Wave Of Red State Laws May Be Driving Road Rage Shootings

The number of shooting incidents stemming from road rage doubled in five years, from 218 in 2018 to 483 in 2023, according to new research from Everytown for Gun Safety, a prominent gun law reform group. The figure amounts to a driver opening fire at someone in traffic every 18 hours.

The sharp jump in road rage incidents contrasts with an overall decline in violence nationwide, the report notes. The group highlighted a significant connection that may help explain it: Road rage incidents increased most in states that have enacted laws that allow people to carry concealed handguns without a permit, meaning they don’t have to go through the application for a license to carry a weapon.

Everytown has monitored road rage shootings since 2018, according to senior research director Sarah Burd Sharps. The group noted a major increase in those shootings during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Burd Sharps attributed to the stress that the pandemic and associated lockdowns caused and the fact that Americans went on an unprecedented gun-buying spree during those years.

The rate of road rage violence peaked in 2022, with an 11% drop in 2023, Everytown found. Of the 483 deaths in 2023, however, 118 were fatal, compared with 58 in 2018.

But road rage shootings remained elevated last year compared with 2018, even as violent crime in general dropped at a faster rate. The group’s research pointed to the proliferation of laws allowing permitless carry as a possible explanation.

“Laws that make it easier and more likely for people to bring guns into their cars means that loaded guns are readily available in a tense situation,” Burd Sharps told HuffPost. “Aggressive driving isn’t uncommon, but the presence of a gun in the car can turn that into a dangerous incident. The gun emboldens people to behave in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Gun rights groups have helped pass a flurry of state laws in recent years allowing private citizens to carry concealed handguns without a license, contending that the Second Amendment alone justifies carrying a firearm without a permit.

Twenty-nine states have now passed such laws, according to the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, a membership group that offers insurance to help pay legal costs in cases involving handgun use for self-defense. “Constitutional carry” laws are far more popular in red states than in blue ones.

Permitless carry states saw a rate of road rage violence of 1.89 per million residents — about three times higher than states with stricter gun control laws.

Everytown found little evidence that road rage shootings are a major problem outside the United States, Burd Sharps said.

“Aggressive driving happens in every country,” Burd Sharps told HuffPost. “But only in the United States is someone shot every 18 hours in a road rage incident.”

Road rage shootings tended to happen at a higher rate in Southern and Western states, where gun laws are often less strict. They were less common in the Northeast and in California, where gun laws are tougher.

Several states bucked the trend. The largely unpopulated states of Montana, Nebraska and the Dakotas all had road rage shooting rates of 0 per million in 2023. Pennsylvania and Delaware, on the other hand, both posted high rates of road rage shootings, out of sync with the broader geographic pattern.

New Mexico had the highest rate of road rage shootings by far, at 6.16 per million in 2023.

Everytown’s research, which is based on data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, adds a new dimension to a longstanding debate about the effect of right-to-carry laws on public safety.

The influential book ”More Guns, Less Crime,” by controversial economist John Lott Jr., contends that a more heavily armed society would deter violent crime.

But critics say that upping the number of guns in public while doing away with hurdles for carrying a concealed weapon, like in-class training and demonstration of shooting competence, leads to more violence rather than less.

One group of researchers published a 2019 paper in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies finding that passing right-to-carry laws led to a 13% to 15% increase in violent crime a decade after implementation.