There are many times, on returning to the US after years away, when you are struck by one particular thought: it doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many great things about this place – the warmth of its people, the speed of its internet, everything bagels – but there are also confounding ideas about how society should be structured, what is permitted and what is not, how best to live together.

Exhibit A: I was at the airport in Tennessee recently. The weekend I’d spent at a rural retreat there had been a blur of autumn foliage and pulled pork and bourbon, made all the better by the fact Nicole Kidman had just left the day before. Around these parts, where country music reigns supreme, Nicole’s husband is the better known of the pair. While I was excited by the prospect that Nicole had taken a horse ride on the same trail I was on, my instructor was mostly disappointed that she hadn’t brought Keith.

But back to the airport, because living in the US is nothing but highs and lows. Standing in line at security, I noticed that every few metres a print-out picture of a different type of gun had been posted. Looking closer, the signs announced which airport security agent had successfully intercepted which model of gun from being carried on board a plane.

Alarmingly, all the guns – there were 20 or so – had been seized in the past month. Until this point I’d thought of the American airport as a safe haven from gun violence, the one public space where you didn’t need to survey available exits upon entering. But now even that comparative feeling of relief had been taken away. Why were all these people travelling with guns in their hand luggage anyway? The signs were, I suppose, meant to be reassuring – look at all these agents preemptively locating weapons of death! – except they felt anything but.