99.99999% certainty, road rage had nothing to do with this murder.

Semper Fi,

[DonP]

24. Do reporters or some posters ever think?

The guy runs several strip clubs (which on more than a few occasions have been connected with organized crime). He was driving home at 3:30 AM, possibly with a large amount of cash, on a basically empty freeway by LA standards.

The obvious answer - he cut someone off and they shot him in a fit of road rage.

Couldn't have anything to do with rivals/angry boyfriend/husbands/ex employees/former customers/current customer thrown out of the club that night etc.

Yup, road range by a licensed CCW is the only logical answer.

[Atypical Liberal]

29. Guns are also great for immediate protection from assault.

The question is, are you willing to disallow people to protect themselves from assault in an attempt to stop people from doing bad things from firearms.

I am not.

Without firearms, every victim of violent assault who tries to resist their assailant will be engaged in a physical contest of strength with their attacker. The weak will be at the mercy of the strong.

[TheWraith]

30. Wait a minute, that's impossible! People aren't allowed to carry guns in Los Angeles!

That's why LA has absolutely no gun-based killings. :eyes:

[GreenStormCloud]

31. Road rage? Sounds like a deliberate hit to me.

Granted, information is sparse. But road rage tends to happen when the roads are crowded. In the early morning, even in LA, there is lots of room on the freedways. Yes, I have driven in LA.

The guy owned some strip clubs. Frequently, but not always, that means a criminal involvement. He may have made a business associate angry. My speculation is better than yours as mine takes into account the light traffic and his occupation.