That is not all. Not only is it possible in many American states to buy a handgun over the counter, no questions asked, but it is also possible to buy bullets whose sole purpose is to penetrate the body armour worn by policeman.

Yet despite years of pressure by advocates of gun control, Congress has apparently been unable to agree on any measure that would significantly curtail the availability of guns.  Any move to do so is met by the wrath of the National Rifle Association, one of the most powerful lobbies in the United States. Its case is simple: the framers of the American Constitution, those self-reliant frontiersmen, won freedom from English repression in the War of Independence because they had a Constitutional right to bear arms. The famous Second Amendment reads: "The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed". That is why today there are some 230 million guns in the USA— a rate of ownership of one per adult. But at last someone has had the courage— and you need it to take on the National Rifle Association— to say that this whole story is a load of rubbish. Professor Michael Bellesiles, of Emory University, Atlanta, has looked at gun ownership at the time of the War of Independence, looking mainly at probate inventories, where citizens had to list everything they owned.

Surprise, surprise: at no time before 1850 did more than a tenth of the adult male population own guns.

Firstly, they were just too expensive. They cost about the equivalent of a year's income for a farmer. Next, no one seemed to want a gun.  In 1808, alarmed at the possibility of a British invasion, the American government offered to buy a gun for every white male in the country. All that had to happen was that the local militia applied stating how many guns they wanted. In the next 30 years only half the militias had bothered to apply. It was the Civil War that changed all that. The Union and the Confederacy issued more than seven million small arms to soldiers during the war and when the fighting was over, many soldiers held on to them.

As a result, murders increased dramatically. As the author Alasdair Palmer, an advocate of gun control, has written, "It is a lot easier to shoot people dead than it is to strangle them, drown them, kick them, stab them or axe them to death (the favoured methods of murder before the widespread availability of guns."

When mass production made guns cheap, then every cowboy in the West carried a Colt, walked tall and was ready for a gun duel, just like in a Hollywood western. Not so, says Palmer. Tombstone, Arizona and Dodge City, Kansas, towns notorious in Hollywood mythology actually had very low murder rates because cowboys had their guns confiscated at the city limits. It was cities such as New York where there were no restrictions on carrying handguns that had high murder rates.  In short there was no tradition and culture of the gun, of farmers with rifles and cowboys with Colts, in the United States except in Hollywood movies. So should the Second Amendment be abolished? It turns out that there is no need to do so. The full Second Amendment reads: "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed." 

So it was the right of the people to organise and arm themselves as militias, repeat militias, that was being guaranteed, not the right to carry arms when on private business.

There is nothing to stop Congress imposing gun control, except for Americans' relatively newfound love for the gun. For this a large share of the blame belongs to Hollywood.

Phillip Knightley is a veteran British journalist and commentator based in London. He can be reached at PhillipGK@aol.com