Anxiety and depression around the globe increased by a whopping 25% during the first year of the pandemic, according to the World Health Organization.
Not surprisingly then, in a country like ours where firearms can be easily acquired, more people on edge means more gun violence. In 2020, gun-related homicides surged by 35%, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
Children haven’t been spared. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, research by the New England Journal of Medicine and the CDC revealed.
The evidence of those sobering statistics is heartbreakingly clear in the murder of 3-year-old Mateo Zastro over the weekend. The tragedies will only continue to mount, as long as adults with raging tempers can keep getting their hands on a gun.
Mateo was shot in the head as he sat in the back of his mother’s sport utility vehicle in a road-rage incident in West Lawn Friday night, Chicago police said.
There were three other children in the SUV with Mateo and his mother when a male passenger in the backseat of a red car allegedly fired a volley of shots at the SUV. Minutes later, the surviving children could be heard crying on a police radio.
It’s unclear what prompted the initial confrontation between Mateo’s mother and those in the other car. What is clear, according to police, is that Mateo’s mother did try to get away and the gunman, who is still at large, was relentless.
He didn’t care that he could potentially hurt children when he unleashed his ire. He wasn’t concerned about hitting a passerby or a resident. His intent was to harm — and having a gun made that sinister objective easy.
Loose cannons like the suspect who killed Mateo aren’t going to have a light bulb go off in their heads if they come across a flyer that tells them a minor traffic-related dispute isn’t worth pulling the trigger.
While Violence Interrupters President Tio Hardiman meant well in his proposal urging officials distribute 100,000 handouts about the risks of guns and road rage following Mateo’s murder, the reality is only stricter gun legislation — and enforcement — can make an impact.
If many of our lawmakers continue to behave as though the Second Amendment is more worthy of protection than the lives of Americans, shootings, including those spurred by road rage, will keep proliferating.
Here in Illinois, 35% of all expressway shootings this year through June were related to road rage, up from 12% last year, state police said.
Nationally, more than 500 people were injured or killed in road-rage incidents last year — the worst year on record for road-rage shootings, according to Everytown Research & Policy.
“The data is clear,” the gun violence prevention group stated when it released its report in April. “With easy access to guns, road rage can turn deadly.”
The harsh truth is that any encounter can take a turn for the worst when a gun is involved.
Two days after Mateo was struck by a bullet, police said a man sitting in a parked vehicle that wasn’t his shot and wounded a 7-year-old boy after the child’s relative approached the would-be robber .
The boy and his family were on their way to church when they spotted the man in their car.
Like Matteo’s killer, this gunman apparently wasn’t bothered by the thought that he could put a child’s life in danger with his rash actions. He was just mad that he was caught apparently stealing someone else’s property.
That shooting wasn’t a road-rage incident, but it is indicative of the terrible consequences that can play out when an angry person has his or her hands near the trigger of a firearm.
Angry confrontations are nothing new. They take place in every country around the globe.
But the easier it is to get a firearm, the more likely it is that a confrontation that might have ended with a fist-fight will instead turn deadly for a 3-year-old.
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