My dad was due to be discharged from the army in 1945 when some uncommonly diligent clerk discovered that in four years of active duty, during which, by the by, the world was plunged in catastrophic war, he had never fired a gun. There ensued for him a mandatory day on the firing range before he could come home - the only, distasteful, time he ever held a firearm in his life.

Guns in America have an atavistic force. Possessing them, or the act of not possessing them, is an identity that seems to pass from father to son. The sociology confirms this: if you're a gun nut (forgive my bias), the overwhelming chance is that your father was a gun nut, too; if your father eschewed them, so will you-likely with great scorn.

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In the litany of issues that separate the two Americas - one more conservative and one more liberal, increasingly as opposed and intractable and opaque to each other as the Palestinians and Israelis - none is so fierce, precise, inviolable and confounding to the other side as guns. The death of a nine-year-old, and the wounding of Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Congresswoman, at a civic rally, no matter how confounding and pointless, has not changed anyone's mind about guns. Culture has no logic.

My dearest friend from high school suffered his angry, Martini-swilling, gun-collecting and gun-stroking father. Then, a few decades later, showed up with his own Glock, tucked under the seat of his car. This is one of the things that ended our long friendship. Guns draw a line. Guns tell you who a person is. Guns are a club.

Of course, people without guns have their own club, too. It's a high-minded one, with a slightly faded, imperial feel - history has not been kind to it.

This American right to bear arms with, practically, a Muslim fierceness, sometimes seems as if it must be age-old, an ancient tradition from a tenacious frontier holdover.

The courts, the congress, the states, the political culture itself, have all conceded that the practically unfettered right to buy and carry firearms is a near-religious one. It is, indeed, bound up with all the passionate issues of the religious right. For better or worse, access to guns by practically anybody - sane or insane, criminally inclined or not, including the Arizona shooter - is a distinguishing American and even, by implication, Christian characteristic. Any attempt to regulate guns is such an obvious losing issue that it is only for losers. Opposing guns is, to only slightly confuse this metaphor, like opposing Israel. The gun nation has risen, and its rights are as inalienable and doctrinaire as free speech and private property.

This absolute catechism is recited so often that, practically speaking, no one remembers when it was otherwise. But as it happens, this is simply not true. The gun as totemic force, as sacrosanct right, is, rather, a new phenomenon, not of the old culture, but of the new.

Let me recapitulate.

After WWII, during the march of modernisation, gun regulation began to seem reasonable and inevitable. It was, initially, not so much a debate about guns, but about hunting. With increasing suburbanisation, hunters had started to shoot neighbours instead of prey. This was, then, the two Americas: the rural and the modern. Hunters may have been fervent, but the new, modern America was righteous and inevitable.

Regulation moved apace. A patchwork of statute - about who could own a gun and how, and under what circumstances - grew up across the nation.

Then guns became an urban issue. Street crime exploded. Guns don't kill people, people kill people, became the hunter's lament. Except this was clearly not true. Some guns - the mugger's Saturday-night special - were designed only to work at close range. Regulation sought to distinguish between the reasonable and the extreme: a shotgun obviously being different in intent from a handgun or automatic weapon. Regulation of one, the gun people understood, portended regulation of another.

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Then came the assassination of John F Kennedy: Lee Harvey Oswald had bought his Mannlicher-Carcano by mail order.

The terrible march of American mayhem and violence during the Sixties and Seventies formed something close to a consensus: even most policeman and police associations backed national gun regulation. Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. His press secretary, James Brady, at his side, was crippled. The Brady Bill, a broad regulation of firearms, launched and doggedly campaigned for by his wife Sarah, and with the tacit approval of Presidents Reagan and Clinton, seemed inevitable.

And yet, not.

It never happened.

Over the next 30 years, the possibilities for gun control became ever more remote. What laws existed came to be dismantled in the new gun territories. The varieties of guns exploded - a cornucopia of weapon functionality, nuance and style; their private use expanded. There are now nine guns for every ten people in America.

