MAKKAH, 5 January 2007 — A Saudi man has adopted what he considers a good conflict resolution strategy: He keeps a toy gun in his car and points it at people who get angry and abusive, the daily Okaz reported yesterday. The man said he recently got into an altercation with a man in the parking lot of a shopping mall after accidentally hitting his car. He said that guy got so angry that he was about to get abusive. But thanks to the decoy gun, which he pointed at the other guy, a fight was averted. This might be a clever idea, or not. One of the first rules of gun safety is that you never purposefully point a gun at another person without being 100% committed to pulling the trigger. Pointing a toy gun at another person might be clever, until the other person happens to be somebody with a real gun who calls your bluff. As they say in the US: You shouldn’t write a check you can’t cash.