US: Some 39 per cent of US households own a gun. And there are some 192 million of them in general circulation in a society in which over 100,000 a year die or are wounded by firearms.
America's gun lobby has not, however, always had its own way.After the 1999 Columbine school massacre, in which 15 children died, popular outrage motivated legislators all over the country to rein in the gun lobby.
In response, the hugely rich and powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) threw over $1 million into a campaign that in the end successfully neutered much of the legislation.
"We know the political realities and we're not going to get anything through right now," Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat and a long-time gun control advocate admitted to CNN recently.
Gun-lovers rejoiced with the election of President Bush, well-known for his support for their rights. With his appointment of Mr John Ashcroft as attorney general, they were nearly ecstatic.
Mr Ashcroft, quite simply, is an NRA man through and through. He was the Senate's most determined opponent of gun control, and even spoke out against restrictions on the free sale of automatic assault weapons. The grateful NRA spent $374,137 on his failed 2000 Senate re-election bid.
The organisation was confident that the federal government would reverse local attempts to control the sale of guns and, to its delight, the solicitor general, Mr Ted Olson, announced in May an important revision of the federal interpretation of the Second Amendemnt to the US Constitution.
The amendment upholds the right to bear arms in terms that had been interpreted by the government as guaranteeing the right of the states to have their own militias or National Guard detachments.
In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled that the right arises from and relates to "some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well-regulated militia".
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," the amendment provides.
But now the federal government believes the amendment "more broadly protects the right of individuals to possess and bear their own firearms".
The distinction is crucially important. It reverses the onus of proof in law and has raised fears that lawyers from the Attorney General's office will now be making the case for a permissive interpretation of the rules in important cases now before the courts.
And gun-control advocates worry the conservative Supreme Court may decide the climate is right for it to reverse position.
In Maryland, the introduction of a database on the individual characteristics of guns, so-called "ballistics fingerprinting", provoked a furious response from the NRA.
The Maryland State Police lobbied for a law, passed in 2000, that requires sellers of handguns in the state to provide police with information about each purchaser and a casing from a bullet test. New York has a similar system, and there are several proposals to create a national database.
At a time when the Maryland sniper was stalking victims in three states, President Bush's spokesman, Mr Ari Fliescher, intervened to say such proposals raise the same issues as saying "that every citizen in the United States should be finger-printed in order to catch robbers and thieves."
"The president does believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own weapons," he said. "Certainly, in the case of the sniper, the real issue is values. These are the acts of a depraved killer, who has broken and will continue to break laws. And so the question is not new laws."
But gun-control advocates say if the Maryland law had not been restricted to handguns, it could perhaps have helped find the sniper.
"The shootings in Montgomery County are a perfect example of how valuable complete ballistic finger-printing would be," Mr Eric Gorovitz, a lobbyist for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said.
