The United States is the only country in the world where civilian guns outnumber people - Christine Jardine

What is freedom really if you are scanning for danger doing the weekly shop?

Walking into a general store and seeing rifles on open display along one wall stopped me in my tracks.

In a small town in Virginia, with the cool, laid-back vibe of a Happy Days episode, lethal weapons were on sale alongside the fruit and veg.

It was the autumn of 2016 and I had gone to the US to experience the Presidential election campaign.

Suddenly small-town America seemed a very strange and potentially dangerous place.

I had experienced the States' casual relationship with guns and its consequences once before.

As a young journalist I had been sent to Texas to cover the death of a young Aberdeen oil man in an inexplicable shooting incident in Houston.

But this was different. I felt threatened.

I have long been mystified that the country does not recognise gun control as the solution to the loss of life which bedevils their culture.

I thought it might come with Sandy Hook in 2012, when twenty children and seven adults were shot.

That they might have the same realisation that we had following Dunblane and Hungerford.

I was wrong.

Their commitment to the Second amendment of their constitution that; “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” seems intractable.

But surely the maxims that ‘it won’t happen to us; it won’t be today, not in our community’ are becoming harder and harder to believe as yet another community becomes the worst of statistics?

As I listened to the reports this week following the mass shooting in Maine I wondered again how people can continue to accept guns as a way of life.

One man told how he slid down the bowling alley where the attack happened, climbed up into the mechanism and waited there until he heard the sirens.

You begin to wonder if normal day-to-day activities in America need to come with an escape plan.

What is freedom really if you are scanning for danger doing the weekly shop, or keeping an eye on the exits on a night out?

The statistics are cold. More than 35,000 deaths and 500 mass shootings where more than four people have died so far this year. We shouldn’t forget that 19,000 of those were suicides.

The United States is the only country in the world where civilian guns outnumber people.

Those are statistics of which I wasn’t aware, the full horror, and now can’t believe they aren’t being talked about more.

But perhaps American society has somehow, horrifyingly, become inured to it.

Maybe it’s because the news reports follow the same pattern. Flashing lights, sirens, people running and: ‘Oh, it must have happened again’.

Even here it feels as though we are no longer as shocked. I was with a group of people who all paused to look at the breaking news on the TV on Thursday.

After an almost audible tut we carried on with our day.

No doubt the argument over gun control will rage again on Capitol Hill.

Equally doubtless the National Rifle Association will cite the constitution and their right to bear arms.

And you’ll still be able to put a gun on your shopping list.