Your starter for ten: what do Ritalin prescriptions, too many doors, abortion laws and trench coats all have in common?

No idea? Let me assist.

These have been listed variously this last week by Republican congressmen in America as contributory causes of the seemingly

endless carnage from school shootings.

Oddly, you might think, not a one of them mentioned the availability of guns.

The truly mind boggling annual death toll from firearms incidents, the fact that the National Rifle Association bankrolled so many of them to get to Congress in the first place, or that they have routinely failed to support even modest background checks on buyers, or impose penalties on those who sell army style weaponry to private citizens.

You will be less than gobsmacked to learn that Texas – home of the latest tragedy – tops the league for gun ownership, or that its junior senator Ted Cruz (a recipient of NRA election funds) is a long term supporter of the second amendment – the 230 year old legislation routinely used to defend American households doubling as gun stores.

Mr Cruz, a failed Presidential candidate, has been rightly slagged off by those children who lost schoolmates in the recent Florida shootings, and now that he has one in his own backyard, has fallen back on the “thoughts and prayers with you” mantra which is routinely used to camouflage legislative cowardice.

You will recall that it was Mr Cruz’s political bedmates who came up with the dandy wheeze of arming the teachers, rather than disarming the country. The teachers, unsurprisingly, indicated they didn’t sign up to be part time cowboys.

The good people of Dunblane made a video in which those who survived that terrible Scottish school shooting and those who lost family and friends in it urged America to look at their example.

To reflect that after their successful campaign to have a handgun ban not a single schoolchild in the UK has lost their life to a crazed shooter.

They hoped that the fact they had walked these hard miles in the same shoes might have some influence. I fear that hope is in vain.

In a week which also saw a high school graduate parade in a prom frock with a semi-automatic machine gun slung over her shoulder and pose for souvenir pictures, it becomes ever more despairingly clear that this is a nation in love with weaponry – or rather a nation where too many of its elected representatives lack the basic common sense to follow Dunblane’s groundbreaking example.

Sensible Americans know this. But sensible Americans are in short supply at the political helm these days. Not least in the White House.