AT the candlelight vigil in Las Vegas on October 3, people spoke, often tearfully, of losses, of sadness, of close calls, of God, and of the frustrations of not being able to do anything in light of the horrific and apparently meaningless slaying of 58 and the wounding of many more at a country music concert.

A British reporter asked why no one talked about gun control. His American respondent blinked his surprise at the question. “That’s politics,” he said. “This is about emotion.”

From across the sea, the answers seem glib and obvious. The BBC’s finger-wagging reports knew exactly why the massacre happened – lax gun laws.

Many prominent Americans agree. Pop stars Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande, and prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton all tweeted their support for gun control immediately after (all three, it should be noted, have been protected by armed guards). They look down on Americans who own guns. What did you expect, they imply? But ordinary Americans – who mourned friends and family, who queued to give blood in their hundreds, who attended these candlelight vigils – tend to disagree.

RATHER than crazed Americans running around with lethal weapons being irrational, calls for gun control are irrational, emotive responses to an appalling and awful attack. It is not gun owners who fetishise guns but gun control proponents who fetishise gun controls, as if they might protect us all from harm.

Mass shootings, even in the United States, are extraordinarily rare, if very high profile. On various websites you can find hysterical talk of how many “mass shootings” – where four or more people are shot – there are in a year, but there is a world of difference between shootings like the one in Las Vegas, where someone purposefully destroys the lives of strangers for no apparent reason, and killings by so-called “gang-bangers”, which make up the bulk of mass shootings. Guns are objects owned by a large number of Americans. They are tools with no magic powers to turn ordinary people into killers. The vast majority of people who own guns are not killers. The vast majority of America’s estimated 320m guns – at least 99.75 per cent – have never been used in the commission of a crime. Familiarity with guns means Americans do not feel the emotional repulsion felt by celebrities, some Democratic politicians, and BBC reporters. The real problem is not guns but murderous impulses.

The fact that such a huge number of guns have never been used to kill means that they have some legitimate purpose for the people who own them. People who do not own guns may not relate to owning guns or even fathom their purpose but this is no reason to ban them. Dogs and horses are not necessary and both result in many deaths per year, but no one would think of banning them because they don’t understand the appeal.

This is particularly true of rifles, which are hardly ever used in crimes. Las Vegas killer Stephen Paddock used semi-automatic rifles fitted with a bump stock – a device that makes the rifle fire in bursts, like a machine gun. But rifles of all varieties, including so called assault weapons, kill very few people in the US. In 2014, according to the FBI, they were used to kill 248 people; fewer than were killed by shotguns (262) and hands, feet, fists, etc (660).

This crime occurred because Paddock was determined to kill large numbers of people. The fact that police found stockpiled explosives ought to alert us to the fact that the means that he used to kill was less important than his determination to do so. Focusing on guns – and irrationally focusing on guns responsible for less than two per cent of gun homicides per year simply because they look too butch – will not stop determined murderers from destroying human life. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel killed 86 and injured 458 others with a lorry in Nice. No-one blamed the truck.

THE news on guns in the United States is good. Though the number of guns has gone up to around 320m, gun homicides have come down by 49 per cent since 1993. Sadly, there are still too many gun deaths but race and poverty factors are much more important than ownership of guns. Sixty six per cent of victims of gun homicides are black males, who make up six per cent of the population.

What should Americans do? Leave the gun-control handwringing to Washington and finger-wagging Europeans and continue to attend concerts and have a good time. As country singer Lee Brice, who played the Las Vegas festival two nights before the attack, said: “There’s a pride in country music and what they stand for and what they believe in and I don’t think that’s going to change because of one person who wants to take that away from them.”

l Dr Kevin Yuill is senior lecturer in American history at the University of Sunderland. He has recently published, with Joe Street, The Second Amendment and Gun Control: Freedom, Fear, and the American Constitution (Routledge, 2017).