YET another crazy shooting spree in a US cinema has resulted in murder, followed by the gunman’s suicide. So get rid of the guns and stop the killings. Simple. Barack Obama thinks so and that’s why he has just said that his failure to introduce tighter gun controls is the biggest disappointment of his presidency.

Obama consistently exposes himself as a sentimentalist. And a sentimentalist is one who never allows facts and reasons to affect his thinking: for really he doesn’t think at all, but only feels.

So the more guns, the more murders? Let’s introduce some facts. There are only six million people in Switzerland – that’s one-forty-eighth of the population of the US. But these six million Swiss own 600,000 assault rifles and 500,000 handguns. Yet murder statistics there are so low they aren't even kept.

Let’s turn to the US. Massachusetts has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, but it has three times the murder rate of New Hampshire, where the gun laws are so lax that a resident doesn't even need a licence to buy a rifle, shotgun or pistol. What about the UK? In the six months after handguns were banned in Britain in 1997, gun crime doubled.

The former Soviet Union's extremely stringent gun controls, successfully implemented and enforced by a police state, did not keep that nation, and successor states like Russia, from posting murder rates from 1965-1999 that far outstripped the rest of the developed world.

Fact: killers in the USSR and later in Russia didn’t use guns to murder their victims, but other methods. This bears out the truth that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Someone bent on murder will always find a way: if not a gun, then a knife – or a hammer, poison or a pillow. Should we ban hammers and pillows then?

In the 1960s and early 1970s, murders committed by Soviet citizens -- again, almost entirely without guns -- equalled or exceeded the lives taken violently in the gun-saturated United States. By the early 1990s, the murder rate in Russia was treble the American rate, which had by then levelled off, before dropping away even further.

Or look at Norway, Finland, Germany, France and Denmark, all countries with heavy gun ownership. These countries posted low murder rates in the early 2000s compared with countries where there were far fewer firearms. In 2002, for example, Germany's murder rate was one-ninth that of Luxembourg, where the law prohibits civilian ownership of handguns and gun ownership is rare.

Statistics within countries show similar results. Regions where there are higher gun ownership rates correlate with areas of lower rates of violent crime; while areas with strict gun laws correlate with areas high in violent crime.

The truth is that, in every country, anyone can get hold of a gun who wants to. For example, you only have to walk into a pub in parts of South London or the East End and ask the right person the right question and you can pick up a firearm, no questions asked. Britain has strict gun laws compared with the US but, even after these restrictions were tightened yet further, Hackney was notorious for its number of drive-by shootings.

Here’s another truth which is obvious to everyone, except to sentimentalists: if you ban guns, it’s only the bad guys who still have guns. Does anyone – even Barack Obama - really imagine that someone planning to shoot his neighbour will say to himself: “Oh I can’t go doing that, because the government has banned guns!”