Good Guy with a Gun #218: Carroll County, KY

He cut someone off, brandished a gun, and blocked the road. The grand jury said the other driver finished it legally. | Original incident: June 8, 2024

These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is essentially the same as the calendar version.

Daniel Shouse, a 63-year-old from Carrollton, Kentucky, was driving on I-71 in Carroll County around 7 PM.

No, not Danny Shouse, the American who played pro basketball in Iceland in the 80s — he would have been 65. Nor the Daniel Shouse the left-handed pitcher — he’d be in his 40s. Nor the Daniel Shouse who claimed he was hit by an ICE car in 2025 — because he was alive in 2025. Nor, obviously, the Daniel Shouse who shows up as class of 2031 on perfectgame.org. 63-year-old Daniel Shouse could have been related to Astor Daniel Shouse, Sr., who died in Kentucky in 1954 at the age of 57 — at least they were both from the same state — but they’re definitely not the same person.

I know, I know: “Jake, you’re rambling.” But honestly, I look up a lot of names, and most of them don’t have as many different people behind them as this one does. (It makes the research difficult.) And this doesn’t seem like a very common name. Who knew?

Anyway, 63-year-old Daniel Shouse was driving on I-71, about an hour northeast of Louisville.

We’re assured by his neighbor, Laura Wilson that, “From what I knew of him, he was very, very kind, very sweet, very, you know, nice with words. Didn’t seem like he had a mean bone in his body.”

But at some point things got out of hand. Shouse passed another driver and brandished a gun.

The other driver called 911 to let them know what was happening. It sounds like he was still on the phone with emergency services when both cars pulled off at exit 43 onto KY Highway 389.

At that point, Shouse did a U-turn in front of the other driver to block his way. Both men were still in their cars when “shots were fired,” as they say in the passive voice: We don’t know if Shouse shot the other man, but there were apparently guns in both cars, and the other man shot Shouse.

Shouse died. About six weeks later, a grand jury determined that no criminal charges would be filed against the shooter.

Sources

Primary

The Kentucky State Police put their original police report online and updated it as information came out, including the no-bill from the Grand Jury.

Local news

This had a lot more coverage than I would have thought, both on the initial shooting and on the no-bill from the Grand Jury. Most of them say approximately the same things. Rather than try to give you comprehensive coverage and video, I’m going to link to a raft of them and leave it at that.

Most of them followed a pattern like WDRB’s:

• 1 dead after road rage incident in Carroll County, Kentucky, police say

• Kentucky State Police investigators believe fatal Saturday shooting on I-71 was self-defense

• No charges filed in Carroll County road rage shooting that left 1 dead, KSP says

…though sometimes the middle one is missing.

Other coverage came from the Lexington Herald-Leader, WLKY (1, 2, 3), WCPO 9 Cincinnati (1, 2), Eagle Country 99.3 FM (1, 2), WAVE (1, 2), the News Democrat, and K105 Radio.

I only found information about the original shooting on WXIX Fox 19, the Madison Courier, and WHAS 11 (though I didn’t look very hard).

2A / specialist media

The National Gun Violence Memorial beclowns itself by calling Daniel Shouse a “victim of gun violence.” The Gun Violence Archive at least correctly classifies it as a DGU.

Colion Noir covered the incident at his site.