And make no mistake about it, gun ownership, despite President Obama’s best intentions, is a major problem in that country.

It suffers countless mass shootings, 352 just this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

That’s mass killings, not individual murders.

Its findings tell us that this year alone those 352 incidents resulted in 13,000 deaths – 623 of them were children, and 2800 teenagers aged from 13 to 17.

These are truly frightening statistics.

Research by other organisations tell us that there are 310 million guns in the US (Congressional Research Service).

That’s more guns than people - 112 guns per 100 people, to be precise. In Australia we have 21 per 100, ranking us 26th in the world.

All this provoked me to look up President Elect Trump’s position on gun control, and I quickly found his (in)famous quotation from the Republican primaries: “I am a second amendment person. If we had guns in Orlando on the other side going in the opposite direction, you wouldn't have 50 people dead right now. If even in Paris, if they had guns on the other side, going in the opposite direction, you wouldn't have 130 people plus dead.” (Fox News)

Like most who favour retaining the Second Amendment he misses the obvious point that if Americans were not allowed to bear arms the shootings wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

And so the Trump presidency, which begins when he is sworn in on January 21, 2017 promises at best more of the same, though with a likelihood that things may well get worse.

So I was very pleased to hear that Greens MP and Gun Control Spokesperson David Shoebridge will be undertaking a trip to Trump’s America to discuss gun control policies, compare the two countries’ gun lobbies and what it might all mean under a Trump Administration.

While Australia is considered by many the envy of the world when it comes to gun control laws due to the gun buy back after the Port Arthur massacre and restrictions on the sale of firearms, there is a growing and disturbing gun culture in Australia that is perpetuated by an increasing number of pro-gun MP’s in Parliaments across the country.

Here in NSW we see Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party MP’s frequently visit the United States to pick up campaigning tools and import the US gun lobby’s rhetoric into Australia.

They recently won the Orange by-election, so presumably we can expect more pro-gun motions in Parliament, and as the party’s power may well increase in this post-Brexit Trump era world we are now living in, there is a greater and ever increasing chance that they will succeed

It’s already beginning.

The importation of the Adler shotgun, attempts to open up its licensing and sale to every gun obsessive, the introduction of silencers or the return of duck hunting, demonstrates deal after deal delivering for the Australian gun lobby.

Let’s hope not only that such moves stop at this point, but that they are reversed.