Life in America. Life in Texas. Life under a corrupt Supreme Court.
While driving to work near Dallas Texas, a man flipped off a car, the other driver opened fire and fatally shot the man’s wife. In Texas, you can carry a loaded handgun in your vehicle without a permit. Texas leads the nation in road rage shootings.
Paola Nunez Linares was shot in the back of her head after her husband, Zane Jones, flipped off what he said was an aggressive driver. Her husband said he was using the left lane to pass a slow car in the right lane, the slow car driver began riding their bumper and Zane flipped off the driver. The other driver responded by opening fire into their vehicle, fatally shooting his wife in the head.
“Upon arrival, officers found a 37-year-old female with a gunshot wound to the head. The female’s husband was on the scene and reported that they were driving their vehicle, a maroon 2017 KIA mini-van, northbound on East Loop 820 when they were involved in a road rage incident with another vehicle. An occupant of the other vehicle fired several shots at them, striking the female. The female victim was transported to JPS Hospital by Hurst FD medics, where she was later pronounced deceased,” Hurst police said in a statement.
Her husband, Zane Jones, said to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, “I need him caught, I need him prosecuted, I need him in prison. I need him to know he didn’t just fire a gun into a car, ‘The end.’ He killed someone who’s not like anyone. He killed someone who fought so hard to be here, who loved my kids, that loved me, someone who’s building a life and a career for herself. Someone who had nothing to do with anything. Someone who was a passenger of the person he was mad at. I want him to rot.”
The shooter has not been arrested at the time of this writing.
Texas ranks first in the nation for road rage shootings, according to a report by Jerry. It is followed by Florida and California (due to high populations). Just having a gun in the car makes people drive more aggressively, according to researchers. And of course, the easy access of a gun can quickly escalate into a deadly encounter.
When you see the term “permitless carry”, it sounds a lot less harmful than it actually is. What it means is that people who have no formal training or special permit can now carry a loaded gun in their vehicle. As anyone who has used a gun responsibly knows, careful use of a gun requires training. The military, for example, spends months on weapons training, and there are still accidents. Guns are not toys, but they are treated as such by the culture created by the NRA and Republican lawmakers who pose with their kids holding machine guns in front of Christmas trees, as if weapons of war are virtue signaling signs of Christianity and strength. They are neither. They are weapons of death and destruction, meant for skilled, trained people to use in war.
Everytown for Gun Safety reported that in 2022, “someone was shot and injured or killed in a road rage incident on average every 16 hours.” They point out that states with weaker gun laws, like those in the southern United States, “sees the highest rates of victimization from road rage shootings, double those in the Northeast.”
Texas put permitless carry into effect in 2021. Everytown notes “states that were permitless in 2022 have by far the highest rate of road rage shootings with injuries or deaths.”
Furthermore, permitless carry states had “nearly triple the rate of road rage shooting victimization than those states with the most protective standards. Moreover, states that were permitless in 2022 had 27 percent more deaths and injuries in road rage incidents involving a gun than states that required a permit but did not give law enforcement broad authority to deny an application.”
But guess what. The “Supreme Court” ruled in 2022 that states can no longer protect their residents from this kind of wild west shoot out on the streets of America when they barred states from requiring justification for concealed carry permits. So guns have more rights than women do in America, thanks to this corrupt conservative “court” that is legislating their so called “pro-life” values from the bench. This court is comprised of several conservative justices, who we’ve recently learned are secretly funded by conservative billionaires and Nazi memorabilia collectors. These are not great people and they certainly are not ruling from true moral convictions or legal precedent, or else they would have a problem with their rulings which are directly leading to more deaths for pregnant women and girls and guns.
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand, summed it up, “After a driver flipped off a car near Dallas, the other driver opened fire, shooting the man’s wife in the head. No arrests have been made. Permitless carry went into effect in Texas in 2021; Texas has more road rage shootings than any other state.”
America, where your wife or kid can be shot while you drive to work, because gun manufacturers have control of Republican legislators and Republican Supreme Court justices.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
