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nonetheless offers authoritative-sounding sound bites that support reporters’ portrayal of highway violence as personal pathology. “There’s a deep psychological urge,” he tells Newsweek, “to release aggression against an anonymous other.” Road rage is “a mental disorder that is contagious,” USA Today quotes him. In an interview with the New York Times, Nerenberg called on the American Psychiatric Association to add road rage to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). At some point in their lives, he said, more than half of the U.S. population suffers from the disorder, which Nerenberg described on ABC’s “World News Tonight” as “an adjustment reaction disorder.”12

Such psychoblather only obscures what even Nerenberg himself knows to be the primary instrument of murder on the nation’s roadways. Asked directly by People magazine whether there is truly any difference between now and twenty years ago, Nerenberg allows, “One thing that makes the problem worse is that we have more Americans arming themselves. Millions of us illegally carry loaded weapons. The more guns in cars, the greater the chance they’ll be used.”13

Most of the coverage of road rage, however, shamelessly disregarded the import of firearms, even though the AAA study found that offenders in road rage incidents often use guns to kill or injure their victims. On Oprah Winfrey’s show devoted to road rage the murder of one driver by another was recounted tearfully and in detail by the victim’s fiancé as well as by the man who killed him. But at no point in the program did anyone mention that the victim would almost certainly have survived had there not been a gun involved. In fact, when Winfrey brought on the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, his only mention of weapons was metaphoric. He referred to cars as “three-thousand-pound weapons.”14

Experts who do try to direct attention to the matter of guns seldom succeed. In a road rage story on CNN occasioned by a fatal shooting, the local district attorney counseled against “too many guns in cars” and made a comparison: “When you go to Canada, they ask you, ‘Do you have any guns in your car,’ because you have to check them at their border. If you’re coming from Canada to this country, they ask you if you have any fruit.” Rather than pursue the matter CNN correspondent Dennis O’Hayer promptly shifted the focus. “Even if you don’t have a gun, your own driving tactics could be setting you up for a dangerous face-off,” he said. Someone identified as a traffic columnist with the Atlanta Constitution then proceeded to urge viewers against death-defying acts such as “getting in the left lane and holding up traffic.”15

One of my initial hypotheses about why pseudodangers receive so much attention was that they provide opportunities to talk about, and perhaps rectify, problems too big to face in their totality. Stupefied by the quantity of guns on the streets, we might focus on doing something about the much smaller number in cars. My hypothesis could not have been farther from the truth. Pseudodangers represent further opportunities to avoid problems we do not want to confront, such as overcrowded roads and the superabundance of guns, as well as those we have grown tired of confronting. An example of the latter is drunk driving, a behavior that causes about eighty-five times as many deaths as road rage (about 17,000 versus 200). Close to half of all fatal traffic crashes involve alcohol, and three in five Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at some point in their lives. Moved by those statistics and by the advocacy group, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, journalists had covered the issue of drunk driving in a sound and sustained way throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Thanks in part to that coverage, the number of alcohol-related highway deaths plunged by 31 percent between 1982 and 1995. Fatality rates fall twice as rapidly, studies find, in years of high media attention compared to those of relatively little attention. Intensive coverage permits passage