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I try to drive safely and would never knowingly do anything to “set off” another driver. However, if you don’t see someone or they do something sudden and unexpected while you’re say, changing lanes, you can end up in a rage incident. Those can range from fist-shaking to aggressive driving, sudden slowdowns causing you to hit the brakes or moving over suddenly to force you off the road. Merging in front of you with no safety margin appears to be a favorite.
In the few instances something like this happened, I immediately either turn into another road or pull off the road. Having known a few jerks who were aggressive drivers and who got into incidents that they related I realized that they all felt they simply HAD to keep driving. Thus, if you keep up with them or, worse, engage in tit-for-tat the incident will escalate. These are small minded, angry people and they will not stop misbehaving until they feel they’ve “won.”

I carry. But the idea of getting into a running gun battle is ridiculous. Also, I have zero ego involved. If the other guy wants to feel he “won” then let him. Why would I care? I certainly don’t want a prison sentence because I had to defend myself from harm. I also don’t want dings and bangs on my car.

I had a boss who, it seemed once a month, yelled out his story about dealing with what he described as “some asshole.” He was about five feet tall, wore tooled cowboy boots and fancy western outfits. We all understood who the “asshole” was as we dealt with him every day. He regularly related stories about exchanging gunfire with other drivers. If the stories he related were true, and we felt there was always a cornel of truth, then he could have gone to prison several times over. (He carried a .357 magnum and there’s no way he could hit anything with it.) One day he completely changed and almost looked furtive coming in. Each of us searched the news to see if he’d actually shot someone but there were so many possibilities, we couldn’t pin down one. He left the company shortly after that and moved away. We were pretty sure something got out of hand.

So:
One AH plus one reasonable guy equals probably no incident.
Two reasonable guys, the incident could never happen.
But two AH’s and it will end badly for someone. That’s what we think happened to our boss.

I saw a bumper sticker reading, “If everyone is driving like an AH, chances are you’re the AH.”