This time, the innocent victims were a television reporter and cameraman simply going about their business when they were shot dead – live on morning television.

The horror was beamed directly into homes across Virginia, but not even that is likely to be enough to finally convince the US to get serious about gun control.

After all, if the murder of 20 children in Sandy Hook just a couple of weeks before Christmas 2012 couldn’t bring about a change, then why should the murder of a journalist and cameraman have any effect?

It took just minutes this week for the heavyweights of the US gun lobby to begin spouting the spurious “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” line that follows every new mass shooting.

By their twisted logic, more guns can only improve the safety of their citizens – because if someone pulls a gun on you, you had better be armed yourself.

At the same time they reject the example set by Australia where there have been no Port Arthur, Columbine or Sandy Hook-style mass shootings in the 20 years since the Howard Government’s contentious gun buyback.

Australia has shown that taking guns off the streets works, but the US gun lobby is not having a bar of it – it’s always going to be hard to talk sense to people who value the right to kill over the right to live.

Even the politicians who want to see tighter gun controls – from the president down – are reluctant to do so at the risk of their jobs, and their system of optional voting can be blamed for that.

Polls show that the majority of Americans would support tighter gun controls, but most of those people don’t vote.

So when the elections roll around every four years, the vocal minority is able to assert its will over the silent majority who could not be bothered heading out to the booths.

And no matter how much we might want to help fix America, the American people must want to help themselves.