Road Rage Cases Have Doubled Says The Trace

We get it. Driving sucks sometimes. There’s always a driver that wants to go faster no matter how fast you’re already going. No matter how hard it’s raining or how curvy the road is, whatever. There’s always a driver who cuts you off when you’re in your own lane minding your own business. Most of the time when this happens to me, there’s not even anyone behind me! I drive on a m rural highway a lot of the time and invariably there’s some jerk who pulls out of one of the few stores along the highway right in front of me when there’s not a car in sight behind me for half a mile.

Most of the time I let it go but I have been known to give people who do this the middle finger salute. I try to keep my temper but, hey, they’re driving away, I’m driving away. What’s the harm? Well, according to the New York Times,  a recent analysis says that cases of road rage involving a firearm more than doubled over a three-year-period. In 2014, there were 246 cases and in 2016 there were 620.

Road rage involving a firearm was determined to be “where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger.” The analysis was done and published by The Trace, a non-profit news organization focused on gun violence. The Trace in turn got its data from the Gun Violence Archive, which the article says tracks incidents of gun violence in the United States based on news reports, police reports and government reports (ATF, TSA). Though the group has only been around since 2012, the archive of their data is available to the public on the website. Out of the incidents that they were able to track, The Trace accounts for 1,319 road rage episodes involving firearms during the period from 2014 to 2016, with 354 people wounded and 136 killed.

But seriously, if drivers are pulling guns out at firing at other drivers, that’s a fact that’s kind of hard to sugarcoat. I know that many of those incidents are probably not done by responsible gun owners, too. Most people who are safe and responsible with their guns wouldn’t point their gun at someone or pull it out and actually shoot someone with it over a parking space.

The article doesn’t say what is believed to be behind the increase in road rage involving guns. But we all know that there are millions of new guns sold over the past several years and many of them are to new gun owners and possibly people with less than optimal training, or even no training at all in some states. The Trace says states with larger numbers of concealed carry permit holders and what they call “relaxed gun laws” had more road rage cases. Florida was No. 1, with 147; followed by Texas, 126; California, 82; Tennessee, 68; and Pennsylvania, 62. Louisiana was No. 10, with 35 cases over the examined time period.