Road Rage Killing Shows Futility Of Gun Control

(AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)

The state of California is generally accepted to be the most gun-controlled state in the nation. They have every single law being considered at the federal level, including assault weapon bans, red flag laws, and universal background checks. More than that, though, they’ve got a pile of laws that would never even make it out of committee in Washington, D.C.

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Despite all of that, though, they haven’t nipped gun violence in the bud. We keep hearing how we need this bill or that bill to stop gun violence, yet this still happened in California.

Days after the killing of a 6-year-old boy in a road-rage shooting on the 55 Freeway in Orange, the suspects got into another traffic altercation in which the alleged shooter waved a gun at another motorist, prosecutors said in court papers filed Wednesday.

Marcus Anthony Eriz, 24, and Wynne Lee, 23, are scheduled to be arraigned on Friday when Orange County Superior Court Judge Larry Yellin will consider a request from prosecutors to set bails at higher-than-usual levels.

The victim, Aiden Leos, was fatally shot May 21 as his mother, Joanna Cloonan, was driving him to kindergarten in her Chevrolet Sonic on the freeway.

About 8 a.m. that day, the two were cut off by the defendants, who were in a Volkswagen Golf Sportwagen, according to prosecutors.

Lee was behind Cloonan in the diamond lane before swinging over to the fast lane and then accelerating at an “extremely high rate of speed” to get in front of Cloonan, prosecutors said in the motion.

“Wynne Lee motioned to the victim vehicle a `peace sign’ with her hand and continued driving,” prosecutors said in the motion for higher bail.

A few miles later as Cloonan was attempting to merge over to the Riverside (91) Freeway east she passed the defendants and was “still angry about being cutoff and she put up her middle finger at the two as she passed,” prosecutors said.

“She then heard a loud bang to the rear of her vehicle and heard her little boy in the backseat say, `Ow,’ ” prosecutors said.

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Eriz also allegedly brandished the weapon in a threatening manner toward the driver of a Tesla for…something. The report doesn’t say what exactly, only that the Tesla driver did something that angered Eriz.

Yet let’s remember that California has extensive gun control. Why didn’t that prevent the shooting?

Well, probably because the problem is the same as it’s always been. It’s people. Some people are mean, some are evil, and some are stupid. Some are a combination of two or more of them. That mix creates situations where people do bad things for whatever reason and good people are left dealing with the aftermath.

You can’t legislate our way into perfect safety. Such a thing doesn’t exist, for one thing, but for another, legislation suffers from the same flaw as everything else man creates. At its best, it’s still imperfect. Gun control laws, for example, cannot stop those determined to do horrible things, people like Eriz.

This is just the natural order, I’m afraid.

California has passed all the gun control it can, but until it recognizes that the problem rests in the people who walk the streets and start working toward addressing that, they’ll never really put a stop to these kinds of senseless acts.

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