Stressed drivers, lots of guns: An explosion in road rage shootings
HOUSTON — The trouble started with an argument between two drivers merging in slow traffic after a Houston Astros baseball game last summer. It ended with two gunshots, fired from a moving Buick and exploding through the glass of a fleeing Ford pickup truck.
The bullets missed the truck’s driver, Paul Castro, but one — just one — struck his teenage son, David, who sat in the passenger seat. As Castro drove to get help, a 911 operator told him to apply pressure to the wound at the back of his son’s head. But David did not make it.
The random pointlessness of the killing shocked Houston. But it was one of dozens of similar incidents across the country over the past year amid an explosion of shootings and killings attributed to rage on the road.
These eruptions of sudden violence — a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firing repeatedly after an argument at a red light; a Georgia driver shot while on a family road trip — are not unique to any part of America, among a population that is increasingly on edge and carrying guns. But they have been perhaps most pronounced on the roads of Texas.
“In the past, people curse one another, throw up the finger and keep moving,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston said. “Now instead of throwing up the finger, they’re pulling out the gun and shooting.”
As more motorists seemed to be firing guns last year, the Dallas Police Department began tracking road rage shootings for the first time. The results were alarming: 45 people wounded, 11 killed.
In Austin last year, the police recorded 160 episodes of drivers pointing or firing a gun; so far this year, there have been 15 road rage shootings, with three people struck. (Two others were stabbed in altercations stemming from road rage.)
The prevalence of such violence, not just in Texas but around the country, suggests a cultural commonality, an extreme example of deteriorating behavior that has also flared on airplanes and in stores. It is as if the pandemic and the nation’s sour mood have left people forgetting how to act in public at the same time as they were buying millions more weapons.
“It’s the same sort of ball of wax: People getting frustrated, feeling strained and acting out toward others,” said Charis E. Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine. “One thing that we do know is that there has been a huge rise in gun sales,” she added.
Last month, a woman driving with her dog shot and wounded another motorist in Oklahoma City. In Miami, a man fired 11 shots from his car on Interstate 95 in what he has said was self-defense. A Los Angeles couple is set to stand trial for firing into a car during morning rush-hour last year, killing a 6-year-old boy on his way to kindergarten.
Criminologists cautioned that any theory of motivation behind road rage shootings is hampered by a lack of data. Most police departments do not keep statistics on road rage episodes, in part because it is not itself a crime category. There is no federal database.
Arizona has tried to get a rough approximation of the number of road rage incidents, adding a box for “possible road rage” to the form filled out by police officers for car crashes in 2018. The data showed an increase in such incidents in 2021 compared with the previous two years, according to Alberto Gutier, the director of the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
“It’s going crazy,” he said of road rage. “People are so stupid.”
But, he added, the state does not track the number of episodes that end up in gunfire.
For its report on an increase in road rage shootings, the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety relied on the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that compiles data from government sources and media reports. The group found that more than 500 people had been injured or killed in reported road rage shootings last year, up from fewer than 300 in 2019.
“The story that it’s telling is a definite and really worrying increase in incidents of road rage involving a gun,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior director of research at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Only in this country is someone shot and injured or killed every 17 hours in a road rage incident.”
Texas accounted for a quarter of the fatal shootings last year that were documented in the study, with 33 people killed in road rage shootings in the state, up from 18 in 2019.
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