Well, in fairness, what they're blaming are guns for road rage shootings, not road rage itself. In particular, they're claiming exactly one law may well be driving a supposed uptick in such 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 shootings 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.”

Well, that's a hell of a take. It's not a good one by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a take, that's for sure.

First, let's look at why this is ridiculous at a surface level.

Constitutional carry laws aren't necessary for there to be a gun in the car. In fact, prior to those laws passing, almost all of these states had some law on the books that permitted a gun to be in the vehicle and within reach, either a glove box or center console or something like that, at a minimum.

So I find it hard to believe that now, suddenly, people who didn't take advantage of that law are now taking advantage of this one and shooting at other drives.

Of course, I'm not convinced there's any uptick in road rage shootings, either.

See, Everytown used data from the Gun Violence Archive. Even if GVA wasn't remotely interested in pushing an anti-gun agenda and simply collected data, the truth is that they're dependent on media reports. They don't have access to police data or anything objective like that, only news stories about shootings. If it doesn't make the news, they don't get the data point.

So what they're actually tracking is an increase in the number of news stories about road rage shootings.

I'm not saying that this is confirmation bias at work, but it might be. 

The report above notes that violent crime is down across the board. Most news outlets only have so many resources. When violent crime as a whole is high, those resources aren't going to go toward some random road rage shooting where no one got hurt. Instead, they're going toward the three double homicides that happened.

As other violent crime drops, those resources get reallocated toward other incidents that might get readers/viewers.

So while crime is down, even road rage incidents, the reports of road rage incidents increased.

Again, I can't say that's what happened, but the truth is that there's no reason constitutional carry would cause any such thing since people generally could carry in their cars without a permit anyway to some degree or another, so what else could be driving it? Well, nothing sure sounds plausible, doesn't it?

Not that anyone in the anti-gun media is going to look at the report that critically.