Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part four. Protect Yourself from Road Rage

Many drivers in America carry guns and are often willing to use them in road rage shootings. According to this article, there were 1,319 road rage shootings from 2014 to 2016. This resulted in 354 people being wounded and 136 being killed. The rate seems to be increasing, from 247 in 2014 to 620 in 2016. Official statistics do not keep separate record of road rage incidents; these numbers were gleaned from published reports by the organization that published the above article.

These numbers are low compared to the population as a whole. Do not fall into the half-full half-empty trap, telling yourself that, any time you use your car, there is less than a 50 percent chance that you will be the victim of road rage. Over time, the odds accumulate that you might be a victim. The figures are large enough to justify thoughtful and continual precaution while driving.

Moreover, the number of road rage gun incidents is under-reported. I know this for a fact because one of my students told me of an incident in which an enraged driver followed another and shot his car. The incident, not involving any injury, went unreported.

One reason they often go unreported is that the victim may place him or herself at risk of further attack. A policeman once told me that a man at a stop sign got out of his car and used a baseball bat to smash the windshield of the car behind. The victim started to report it, but the police discouraged the victim from taking action. The reason is that, if you report or sue someone who commits violence against you, your name and address become a matter of public record, and the perp may track you down. You lose the protection of anonymity.

One way, you might think, to get around the problem of revealing your identity to the attacker is to let your insurance company pursue a suit against the attacker. However, this will not work: before an insurance company can act, they need a police report, which contains your personal information and to which the attacker may also have access.

Statistically, you are unlikely to be injured or killed by road rage. But the numbers are great enough to justify a cynic’s wariness: if there is a pickup truck nearby, you can assume the driver is armed and angry, and you should take precautions. Under no circumstances should you make that driver angry or angrier.

From an online search, I found a story about a road rage shooting in France. See, they aren’t all in America. But the article was published in 2013. America stands out among industrialized countries in the frequency of road rage.

News from France!

“A 19-year-old French youth who was shot in the head after a banal road dispute over right-of-way was pronounced dead in hospital on Wednesday. A suspect has now been charged with his murder…The 19-year-old youth was left fighting for his life after being gunned down on Sunday night near the town of Giffaumont in north-eastern France.”

Wow! They have road rage shootings in France! This makes America not look so bad…

Except that this report was from 2013. This was the only case of French road rage I could find by searching online.

Meanwhile, I was searching online for more information about a road rage shooting in Dallas about which one of my botany majors had told me. A friend of her husband had cut in front of another driver in an ill-advised attempt to take an exit. The driver who got cut off followed him around through Dallas until pulling up next to him at a stoplight. The road rage driver then took out a gun and shot holes in the side of the first man’s car. My student confirmed that this incident went unreported. The only road rage incidents that were reported were those that involved bloodshed, including murder, about five of them in Dallas just in the second half of 2017.

And you wonder why the Europeans think we are crazy? Is this what a “Christian country” is supposed to look like?