Every now and again something happens that makes your stomach drop.

A week ago, one of those things happened in a small town 5,000 miles from here.

An 18-year-old, armed with an assault rifle, walked into a Texas primary school and locked himself inside a classroom. There he proceeded to kill 19 schoolchildren – aged between nine and 11 – and two teachers.

Earlier that day he had shot and severely wounded his grandmother, who he lived with.

The first I, and many others in East Anglia, knew of the atrocity was through a notification bleeping up on my phone one evening.

It said 14 children had been killed in a school shooting in America.

By the next morning’s radio headlines, the number had increased to 19.

This calamity alone, however, is not what made my stomach drop.

Nor was it the horrific details that emerged in the days following the tragedy.

Not that the police had waited outside the classroom door for the best part of an hour while the shooter was barricaded inside.

Not even that one 11-year-old smeared herself with a dead classmate’s blood so the shooter believed she too was dead.

What really made my stomach drop was the seeming hopelessness that anything can be done to stop the same thing from happening again and again.

The Robb Elementary School shooting was the 22nd school shooting of the year in America.

There has since been a 23rd.

In the wake of the shooting, president Joe Biden said: “I had hoped, when I became President, I would not have to do this again.

“Another massacre. Uvalde, Texas. An elementary school. Beautiful, innocent second, third, fourth graders.

“And how many scores of little children who witnessed what happened see their friends die as if they’re on a battlefield, for God’s sake. They’ll live with it the rest of their lives.

“There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but there’s a lot we do know.

“There are parents who will never see their child again, never have them jump in bed and cuddle with them. Parents who will never be the same.

“To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. There’s a hollowness in your chest, and you feel like you’re being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out.

“It’s suffocating. And it’s never quite the same.”

He continued: “I am sick and tired of it. We have to act. And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.

“I spent my career as a senator and as Vice President working to pass common-sense gun laws. We can’t and won’t prevent every tragedy.

“But we know they work and have a positive impact. When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

Within a year of a similar shooting in this county – in Dunblane in 1996 – an official inquiry had been launched.

The next year the government banned handguns with very limited exceptions. The next year the law was tightened further.

There has not been another mass shooting with a handgun since.

This country has many of the same problems blamed for shootings by pro-gun politicians – poor mental health services, increasing alienation among some people and growing issues with online radicalisation – but without easy access to guns, these have none of the jeopardy they do in America.

This, then, must be a message that bold change can and does fix problems.

The politicians who promise thoughts and prayers rather than real change to fix society’s ills are just ensuring that the problems will repeat themselves.