providing we have the gun and no one else does. There are so many deserving cases… Dawdle at the checkout: BLAM! Get in our way on the pavement: you’re popped. Buy a Coldplay album…well, there just aren’t enough bullets even for one of you deluded people.

Gun culture worries the British because we’re so peevish and irritated by one another that we know there wouldn’t be enough of us left to bury the stinking heaps of the dead piled up on every street if it caught on.