First of all, a couple of my friends are bikers, and I’ve been to meets and met many members of their club. Great bunch guys, grown adults with responsible jobs and families. But once they’re in numbers and on the road, they change. I’ve witnessed first hand griefing similar (but not as extreme) to that shown in the video. All it takes is for one of them to do something, then the one-upmanship kicks in and things escalate very quickly.
This probably makes me sound like a biker hater, but I’m really not, I just don’t have the rose tinted visor.
With regards to the video – I’ll give the biker the benefit of the doubt that he was just trying to help his fellow bikers regroup, as his actions were very clearly deliberate. If that is the case, it was still a pretty dim thing to do, and is just asking to get nudged. With all those bikes around him, the RR driver’s eyes were likely darting from mirror to mirror in an attempt to avoid hitting any of them. I’d also hazard a guess that a bike deliberately pulling in front and slowing was the last thing he expected.
Now we get into the perception of the driver.
What are these guys doing? What do they want? There are lots of them and they’re all around me and seem to be trying to force me to stop. Oh ****, I’ve bumped one of them and they’ve all stopped and are approaching me and my family in numbers.
If this happened in a
Stand Your Ground state, that in and of itself would be justification to draw a weapon. Even if the bikers did nothing other than approach his car in numbers, I could still fully understand that he felt in danger and invoked the
Duty to Retreat.
As for getting away, he didn’t have to outrun or outlast them, he just had to keep moving and call the cops. I’m pretty sure no other biker would have attempted to slow him again. I know, easy to say when calmy sitting in front of my PC.
Of course if something happened prior to the video, it could cast a whole different light on the matter, but my
provisional opinion is that the RR driver acted reasonably
