When I first went to my friend Sherry’s house for dinner, I couldn’t help noticing tiny holes all over the white kitchen cupboards. She was a new friend, my only friend, actually, as I had just moved to Miami.

Her mother came in and saw me looking and said: “That’s where Shane shot himself up.” Shane was Sherry’s cousin. Her mother was mostly annoyed that he had used Sherry’s dad’s gun. Whether this was an accident or a suicide I was too polite to ask. He was 16.

When Sherry’s dad sat down at the table, he showed me his huge collection of guns. One rifle after another. I sat there nodding, wondering what to say.

I was 21 and had gone to live in Miami because I thought New York might be dangerous. Yes, I know – now. Every boyfriend I had in Miami would give me their gun to put in my bag when we went out. This became just the way it was. America was in my blood, literally – my father was American – and I presumed this was what it was like to be properly American.

The American dream was what my father had offered my mother. Escape from small-town Suffolk to a place of Pontiacs and huge fridges. She liked Americans so much she married two of them, with an English man in between. “He bought me a lovely little handbag pistol,” she said of my father. This was as glamorous to her as the menthols she smoked: a special ladies’ gun.

This casual relationship to gun ownership is different in different parts of the US. For the US is several different countries. When, later in the 80s, I moved to New York, gun violence was seen as a black crime.

I had moved to the US because it seemed to offer everything I already knew and more. But very quickly I knew that this was an extremely alien culture. It is an illusion of popular culture that makes us think it isn’t. Somehow, though, British people still think they “know” America because they once had brunch in Manhattan. Americans are just like us but with bigger portions. We can prescribe our liberal solutions to their terrible problems if they would only listen.

This is delusional. The unknowability of the US, even to itself, has been brought into focus by Donald Trump’s election. Nowhere is it more apparent than in the debate around gun control. An angry white man is in the White House. And angry white men who murder scores of people with guns are not terrorists, apparently. The reaction to these massacres is that more people go out and buy guns to protect themselves. This mentality is incomprehensible to many of us. Never mind North Korea, Americans excel at killing each other with guns and opioids. The terror that they fear is coming over some mythical wall is in fact rooted inside their own culture. The same figures are rehearsed after every massacre. It is estimated that the US has the highest number of privately owned guns in the world – in 2012, there were thought to be about 300m, held by about one-third of the population (enough for every man, woman and child in the country to have a gun). The second-ranked country is Yemen. In the US, 18 young people are killed every day by guns. Meanwhile, suicide – the majority by gun – is the second most common cause of death for Americans between 15 and 34.

One of the saddest parts of Gary Younge’s devastating book Another Day in the Death of America is when parents of children gunned down speak of relief. The mother of Tyshon Anderson, who was shot in a gang-related incident at 18, says: “I don’t have to worry about him being out there killing nobody else or nobody else trying to kill him.”

Every right-minded liberal can point to Australia, where gun control has brought the homicide rate right down. Legislation would implement background checks for gun ownership and yet …

Gun fairs are visited as if by Victorian anthropologists. Who are these people? The National Rifle Association is powerful, and, of course, the militias were out recently in Charlottesville. This is not “left-behind” America, but it is a part we find utterly foreign. The anti-centralised state narrative may be wrapped in second-amendment bluster, but part of the problem with gun control is precisely this word “control”. Obamacare is rejected again as something to do with control. I offer no solution to the massacres. I don’t particularly like the US’s reliance on cars either, but I can’t see the country without them.

The now-familiar argument in the US on gun control is that of two different nations circling each other. It seems to me much of the US cannot be understood as a developed nation. Look at the levels of inequality, the infant mortality rates, the addiction, the self-inflicted wounds. The absolute rejection of a centralised state is part of its notion of freedom. That this culture is not ours, that it is something entirely different, gets brought home time and again.

When I was being taught to shoot by an American ex-cop, he emphasised that children must learn how to behave around guns. At what age, I asked him, did he think they should have their first gun?

“Three” he said.