You have never seen anything like a Las Vegas gun show – if you had, you'd understand how massacres happen

A number of otherwise sane women, dressed in cowgirl outfits or camouflage gear, were coiling themselves semi-erotically around extremely large barrels. One woman I met there was not only a hunter and fitness fanatic but was also in training for a bodybuilding competition and tried to sell me on the joys of the Weatherby Vanguard rifle and some assorted handguns

Vegas is as much about guns as it is about gambling (Reuters)

Las Vegas was never just about the gambling. It’s about guns too. Because sometimes you want a sure thing. “Which will it be, sir, the multiple grenade launcher or the pistol-grip repeating shotgun?”

They say there are more guns than human beings in America and most of them were at the “Shot Show” in Las Vegas when I was there last year. Wedged between a couple of casinos and a replica of the Grand Canal in Venice, Shot (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) is the firearm industry’s biggest shop window in America, and therefore probably on earth. It occupied several floors of a building the size of Wembley Stadium.

I tried to get the numbers straight, but I doubt anyone could: it was like trying to count grains of sand on the beach or stars in the sky. Except these were all extremely lethal weapons.

Everybody there was trying to be somebody and with one of these in your hands you felt as though you really could be, if only for a moment. Winchester, Springfield, Beretta, Glock, Sig Sauer, Mossberg, Heckler & Koch: the names themselves were bewitching.

For a certified gun nut, Las Vegas is an Aladdin’s cave. It’s like being a kleptomaniac let loose in Harrods. There is a definite nostalgia factor too when you have on offer a Colt Six-Shooter and an upgraded AK-47.

It was like the opposite of Woodstock. There was little here in the way of peace and love, and no visible hippies either, but at the same time there was a sense of a high in the air, the aphrodisiac frenzy induced by the smell of powder and gun oil and toys for boys.

A number of otherwise sane women, dressed in cowgirl outfits or camouflage gear, were coiling themselves semi-erotically around extremely large barrels. One woman I met there was not only a hunter and fitness fanatic but was also in training for a bodybuilding competition and tried to sell me on the joys of the Weatherby Vanguard rifle and some assorted handguns.

I watched promotional movies of people creeping up behind assorted critters and then getting themselves filmed in a warm embrace with their dying victims, and grinning their heads off. Isn’t killing fun, was the gist.

There were a lot of trigger-happy heroes and urban cowboys at the Shot Show’s NRA (National Rifle Association) enclave. None of them were great fans of Hillary Clinton. They all turned out to be constitutional experts, especially where the Second Amendment is concerned, with its “right to bear arms”. In fact there was a general consensus that it was unpatriotic not to bear arms.

If I felt like joining, there was a special deal on and they were throwing in a subscription to “American Rifle”. More than once I heard the argument that if only everyone in the nation had a decent gun in their pocket (better still, several guns) then there would be no more mass shootings. Potential shooters would be too afraid of other shooters gunning them down. That is the best theory the NRA has been able to come up with. There aren’t yet quite enough guns in America. The more the merrier.

I remember that I couldn’t find my way out of the show. It was so enormous I kept going round and round. In the end I had to ask somebody where the exit was. Maybe there really is no way out, I started to think.

The Las Vegas gun show is a microcosm of America, a locked-and-loaded nation with the safety permanently off. As the ad said, this really is “Remington Country”. I, a rank amateur, with only a passing acquaintance with weaponry, could very readily kit myself out like Rambo. It was hard not to.

Las Vegas is testimony to the militarisation of an entire society. And talking of exits, it is easy to see how tempting it must be to make a really spectacular one, a mass exit that no one will ever forget.

At the Venetian complex, I could take a gondola beneath a painted sky and climb up St Mark’s Campanile. As I walked back up the Strip in the sun, courted by Elvis and Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader, I thought to myself that the bewildering sense that nothing is real, that everything here is fake, makes reaching for a gun just that little bit easier. It feels as if everything is a hallucination, a dream or a delusion. Maybe only the cold, hard metal in your hand feels real, the final truth.

During the short time I was in Vegas, there was a shooting outside the Bellagio hotel and casino. The Strip was sealed off but no one batted an eyelid. It was situation normal. Mass shootings have become normalised in America. Las Vegas is where Hollywood fantasy meets real bullets and actual blood.