I’ve spent 30 years advising clients on risk they can quantify: interest rate risk, market risk, counterparty risk. None of that prepared me for the specific anxiety a friend described to me last month, driving his late father’s shotgun from Oregon to a memorial service in Pennsylvania. The gun was unloaded. It was locked in a hard case. The ammunition rode in a separate box in the trunk. He still mapped his route around three states like a man running contraband, because he couldn’t be certain the law would agree with him if a state trooper didn’t.

He wasn’t running contraband. He was trying to comply with a federal statute that has told Americans for 40 years that this exact trip is legal, yet still leaves them guessing at the details.