It was the sort of amicable chat one has over a couple of beers after hours of political debate during the early days of the presidential campaign.

The issue of an American’s right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment, was pretty important to this New Hampshire Republican activist who told me that he kept a couple of guns at home to protect his family.

Very gently I asked what sort of guns we were talking about, and from memory, they were hunting rifles. He made it pretty clear that he had no interest in assembling an armoury of assault weapons such as those used in the Sandy Hook or Orlando massacres.

In many ways this was, in microcosm, what the entire gun debate has been about and why no politician would ever suggest introducing the sort of sweeping curbs which came into force in the UK after the 1996 Dunblane massacre.