In Florida, there more than likely been shots fired. As soon as that first hit to my side window happend, you just brought a helmet to a gunfight.
Maybe.
Maybe that mob, which clearly had little respect for the law, brought a helmet
and three dozen guns to a gunfight.
No way for you to know.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that guns need to be taken completely off the table here, and I've actually argued in support of their potential utility in respect to this very situation, but I question the wisdom of a firearm being anyone's first response (as soon as a helmet touched the window).
Seems to me that "getting off the X" as quickly as possible, before the bikers' aggression could escalate beyond banging on windows, was the number one priority if protecting one's wife and kid was the primary task.
You'd want to extricate yourself (and your family) from the threat situation using as much force as is necessary in order to be successful but as little force as is absolutely necessary so as not to elicit an escalation of force by the attackers (and to minimize any potential criminal or civil liability down the road).
It makes sense that you'd not want to do anything to precipitate two dozen thugs dumping two dozen mags into the doors of your vehicle.
Driving away at a high rate of speed, even if the driver went over a few bikers in the execution of his escape, is orders of magnitude lower on the threat scale, as far as the bikers would have to be concerned, than opening fire on them.
If the possibility exists that these guys have guns, and prudence dictates that you have to begin with the premise that they do, you also have to begin with the premise that they're carrying those guns because they're willing to use them
at least as necessary to defend their own lives (if threatened).
If anything is going to get a bunch of guys shooting at you, it's gonna be opening fire on them first.
I think there were probably points during the actual events of this confrontation where a firearm would have been useful. I can think of plenty of things that would have made a firearm the right first choice if the situation here had been different. But the situation being what it was the Range Rover driver, even if he had a firearm at the time he was "surrounded", did the right thing by attempting to flee (actually, successfully fleeing).
I think he made a huge mistake in both driving so fast away from the initial scene and in leaving the highway (in order to enter Sunday gridlock in NYC).
He should have taken his time, stayed on the highway doing 30 MPH, bumped any bikers who tried to slow or stop him, made any illegal turns necessary on the highway to ensure steady movement, and been on the phone with 911 the whole time.
But I can't see how having a gun at the initial scene would have made him and his family any "safer" (they were perfectly safe as it was, a gun couldn't have added anything) while on the downside I see where his presented or fired a firearm could have made a bad situation spin into and unrecoverable, out of control situation.