Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances - and anyone I meet who I chance to talk about guns with - there is a very strong self-reinforcing culture of safe handling and responsibility. People will come down incredibly hard on anyone who seems inept or who they even hear speaking about some kind of irresponsible behavior. Now, I'd say about half of these are ex-military people, but they set a standard and keep other people in line. Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country. But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult. People are well aware that it's their life or their freedom are stake if they mess up. I know guys who get drunk as skunks and get in bar fights, but who would never carry their gun when they go out drinking, or anywhere besides the woods.

> But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult.

"Everyone"?

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

> Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances

This is significantly biasing your perspective, and I don’t think you quite realize by how much.

There are many, many gun owners who are incompetent and irresponsible. There is an entire spectrum, and it’s not a purely bimodal distribution with 95% safety-conscious owners and 5% hoodlums.

>Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country.

well ok, I don't know but there are stats on how many adults have guns, and there are stats on misuses of guns. I suppose a clever statistician would be able to get to some potential overview of how many people who own guns have decent discipline?

Not saying that's you but someone on this site. It is difficult to find anything with a query on Google nowadays, but the things I do find - like https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ implies to me that the amount of the population that maintains your level of discipline is very low.

The reality is that nearly every "responsible gun owner" knows gun owners who are not responsible, and usually just ignore that unfortunate reality. None of my family members, including the ones who "take safety seriously" and lock up their stuff from their kids, would EVER narc on the family member who thinks shooting up their back yard while drunk or high is okay. They rationalize this through all sorts of "but they aren't hurting anyone" wishful thinking, ignoring that being irresponsible with a gun in one way usually means they are being dangerous with firearms in other ways.

So many people provide direct evidence that they do not respect the danger or power of firearms, and most gun owners just look the other way.