Guns and Roads: A Dangerous Combination

A man was arrested in connection with the Fourth of July road rage murder in Taneytown.

Meanwhile, the families of Nyah Hairston and Charles Marks IV are looking for answers to what happened to their loved ones.

Maryland State Police are trying to figure out who shot and killed Hairston and Marks on state highways.

And we wanted to dig a little deeper into road rage incidents across the state of Maryland.

Based on our analysis of data from the Gun Violence Archive, investigations are ongoing in more than 60% of cases.

Part of our In Focus commitment is being transparent about our process.

We filtered the Gun Violence Archive data for Maryland incidents that contained notes with the following keywords:

• car
• vehicle
• highway
• road

And included any in which the incident characteristic included "Road Rage."
We excluded the incident characteristics of 'drive-by,' 'suicide,' and 'Officer Involved Shooting - subject/suspect/perpetrator shot.'

The Gun Violence Archive goes back to 2014, giving us nearly a decade of data, and gave us 625 gun incidents on roads in Maryland in that time.

About 2 in 3 of those incidents are fatal, according to our analysis of this data.

We also took a look at how these have changed over time.

2024 has been removed as the year is not complete.

The number of gun-related incidents on Maryland roads has gone up over time, both fatal and non-fatal.

"These cases are difficult to solve," says Lt. Kyle Clark, the Commander of the Homicide Unit for Maryland State Police. "People aren't really thinking that this will happen on the highway or the roadways and so they're not paying attention as much to these specific things, small things that could turn out to be major things in these types of cases."

Based on this data, since 2014, around 250 people have died in incidents like these, and more than 300 have been injured across Maryland.

Maryland State Police wants motorists to be careful of aggressive driving.

"We don't want to follow too closely, we don't want to drive aggressively, because aggressive driving, I think, leads to road rage," says Clark.

Editor's note: We originally found Nyah Hairston's incident in the Gun Violence Archive data listed as an injury and not death, though, it's been updated since at our request. Other people may have died of their injuries after the incidents were entered into the Gun Violence Archive.