At Mass the other Sunday, my priest opened his sermon with a joke, as he often does. This one went like this: a man is driving without his seatbelt, and a cop spots him and turns on the flashing lights. The man quickly reaches for his seatbelt, and when the cop arrives at his window, he says, “Officer, I was wearing it the whole time!” The man’s wife is in the passenger seat, so the officer looks at her and says, “Ma’am, is he telling the truth?” She replies, “I’ve been married to this man for 40 years, officer, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s don’t argue with him when he’s drunk.”

The congregation erupted in laughs and gasps—I’ve probably never heard a bunch of Catholics make more noise in the pews—and the reaction was consistent with the fact that the joke took a dark, unexpected turn.

And, I suppose, a funny one. But I think this is interesting. It suggests that we broadly understand driving violations, even serious ones like driving under the influence, as not that serious. Different than most other kinds of crimes or offenses.

Whenever I write about traffic rules—right on red (ban it), speed governors (probably), observing the speed limit (I try)—I get a certain category of response or comment. They go something like this.

Traffic rules are based on what’s safe in certain circumstances. They’re judgments or guidelines. It’s stupid to follow the speed limit on an empty straightaway, or come to a full stop at a wide empty intersection, or sit at a red light before turning left when there’s no cop and I can see a mile away. You want to turn the art of driving into a robotic rule-following endeavor. You don’t believe in freedom!

To which I say: How’d you like someone to point an unloaded gun at you?

One thing real gun enthusiasts understand is that the rules of handling and discharging a firearm are not suggestions based on circumstances. They’re absolutely ironclad. Never point a gun at anybody (unless they’re attacking you, and you intend to shoot them). Always treat a gun like it’s loaded.

This is not because every gun is always loaded or because it’s that easy to accidentally pull the trigger (it’s rare for a single bullet to be loaded accidentally, as I understand it, and triggers are actually hard to pull.) But those things can happen, as can accidental discharges. You never know. So part of this is that the risk of being wrong is very high.

But it’s also about cultivating a certain attitude. “Always treat a gun like it’s loaded” is as much about cementing a habit in yourself as it is about the immediate question of safety. The work of building that habit ultimately saves a lot of mental effort, and cuts off an avenue for a lot of temptation.

This is one of the things that makes driving so mentally and psychologically taxing. The typical driver has never wrestled with and subdued his desire to ignore traffic rules. He is always angling for an opening. Every yellow light and stop sign and crossing pedestrian feels like an obstruction coming out of nowhere, getting in the way of what could be. The only way to make the rules feel tolerable is to make obeying them a matter of course. This is what we might once have called self-mastery.

We’ve accomplished this with guns, for the most part. You don’t have to say, each time you go shooting, “Okay, should I treat this gun this time like it’s loaded? Maybe it’s not. Oh look, it’s not! Just this one time I’m gonna point it at my friend and say ‘Stick ’em up!’”

The point of the rule being ironclad is not only to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but to prevent a seasoned firearm handler from even thinking about it.

There’s a reason that an institution like the Army takes discipline even in small matters so seriously. It isn’t about the rule itself. It’s about cultivating a seriousness and gravity, and not allowing the tiny holes of judgment or discretion to become gaping ones. That is what handling a gun demands, as well. And I believe it is what driving demands.

Let me show you a typical articulation of gun safety rules:

Note that the sense of responsibility, and the understanding that handling a firearm is a grave matter, is not something imposed from the outside, and assented to with any sense of annoyance. It comes from inside—responsible gun owners try to cultivate that sense of gravity. They have a sort of respect for the gun, a sense of its fearsomeness and potential for violence. And no gun owner thinks responsible handling of a firearm is somehow contradictory to freedom.

Contrast all of this to the extremely permissive attitudes and norms around driving. There is no equivalent of “Always treat a gun like it’s loaded” or “Never point a gun at someone” in the popular culture. Instead we have a litany of excuses for motorist misbehavior, and a helpless acceptance that everyday mobility implies a body count.

My point is not, of course, that gun violence does not exist. In fact, the body count from gun violence is close to that from traffic fatalities. But no responsible gun owner sides with the shooter. Why, then, when a driver runs someone over or “didn’t see” something or “the sun was in his eyes” or he was “running late,” do so many supposedly responsible drivers shrug? I think I know why: they can see themselves in that situation. They have been in that situation.

I think of a book my dad gave me once, called You Should Start Sooner. It was some kind of story collection of farm life, written in the 1960s. The story from which the title was taken goes something like, a farm boy is late to school because he had to milk the cows before heading off, and when he explains this to the teacher she simply says, “Well, you should start sooner.” I also think of my dad’s driving lessons, which impressed on me the gravity of driving.

Somehow, the handling of a motor vehicle—an activity implicated in 40,000 deaths each year—has escaped this attitude, even though it is one of the gravest responsibilities most of us will ever undertake.

None of this is really about blind rule-following versus the development of judgment and discretion. Which of these modes is appropriate depends on the activity. The real question comes to, what kind of activity is driving?

My feeling is that piloting a car is rather like handing a firearm. But it may be the case that the human brain simply cannot summon that kind of discipline and gravity for something so utterly normal and common.

If that’s really true, then it’s just a further argument for doing a lot less of it.

Related Reading:

With Great Power

The Near Occasion of Speeding

Speeding and the Eucharistic Prayer

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