Deal, partly as a backlash from the Tommy Gun era of Prohibition and the roaring Twenties.

Cunningly, FDR's strategy was to attack gun rights not by a head-on assault on the Second Amendment but by the devious but always deadly route of taxation. Taking weapons across state lines and even transferring ownership became costly activities. The Supreme Court affirmed this in 1939, simultaneously emphasising that the Amendment confirmed the collective rights of a militia, not individual citizens, and that the arms did not include sawn-off shot guns or assault weapons.

For the next half-century the gun controllers pushed steadily forward, given helpful shoves by the assassinations of the Sixties, Reagan's narrow escape and the crack wars of the 1980s. The Democratic Party, listening particularly to its liberal, urban and female base, made gun control a major plank.

The recoil came in 2000, with Al Gore's defeat at the hands of George Bush. Guns,

not Ralph Nader, were a prime factor in that narrow loss. Gore's endorsement of gun control cost the Democrats Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Colorado and the mountain states. The Democrats began to sideline the issue. The gun lobby weathered the crises of school shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech. The Bush presidencies saw membership of the Supreme Court swing steadily to the right.

Europeans, incredulous at America's 50m households holding about 250m guns, usually miss two important points. 'Home defence' is a phrase with profound reverberations, as Scalia emphasised strongly in such paragraphs as the one cited above. And the gun lobby has been successful in anchoring their cause in the notion of a basic 'freedom', in an era when Americans correctly feel that freedoms - against unreasonable searches and seizures, or the right to a speedy trial - are being relentlessly eroded by government.

June 26 truly did open a new page in American judicial history, as politicians quickly recognized. In contrast to the New York