Flowers and candles are seen around crosses at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Photo: CNN.

Imagine you’re 18.

Maybe you’ve finished school, maybe you’re in the last year of school before entering the real world, maybe you’ve dipped your toes into the water and got a part-time job at a takeaway or hardware store, maybe you’re thinking about going to university.

Maybe you’re bored or pissed off. And maybe you’ve already saved a bit of money, unusual admittedly at your age, but still you’ve got enough. So you go into town, and walk into a store. You say to the man behind the counter, I’d like to buy a gun. Sure, he says. Can I see some identification? You present your driving licence. He nods. A few more questions, a few taps on a keyboard, and fine sir, you seem like a nice young man, what are you after?

Soon after you walk out of the store with a handgun, perhaps if you’ve got the cash, an assault weapon. No problem. You’re 18. It’s legal. You don’t even have to hide it. It’s a legal purchase. You may as well be carrying a fishing rod.

In recent days, I’ve said to my friends, ‘Imagine us going into a gun store when we were 18 and buying a gun’. Buying a gun, just like that. Just like the two latest mass murderers did in the United States – Payton Grendon and Salvador Ramos. They just went into a gun store, aged 18, and bought firearms, then they went out and killed, men, women and children, mostly children.

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At 18, me and my friends were buying records, new surfboards if we were cashed up, board wax, if we were not, and we were thinking about buying a car and driving up the NSW coast for a parents-free holiday. That was our mischief. That was our idea of freedom. We are not of course other people, but as an exercise in the alternative reality that is the US, it is truly frightening. Our younger 18 selves could do that if we wanted to? My god.

The freedom to bear arms did not exist, of course, was not a part of our universe. Why would you even think it? A colleague, who lived in the US for many years, says this thinking of the right to bear arms and the right to be free of government runs deep in America’s DNA. It would be nigh on impossible to extract it.

Massacres are one of the consequences of that make-up.

Guns are not a part of our DNA. Though they exist here, they are not seen as a usual accoutrement to daily life. Guns are for police and criminals, and hunters, those who go out into the bush, and shoot.

The figures on guns in the US and the consequences of those guns is staggering; there are estimated to be close to 400 million firearms in the country. The BBC reports: “There were 1.5 million firearm fatalities between 1968 and 2017 – that’s higher than the number of soldiers killed in every US conflict since the American War for Independence in 1775.

“In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun, whether by homicide or suicide, more than any other year on record. The figure represents a 25 per cent increase from five years prior, and a 43 per cent increase from 2010.”

How can this be normal? And yet it is. But only in one country. America.

Imagine you are 18, and you walk into a store …