Good people with guns cannot stop bad people with guns

In states that Republicans control, getting rid of gun regulations is almost as popular as passing election suppression laws and constant whining about the stolen 2020 election. The gun extremist ‘logic’, good people with guns will stop bad people with guns from shooting people, never made a lick of sense. There's waaay too many bad people with guns. And, it is waaay too easy for a bad person to whip out their gun(s) and start blazing away before the good people with their guns whip out their heat and spit hot lead at the bad person spitting hot lead.

The New York Times writes on a tragic road rage incident. 

Angry Drivers, Lots of Guns: An Explosion in Road Rage Shootings

Dozens have been reported in Texas alone amid a pandemic surge in gun purchases and a country increasingly on edge.

The trouble started with an argument between two drivers merging in slow traffic after an 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 Mr. 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, Okla., 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 in an interview. “Now instead of throwing up the finger, they’re pulling out the gun and shooting.”  

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.”

So there we have it. Guns and bullets are starting to slowly replace flipping someone the bird and just moving on. Maybe people aren’t mostly stupid. Maybe most are mostly in a constant state of dark free speech-fueled fear, rage, hate, etc., and it finally explodes in a hail of bullets.

I assign most of the blame (~75% ?) to decades of a tsunami of intentionally divisive, deceitful, polarizing neo-fascist propaganda that has caused too many people of being irrationally terrified, enraged, intolerant and hateful, among some other bad emotional states. Fox News and all the rest of the neo-fascist radical right should be ashamed, but they are just making too damn much money for shame to be a serious concern. This is more evidence that the social glue needed to keep democracy vibrant and viable has mostly rotted away. That rot followed as morality rotted away from the Republican Party.

I spoke before of democracy slowly dying from thousands of all kinds of cuts. This road rage thing is just one kind of those anti-democratic cuts. 

NOTE: In addition to getting rid of nationwide abortion rights in the coming weeks, our Christian nationalist Supreme Court is also set to hand down a major ruling that experts predict will gut some of the remaining gun restriction laws. More gun violence is predicted to result from that in the coming years. 

Grannies with Guns:

Serious potential for a bad road rage outcome

Republicans with Guns

Higher potential for a bad road rage outcome