RARELY a day goes by without a torrent of tweets from the “Real Donald Trump” to his 50 million followers, usually in the early hours. But on Saturday night the voluble president fell strangely silent.

Maybe his mind was on other things. Stormy Daniels, for example, who by the time you read this will have appeared on prime-time television across the nation with what is expected to be explosive new revelations. And even more ominously for Trump, the growing mass movement of youth in America, the biggest since the Iraq War demonstrations of 15 years ago, demanding tighter gun control.

Judging by the turnout at Saturday’s March For Our Lives, the President has a mighty problem on his hands. Two side-by-photos, taken from the exact same vantage point and shared widely on social media, summed it all up.

One was the sparse gathering at the Washington Mall on January 20 for the presidential inauguration ceremony, attended by a crowd that looked like it would struggle to fill Hampden Park. The other was of the colossal demonstration in support of gun control on Saturday, estimated by many to be more than half a million strong.

And that was only in Washington. In hundreds of cities across the USA, and in hundreds more cities worldwide, young people – and older people too – were on the march to demand a curb on the murderous arsenal that every year leaves scores of people dead and maimed and traumatised because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One pupil from Parkland school, who was shot in both legs, told the crowd that she was “crying tears and blood at the same time”. This young woman, one of many who have been told by the gun lobby that they are too naive to know what they are talking about, is still so steeped in her unimaginable trauma that she vomited behind the podium after speaking.

Since the 1980s there have been around 100 mass shootings in the USA, defined as being when more than four random people were murdered in a single incident by a gunman (and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male – and white). Far more than 1000 people have died. And the incidence is growing rather than declining.

So why does it carry on, relentlessly? Why have US presidents from both sides of the political divide failed to act? The answer can be summed in two words. Money and power.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is a notoriously influential force in American society, one of the top three lobbying groups in the country. Much of its power derives from its wealth. And where does its wealth come from?

Yes, you’ve probably already guessed. Over the past decade or so, the organisation has received up to $50 million in funding from the gun industry. As the CEO of Smith and Wesson recently put it: “The existence of the National Rifle Association is crucial to the preservation of the shooting sports and to the entire firearms industry.”

The NRA in turn runs an exclusive club for donors of more than $1 million to the organisation. Some members of the Golden Ring of Freedom club have been investigated for arms trafficking and racketeering, but most are just run-of-the-mill businessmen making an honest living from manufacturing killing machines.

This is a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 2016, US gun manufacturers churned out more than 10 million firearms – a near three-fold increase in ten years. Personal weapons – pistols and rifles – made up 85 per cent of the total. One in three households in the country own guns, with many of them storing multiple weapons. Guns and ammo are lucrative businesses on the other side of the Atlantic. And that’s what drives the apparently irrational defence of “the right to bear arms”. The rest is just excuses.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted in 1791 under circumstances that could not be more different from those that prevail today. The USA had only won its freedom after a war of independence against the British Empire. The state was weak and needed an armed population to defend it from external aggression. Less honourably, the United States was also expanding its territory into the heartlands of the Native American population, who in turn were, understandably, intent on defending their homelands against the white invaders. This 200-year-old constitutional amendment is of little relevance to the modern world.

After Saturday’s demonstrations, the NRA bizarrely called for more guns and recycled the old cliché in defence of the American gun free-for-all: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

You have to be particularly dim not to grasp the fact that both guns and people kill people. Those who carry out mass killing sprees don’t arm themselves with knives and forks. The AR-15 rifle that left 17 young people dead in Florida last month is not a hunting gun. It is capable of firing a hundred rounds in minutes and is specifically designed to kill as many people as possible in one fell swoop. And there are between five and 10 million of these weapons lying around people’s homes across the United States today.

Some people might say that this is none of our business. Why should we express an opinion on something that doesn’t affect us? Well, Donald Trump has already set the ground rules on this one. This is the man who last year told us that Scottish independence would be “terrible”. With his customary deep political insight, he then illuminated why it would be so terrible. “They would no longer have the British Open”, he explained. With scaremongering as horrific as that, who needs Better Together?

More seriously though, gun culture in the USA has distorted the psyche of the most powerful country in the world. The very existence of guns has instilled a deep sense of fear into the heart of the country. Sixty per cent of gun owners say they own guns not for hunting and for recreation, but to defend themselves. But then, they wouldn’t need guns to defend themselves if the whole country was disarmed, would they?

When these attitudes are sanctioned by law, supported by the powerful and saturated into the culture, it leads to a more unstable world. From Vietnam to Iraq, the gun-toting mentality that grips much of middle America has been transported into the global political and military arena.

So let’s salute the young people of Florida who are trail blazing a new vision for their country in which compassion, reason and solidarity replace fear, hatred and violence.