It’s the Wild West out there, nowhere more so than in the Sunshine State, where Central Florida’s WESH 2 news reports that a man fired several shots through his own windshield after he says the driver of another car pointed a gun at him. Dashcam footage captured the incident, which took place on Florida’s Highway 417 in Orange County.
The driver, Marco Mazzetta, posted the footage to YouTube (naturally), and it shows him squeezing off several shots at a Nissan 370Z, all while traveling at 93 mph. According to Mazzetta, the Nissan was being driven aggressively and it bumped Mazzetta’s truck when he tapped the brakes. Then it passed him, and the driver pointed a gun at him out the window. That’s when Mazzetta opened fire.
“I know this video doesn’t capture my smartest moments,” Mazzetta wrote in a text to WESH 2, then adds, “but I hope any idiot criminal with a gun watching thinks twice before loading, brandishing & aiming their firearm at someone over a traffic infraction.”
The unusual, um, tactic of shooting through one’s own windshield last came up a couple of years ago when a Las Vegas police officer fired through the windshield of his cruiser at murder suspects in an SUV he was pursuing, with a Florida deputy doing the same thing a few months later. It’s a move that seemed to carry a lot of inherent danger when a law enforcement officer was doing it — much less when it’s done by a participant in a road rage incident — though the Vegas officer’s superior shrugged it off at the time as allowable under department policy.
Thoughts?
