Graham Carter - the voice of age and experience

TELL me I have lived a sheltered life if you like, but here I am, ready to celebrate my 55th birthday, and I have never fired a gun.

Not just that. I haven’t even held one that was capable of doing anybody any damage.

The closest I have come is handling my friend’s Lee Enfield rifle.

He’s an expert on the First World War, and the gun is one of many genuine historic artefacts in his collection.

You can pull the trigger and it makes a satisfying click when you do, but if you loaded it with live ammunition and then pulled the trigger it would probably blow up in your face.

The next closest to finding out how it actually feels to fire a firearm was at the fairground, 40 years ago.

The little pellets of the air gun knocked down a tin strip in a box and I went home with a water pistol as a prize.

Not only have I never fired or even held a ‘live’ gun, but to my knowledge I don’t even know anybody who owns one.

All this is not because I have lived a sheltered life, of course. It’s normal in most civilised countries in the 21st century.

I suspect most people reading this have a similarly limited experience of guns, and if they do know somebody who has one at home, it is most likely a farmer or somebody who calls hunting a sport.

Despite all this, the question of gun ownership is uppermost in our minds.

The reason, of course, is the Orlando massacre, quickly followed by the shooting of Jo Cox MP - two events that are shocking for two very different reasons.

Sadly, a mass shooting in the United States is hardly rare, so only a particularly high death toll can make it truly shocking, along with the fact that I and many people I know have actually been to Orlando.

When a country has more guns than people, and more than three million own the type of semi-automatic weapon used at Orlando, which is designed to kill multiple people in quick succession, frequent mass shootings are a statistical inevitability.

The killing of Jo Cox, on the other hand, is shocking precisely because it is a rare event in the UK.

We don’t expect people to even own a gun on this side of the Atlantic, so it is unusual for one to be in the hands of a crazed person who is willing to use it.

Guns will always fall into the wrong hands, but at least we don’t suffer from the American gun ownership disease, which generates a mental disorder of its own.

To see what I mean, just read the statements of the pro-gun lobby as they desperately try to defend their lust for weapons.

They actually believe their own ludicrous arguments, which are so illogical that we can only assume that owning a gun causes you to lose your grip on reality.

Here in the UK we like to flatter ourselves because we don’t suffer from that kind of madness. But we should still be afraid. Every time somebody fires a gun in an attempt to resolve their prejudices, we pretend the shooting is an isolated incident.

But violence caused by illogical and irrational fear, usually of minorities, is on the rise, and if we tolerate such prejudice in any form, our children’s generation are doomed to a future as dark as America’s.

Hatred is never more dangerous than when its seeds are sown by the guilty against the innocent and it is pretending to be something else.