Arkansas, Not Texas or California, Has the Nation’s Highest Rate of Aggressive Driving Deaths

Arkansas, not Texas or California, recorded the nation’s highest rate of aggressive driving fatalities in 2024, according to a new state-by-state analysis from Wettermark Keith, which found that a driver in Arkansas faced nearly three times the per-capita risk of dying in an aggressive driving crash compared to a driver in California, despite Arkansas recording a fraction of California’s total population and traffic volume.

Arkansas posted a fatality rate of 7.66 deaths per 100,000 residents from just 235 total fatalities, far below the raw totals recorded in Texas (813) and Florida (791), yet still the highest rate in the country once population is factored in. Montana ranked second at 6.50 per 100,000, followed by Louisiana (5.51), Alabama (4.97), Wyoming (4.79), and New Mexico (4.34), with Indiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Vermont rounding out a top ten in which eight of the ten states sit in the South, Mountain West, or Great Plains. By contrast, more densely populated states fared far better on a per-capita basis: New York, California, and Illinois ranked 46th, 47th, and 44th respectively, meaning a driver on a rural Arkansas or Montana highway statistically faces meaningfully higher risk than one navigating traffic in Los Angeles or Chicago.

The report attributes this pattern not to congestion, but to a distinct combination of risk factors common across these states: high-speed rural roadways, comparatively limited law enforcement presence, and, in several cases, permissive gun carry laws that can turn a routine confrontation into something far more dangerous. Across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., aggressive and reckless driving claimed 7,673 lives in 2024, roughly 21 deaths every day, with just ten states, led by Texas and Florida, together accounting for more than 57% of that national total when measured by raw count alone.

Firearm-involved road rage reveals a related but distinct geographic pattern. New Mexico posted the highest per-capita rate of firearm road rage victims in the country, 0.47 per 100,000 residents from 10 total victims, a finding consistent with prior research from Everytown Research, The Trace, and ConsumerAffairs identifying the state as the nation’s leader in per-capita firearm road rage incidents. The report links New Mexico’s rate, nearly four times the national average, to a combination of high gun ownership, permissive carry laws, and an aggressive driving fatality rate that already ranks sixth nationally. Tennessee ranked second in the firearm data at 0.40 per 100,000, with firearm road rage incidents recorded in every single month of 2024, a pattern the report describes as evidence of a persistent, year-round problem rather than isolated incidents.

Texas, meanwhile, illustrates the gap between rate-based and raw-count rankings starkly. Despite ranking just sixth by per-capita firearm road rage rate (0.27 per 100,000), Texas recorded 80 total victims, 26 killed and 54 injured, nearly double the total of any other state in the country. Delaware, Maryland, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada rounded out the firearm road rage top ten, with research from Everytown Research finding that states without concealed-carry permit requirements experience nearly triple the rate of road rage shooting victims compared to states that require one.

The report suggests these geographic patterns aren’t purely coincidental. A 2026 Nationwide survey found that 40% of drivers nationwide report feeling stressed behind the wheel, with rural drivers who log more high-speed miles on undivided highways facing more frequent close calls and confrontations than drivers navigating slower, more congested urban corridors. That dynamic may help explain why states like Arkansas, Montana, and New Mexico post outsized per-capita rates despite comparatively small populations: fewer total crashes, but a higher share of them escalating into aggressive or violent encounters on stretches of road where help, and oversight, can be a long way off.

“The financial losses confirmed as part of this campaign are truly shocking, and every dollar lost is the preventable result of poor driver behavior,” said a spokesperson for Wettermark Keith. “And although the human toll of road rage is difficult to quantify, we know how important it is to confront that difficulty and learn as much as we can about an issue that affects millions of Americans.”

The report’s authors argue that state-level rankings, both by rate and by raw total, reveal a road rage crisis shaped as much by policy, including gun carry laws and enforcement resources, as by driver behavior alone, meaning the states best positioned to reduce road rage deaths may need to look beyond traffic enforcement.