Posted by hank, Mon Aug 18 04:42:00 UTC 2008
One of the things I’m always hearing is how if you are allowed to have a gun in your car, road rage will involve a lot more shootings. I’ve never really believed it, and I decided to see how much the Google News Archives show for this type of story. There are around 40,000 stories that contain “road rage gun,” some of which can be seen here. I saw some interesting trends:
- There are three incidents on the linked page in Australia, surprisingly, even though they have very strict handgun control. Even fake guns were involved…
- There was one in Toronto, also strict on handgun ownership
- Many states in the US are represented, including Maryland, Georgia, and Florida
- Quite a few are road rage incidents involving off-duty or retired police officers or Federal marshalls!!
There was a study that showed that “people who carry guns in their car are more likely to have road rage.” It’s a pretty far stretch since the percentages are 23% of people with guns vs. 16% of people without them. I don’t think this is a good conclusion. Until someone can show me that road rage deaths in Texas or Alaska or Florida increased when carry laws were loosened, I won’t believe these urban legends I keep hearing. And, if they’re not urban legends, please please cite your source - at least the publication.
I find the last one really shocking. Many of these people are trained very well in firearm use and safety. I would really like to be able to break it down by state using the Google archive search, but I can’t find that. If anyone knows where I can find statistics on police reports per state for road rage incidents involving handguns, especially time series data, let me know.
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