We are told that the speeding ticket business is a $6 billion dollar a year racket collected on a half-billion tickets given out in America.

The half-billion tickets issued are for those who are caught. But an astronomical number of speeding drivers remain uncaught, perhaps a trillion times more than those caught. If the U.S. could catch all speeding violators and collect fines from them, surely we could wipe out our national deficit in no time. Why are there so many speeding violations on American highways? The answer is simple: Because it is so darn easy to speed.

Driving is an art, but ticketing is a science. Let’s say you are going 75 mph on a highway limited to 65 mph. To the law, 75 and 65 is a clear distinction, like guilt or innocence. But to you who drive a modern vehicle, the difference between 65 and 75 (or 35 and 45 in cities) is virtually nothing. One split-second inattention gets your car miles over the limit.

Most contemporary vehicles are built to go way over 100 miles per hour easily. The legendary “lead foot” needs only one small ounce of pressure on the gas pedal to be lead-heavy. It’s the way cars are designed, and advertisements on TV glorify speed. Uniquely American, our highways are so straight in stretches that you can stage a car race on them. So you combine the machine, the culture, and the road itself, and speeding tickets are fait accompli.

Now, here is the maxim that anyone can understand: If something is easy to do and there are plenty of chances to do it, we are likely to do it — over and over again. This is the whole truth about speeding and speeding tickets in America: Drive car, will speed.

There is something else that’s like speeding — easy to do and a lot of chances to do it: plenty of guns in America and firing them is one of the easiest things to do. I served in the Army (1963-65) as an infantryman and handled a dozen different weapons — from the M14 to the Colt-45 — and all of them are fired by the simplest mechanism of pulling the trigger, which even a child can do and often does. To fire them, you just pull the trigger.

We can debate which is easier to accomplish: to speed up to 100 mph or pull the trigger to fire 100 bullets. Both cars and guns are built to accommodate the capacity of the lowest-denominated in society. Virtually anyone can speed up cars and can fire bullets from a gun with only a minimal effort.

In America, buying a car is one of the easiest things to do; so is buying a gun. In fact, it is so easy to buy a gun that there are twice as many firearms in America as the number of people. As cars are everywhere, so are guns of all kinds.

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Both cars and guns are capable of hurting people, cars in traffic accidents and guns in shot people, cars by accident and guns by design. (Just recently in Texas, an SUV and a gunman killed eight people each, only a day apart). Interestingly, close to 50,000 people are killed by cars and by guns, respectively. But this is where the similarities between cars and guns end.

We as a nation react differently to these certified killing machines. To reduce traffic deaths, we make a stupendous effort, by emphasizing drivers’ education on all levels, improving road conditions and emergency facilities, making automobile constructions better, drivers’ licensing stricter, and instituting annual car inspections, and scientifically rationalizing driving patterns to avoid accidents, and so on. Such efforts have paid off: Since the 1930s, traffic deaths have been reduced by half.

Unlike our stringent efforts and restrictions on auto safety, our records on gun safety, the other routine killer in America, are almost nonexistent. The easy way that we can buy and play with guns is like allowing anybody over 18 to take his car out on the highway, with no driving training, no licensing, no consideration for the potential harm the weapon could cause — with alcohol, drugs and a lot of anger thrown in for good measure.

Of course, cars don’t exist to harm people. But guns do. Cars hurt people only by accident. But guns hurt people by their own design. There is no other purpose intrinsic to them, the few guns for hunting and sport-shooting notwithstanding. We shoot bottles and bull’s eyes for practice only because real-people targets are unavailable. We drive cars to go somewhere, but we fire guns to damage people. In WWII, soldiers fired 900 bullets on average to kill one enemy; still, every one of those 899 bullets was fired to kill a man, nothing else. But we get surprised whenever we witness gun violence, exhausting ourselves trying to understand why one massacre or another happens.

Remember, half a billion times annually we get speeding tickets in America and the speeding tickets hardly surprise us. But fired guns do. How could we allow people to undertake the easiest thing to do with guns, which is shooting, and get surprised, even enraged, that they actually do what they are designed to do with them, which is killing people?

With cars, we speed. With guns, we shoot and kill people. Is it that difficult for America to understand?

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.