In an incident that will surely make the anti-regulation NRA proud, yet another “responsible gun owner” exercised his Second Amendment right to murder a child on a New Mexico freeway before bravely fleeing the scene of the crime. Police are still seeking a man who they say pulled up alongside a vehicle in which a mother, father, and their four-year-old daughter were traveling and unleashed his surely-patriotic rage on the vehicle.
Details of the attack, which occurred Tuesday evening, are scarce, and police are unsure how many shots were fired. According to police, a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputy noticed a vehicle which he believed to be in distress and pulled up to help. At first, he thought the child had fallen out of the vehicle, but then learned from the parents that someone had shot their daughter. She was later confirmed to have died at the hospital.
“The cars were both moving westbound when one car pulled up against the other and started firing,” Officer Simon Drobik explained. He says the girl’s father said the shooting was a result of road rage. The child’s parents, fortunately, escaped the shooting unscathed but will not forever face the pain of having their daughter stolen from them before she was even in Kindergarten.
“I’ve seen tragic loss of children in car crashes. To me, this is one of those crimes that is unexplainable,” Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden said in a press conference following the shooting. “It’s 100 percent preventable. It did not have to happen. We need to rise up as a community and say enough is enough.”
“This is a complete disrespect of human life. This is something that should not be happening in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Eden said, adding that police are in “desperate need of information” regarding the cowardly shooter. Police have obtained a description of the vehicle, but the search for the killer continues. Eden says he is not releasing the name of the victim at the moment to protect the family’s privacy.
Unfortunately, despite the police chief’s (correct) belief that this sort of thing should not happen in Albuquerque, another similar incident occurred in August. Marty Herrera was captured on video driving aggressively and, ultimately, rolling down his window and pointing his gun at another driver on the road. Unfortunately, the mere presence of a gun in a vehicle increases the aggressiveness of the driver. A Harvard School of Public Health study found that “Americans with guns in their cars are more likely to engage in road rage than unarmed drivers.” The study notes that:
Over 2,400 licensed drivers responded to questions about their own aggressive driving in a 2004 national random digit dial survey. We found that 17% of respondents admitted to making obscene or rude gestures in the past year, and another 9% admitted to aggressively following too closely. Males, young adults, binge drinkers, those ever arrested for a non-traffic violation, and motorists who had been in a vehicle in which there was a gun, were more likely to engage in such forms of road rage.
“The best thing for you to do is turn yourself in,” Eden said at the press conference as he begged the community to get involved and provide as much information as possible, as details remain scarce. The NRA, as always, is silent on this issue.
Watch the press conference, below, and if you have any information, please call 505-242-COPS.
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