And during this time hunting, as sport and pastime, shrunk to its smallest levels. Practically speaking, there are no hunters any more.

Now, it's all about "personal security".

"Protection."

It's precise and unembarrassed: guns are for shooting other people.

The most prevalent and successful gun laws now are repeals of regulation. You now have the right, in a growing number of states, to carry a concealed weapon, once the accepted no-no of honest citizen behaviour.

And, mirabile dictu, the constitution argument, the famous, poorly written Second Amendment, the "right to bear arms" clause, which, for the better part of a century has been interpreted to mean that states have the right to organise local military forces, was suddenly reinterpreted to mean individuals have a constitutional right to guns.

Indeed, gun proponents claim that the dramatic drop in crime in American cities over the past 20 years is directly related to the plethora of guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

As it happens, almost nobody shoots their guns. They reside in drawers and attics and sideboards as... metaphors.

As the basis for heroic fantasies, as a secret sort of handshake.

And yet, the fate of a not insignificant number of the nation's vast numbers of guns is merely to be forever misplaced. A gun is put away in the safest of places and, as the years roll on, never visited and seldom considered, and ultimately disappears from thought and memory. It exists only in concept. More precious for having slipped from view and reality.

This may be part of the dedicated resistance to regulation: a feeling not so much that guns are being regulated, but thoughts, notions, options, scenarios, possibilities and meanings. A friend reports that her parents cautioned her about guns as a child, were terrified about her visiting other children's homes with guns - and then, once she was grown up, proudly confessed how well they'd hidden their own guns.

Here is the tribal issue: If you don't have a gun, then you might well be more identified with the people who don't like guns.

There is, increasingly, no middle ground. The way not to be identified by others as suspect, not to be associated with what has to be in your own mind, the distasteful other - the snobbish, condescending, insincere, insubstantial, not serious, not worthy other - nor to be confused in your own mind about your own bona fides and self-worth, is to have a gun.

I remember a time in America when the social symbol of constancy and stability and order, this holding line against anarchy and bohemianism and disorder, was a lawn.

Now it's a gun.

For the rest of us in America, the gun is the symbol of illogic, rage, menace... and, dare I say, low verbal skills. This is not to argue for my obvious position, but to try and stress the absolute divide.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords may have been shot in the head with a Glock, but she was an ardent supporter of gun ownership, to great political effect. The gun somehow levelled her liberalism for the conservatives in her district (although not for the nutter who shot her). The gun, however, would have remained a vulgarity and threat for the liberals who might otherwise have supported her. The gun makes her not a liberal at all.

I have been trying to imagine the humanity of a gun person, if only in a literary sense. To see my fellow citizens with concealed weapons, as ordinary people with ordinary feelings. And I can't. To me, they seem large, dumb, boorish, emotionally short-circuited, feral even. This is, necessarily, a rank stereotype, but I can't overcome it. I can't find our commonality. And don't want to. The gun has become that sort of grudge. You carry a gun? You're simply not like me. Our brains are wired differently. In fact, you're a threat to me.

As gun proponents have pushed gun fealty to its absolute limits, in which there is literally no acceptable modifier for gun ownership, in which any law regulating guns is anathema, a blood double-cross, the reaction on the other side inevitably becomes as binary.

Or will, I believe. It has been cowed now. A gun's real job is to intimidate, and it's worked. It is hardly so far-fetched to argue that the real purpose of a gun is to scare liberals - and to shoot them if they try to take them away. There is - and only the most dedicated conservative propagandists and bloggers would deny it - a terrible extremism that underlies the political and culture enmity in America.

We are speaking only partly metaphorically here - the real power of the gun metaphor being that, at any second, it becomes absolutely real - but the elemental step for liberals in the political and cultural wars that are ravaging the nation is to disarm the other side.

The war goes on.

Originally published in the May 2011 issue of British GQ