AT the end of last year I did a road trip through the American south, from Arkansas in the west to the coast of North Carolina more than a thousand miles east.

It became a running joke between my partner and I as we drove through Tennessee that at least three different gun stores in the state claimed to be the biggest in America. Billboards along the highway cheerily advertised gun shops that would “Blow the competition away!”, and in the spirit of journalistic endeavour I insisted we stop and take a look.

The place we perused just outside Nashville was quite extraordinary - and chilling - to Scottish eyes; about the size of a garden centre, it was piled floor to ceiling with rifles, assault weapons, handguns and ammunition. Smiling sales assistants offered to let us try out anything we fancied, in the same way you would hold and weigh up a mobile phone.

Kids were telling their parents which ones they liked best, little old ladies were stocking up on bullets. As a tourist, I wouldn’t have been allowed to buy anything. But my partner, a US citizen, could have walked out with the sort of arsenal that Rambo would have been proud of. “Y’all have a nice day, now,” they chorused as we left.

Watching the horrendous footage of the aftermath of the latest school shooting in the US, I wondered whether whoever sold 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz the military-style assault weapon he used to kill 17 of his former classmates and teachers had said the same thing to him as he walked out of the store. I don’t doubt that they did. After all, Cruz had bought the gun legally.

And as wrong and downright bizarre as this may seem to us in the UK, the fact remains that gun ownership is a normal and accepted part of life in the US, and that is why the young survivors of the attack who spoke so passionately and eloquently in support of gun control at a rally over the weekend are doomed to fail in their attempts to change the law.

“Thank you for your prayers and condolences, but that is not enough,” said David Hogg, a 17-year-old survivor of last week’s atrocity during his speech. “We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take action and get something done.”

Strong words indeed, but they are unlikely to move many in the southern states, where guns are so central to the identity of the people and their communities.

Go to Arkansas, which is where my partner is from and has the third highest rate of gun ownership in the US – an average of six per household – and you will hear folk talk of far more than just their constitutional right to a firearm. The gun is a symbol of them and their culture, an extension of them and it.

Arkansas was the western frontier of the US as recently as the late nineteenth century and its residents are still raised on stories of how their ancestors had to fight hard for the land they settled on and still work. The west was won by the gun. So, indeed, was the idea of America itself, whether that be through independence from Britain in 1776, the war against Mexico in the 1840s, or the eventual reunification of the states in 1865, following a catastrophic civil war that had claimed the lives of 620,000 Americans and still shapes so many of the divides that exist in the US.

The gun is so often cast as hero rather than villain in the American story. Deer hunters outnumber the military in the US by 250,000 – shooting a gun is how many people choose to relax.

It is also, however, how too many young men in particular choose to express their frustrations and their wrath, whether that be in the form of mass shootings or the gangland culture that so devastates life in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles.

But for many people in the US, blaming guns for such massacres is like saying it is cars, rather than their drivers, that are responsible for deaths on the roads. You don’t call for the sale of cars to be controlled after a fatal car crash, they will argue.

And that is why no US president to date has dared tackle gun ownership, not even Barack Obama following the Sandy Hook shooting of 2012 when 20 six and seven year olds and six of their teachers were murdered by a yet another angry young man.

Why would the ultra right-wing Donald Trump, whose Presidential campaign was funded to the tune of $21m by the all-powerful National Rifle Association and whose support base is in the south, even consider tightening gun laws? In the eyes of Trump and his supporters, the gun is central to the very idea of “making American great again” as to them it symbolises the greatness that built the country in the first place.

There may well come a time when the American people and their representatives decide to change the gun laws. I suspect, however, that this will entail nothing more than a few moderate tweaks around the edges of what type of person is allowed to own which type of gun.

Whether citizens should be allowed to own guns has never been in question. It is a simple fact of life that will continue to both shape and haunt the American soul.