There is no such thing as a responsible gun owner

American lore is full of imaginary folk icons: The Happy Yeoman, The Contented Slave, The Ethical Businessman, et cetera. These icons do not exist. They are fake. They nonetheless serve a significant role in shaping our national identity, as they give our empowered classes an excuse to behave like shitty monsters.

The newest such icon does have some grounding in reality. He is The Responsible Gun Owner, and he did actually kinda exist at one point. He’s dead today, though, found himself replaced by a millions-strong army of fanaticists whose gross irresponsibility is considered the height of American freedom.

Personally, I have known three people who have been shot at while driving. None of these people were criminals. They weren’t in gangs or selling drugs or robbing banks. Two of three weren’t even in high-crime areas. They were just regular people, living regular lives, and then—with a literal boom—a so-called responsible gun owner almost killed them.

Story one: my sister and her friend were driving from Iowa to LA. Somewhere in Nebraska, their front passenger window exploded. They panicked and drove like hell to the nearest town. The police laughed it off: stray bullet, no big deal, no need to investigate.

Story two is much worse. A former colleague of mine, who happens to be one of the most bad-ass people I’ve ever met, was driving with her family from Iowa to New York state. In rural Ohio, her front window exploded. Her jaw also exploded. With her husband and three kids in the car, watching their mom gush blood from her blasted face, she had to drive to a small hospital.

Police agreed this was a tragedy, but they refused to investigate. Just some hunters having some fun, most likely. No harm meant.

She recovered wonderfully (she’s a badass, like I said), but only after painful, expensive surgery and months of having her jaw wired shut. She’s lucky she is a state employee and had decent health insurance. Also lucky her job couldn’t fire her at-will. If she had been a private sector employee, or lower-income, getting shot would have ruined her financially.

And, good god, can you imagine the psychological damage wrought by seeing your mother get the bottom of her face blown off? You don’t need to be emotionally vulnerable for something like that to have severe, long-lasting effects.

Story three: my friend was delivering pizzas for the Waterloo, Iowa Pizza Hut. He was in a not-so-great neighborhood. Dropped off a pizza, did not get tipped, got back in his car. Heard a bang, then his rear and front windshields exploded almost simultaneously. He floored it, ran through red lights, and when he got back to work he was shivering like a Chihuahua.

His boss came out and looked at his car. The bullet had entered the van directly in line with his head. It deflected off the roof and entered the front windshield inches from his cerebellum. He was literally millimeters away from death.

Unlike my former colleague, my friend was not upper-middle income, and he could be fired at will. So his boss at Pizza Hut made him finish his shift. He was not allowed to go home after getting shot at, nor did he receive any apologies or redress. And as for the cops? Pfft. They sure as shit did not investigate.

Now, I’m not blaming gun owners for being irresponsible—that’s the nature of their fetish. Personally, I do tons of irresponsible stuff. But when it comes to the bad stuff I do, like drinking too much, there are legal mechanisms in place that are meant to prevent me from allowing my irresponsibility to harm others, and I’d get in bad trouble if I ever did. I cannot drive drunk. If I ever drunkenly punched someone, or drove over a kid, or even caused too much of a ruckus at Wal-Mart, I would get arrested, go to jail, and most likely lose my job.

That’s fair. That’s how it should be. But gun owners don’t have to worry about being held accountable for their harmful actions. Hell, several states have laws specifically designed to shelter gun owners from accountability. In others, police and prosecutors will refuse to take action, giving the gun owners every benefit of the doubt—hunters don’t meant to accidentally shoot cars, after all, so it’d be unfair to punish them.

In America in 2014, you can get arrested for leaving your kid in the car for 3 minutes while you run into Walgreen’s, but it’s perfectly legal to let your child fire an Uzi, or to leave assault weapons unattended around children. Police will mace and sexually assault you if you say something that offends Citibank, but treat you with understanding and civility if you brandish M-16s at them while shouting about how Obama is a communist.

This is fucked up. And it’s happening because no one questions the myth of the Responsible Gun Owner. We’re all led to believe that the majority gun owners are calm, responsible, sober patriots, and that the tragedies of gun violence, gun accidents, and mass shootings are caused by a few bad apples. This is not true. By its very nature, gun ownership is paranoid, reactionary, and dangerous. It needs to be regulated the same as every other dangerous activity.

Don’t believe me? Pick up literally any issue of any gun magazine. Peruse a gun forum or website. Soak in their politics. Count the number of white supremacy references, or read a couple articles about how Muslims are about to bring the end times upon us. Go ahead, do it—it won’t take more then a few seconds.

Or, hell, go to the liquor store during hunting season. See that orange-colored, camo-printed Bush 30 pack? Probably not too responsible to drink 30 Buschs while shooting, eh? Can you imagine the uproar that would happen if Busch released a pack made especially for bus drivers or boat captains?

But this isn’t just a political or cultural issue. It’s an issue of basic, legal accountability. Gun owners aren’t responsible–indeed, cannot be responsible–because there are no formal mechanisms of holding them responsible.

I’m not saying we should ban guns. Not at all. But as far as we’ve gone in criminalizing potentially dangerous behaviors in every other realm of existence, we’ve gone the opposite direction in establishing decent safety regulations for firearms. We live in a society where nearly everyone is treated like shit, where your boss can make you deliver pizzas minutes after getting shot at, where being a victim of some drunken asshole’s fetish can ruin you financially. Why don’t we try protecting the people who aren’t aggressive, who don’t fetishsize violence? How come we treat assholes with such reverence and everyone else with disdain and cruelty? What is wrong with us?