WAKING up to read that one of his former customers had opened fire on a crowd and killed nearly 60 people at a Las Vegas concert, gun shop owner Chris Michel said he had an awful feeling.

“My gut fell out from underneath me,” he said. “I mean, it was the worst thing I could ever imagine.”

Mr Michel, who owns Dixie GunWorx in St George, said he recognised Stephen Paddock, the apparent shooter, immediately, recalling how he had sold the man a shotgun earlier this year.

It became clear Paddock had not used a shotgun, having fired into the crowd from several hundred yards away, but Mr Michel said he was still overwhelmed by sadness for the victims, their friends and family.

Like several other interviewees who had interacted with Paddock, Mr Michel said he noticed nothing unusual about the man.

“He was a normal, average ‘Joe Blow’ kind of guy,” Mr Michel said. “There was nothing special that happened. He came in a couple of different times, we dealt with him as a normal customer.”

The Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research group, estimates national gun ownership rates range from a high of 90 firearms per every 100 people in the US, to one firearm or less for every 100 residents in South Korea and Ghana.

Yemen, the country with the second highest number of firearms per 100 people – 55 – is one of the Arab world’s poorest countries and is fighting a bloody civil war. Americans own 42 per cent of about 650 million civilian firearms worldwide, according to the Small Arms Survey.

The US has more gun deaths per capita than any of the world’s two dozen highest-income countries, according to research by David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Centre.

Using mortality data from the World Health Organization, Mr Hemenway found firearms- related homicide deaths were 25 times higher in the US than in other high income countries such as Austria, France and Finland.

For those aged 15-24, the gun homicide rate in the US was 49 times higher. Approximately 300 Americans are shot every day in the US and 100 die from gunshot wounds in murders, attempted suicides or accidents, according to Mr Hemenway.

In the European Union, which has a population of 740 million – more than double the US – 18 people die on average each day as a result of gun shot wounds, but 75 per cent of these are suicides, according to the Flemish Peace Institute, a research organisation.