Shortly after Barack Obama was first elected, I was in a gun shop in South Carolina doing a report for the BBC Ten O’Clock News about how easy it was to buy a weapon.
The shop was the size of an indoor tennis court. There were a lot of guns to choose from. We tested a couple of assault rifles for the camera. We established how little we would need in the way of supporting evidence of our decency and mental stability. The gun shop owner chatted amiably about how he was importing an online bride from Thailand.
As I was pondering her future among the rapid loaders and the palmetto trees, the shop owner suddenly got serious.
“I gotta level with you,” he said. “I could sell you this weapon for sure, but I cannot sell you the ammunition.” Why not?
“Because we have run out!”
While the rest of the world and much of America celebrated the achievement of electing a black man to the White House, in rural South Carolina they spat out their chewing tobacco, got in their pick-up trucks and headed for the gun shops.
Part of it was probably racism, pure and simple. But part of it was something much deeper and much more acceptable to most Americans. If the sophisticated folks in San Francisco and New York City are going to make progress on gun control, they will have to address this question eventually.
The really fundamental issue facing America is not the loading speed of a rifle, or the ease with which deranged people can access weapons. Any gun laws introduced as a result of the Connecticut horror will not affect weapons already sitting in homes. No, the fundamental question is why people need these guns in the first place: or why they feel they need them.
Many Americans seriously believe (as the Second Amendment to the constitution suggests) that guns are necessary because guns guarantee freedom.
In my eight years in America I came to love many aspects of American life. But this link between freedom and guns I could never grasp.
“Look around the world,” I would say to Americans: “Is Yemen (which has one of the highest rates of gun ownership per person) really a nation you admire and seek to emulate?”
I never really got an answer. But getting an answer — or at least holding a sensible discussion — is the big challenge for America now. It is a question of addressing culture. It is a multi-generational project where urban and suburban Americans try to persuade the rest of the nation that freedom can still be protected, without a gun in the closet.
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And it has to be persuasion. You have to accept that this link between freedom and guns is a genuine and honest view. Any real effort to take guns away from people would result in something approaching a new civil war. It would not be politically possible.
My eight-year-old daughter is a US citizen. I hope one day she lives there. I know she will live in freedom if she does. But to be sure of that, will she really need a gun?
Radio 4 Today programme presenter Justin Webb was the BBC’s North America editor. His book Notes on Them and Us is published by Short Books.
