There are a lot of Americans on the other side of the pond who seem to think our story about a bullet found in Walthamstow High Street was a big joke.

Judging by the emails with which they have been bombarding us, they appear to have missed the point or, at least, the point from our perspective.

The way we see it, a bullet found in the High Street means that someone was probably carrying a gun there.

In Britain, the vast majority of us don't want people to have guns, except perhaps for carefully controlled and licensed sporting activity.

The message from our American correspondents is that we are total wimps, that we should be carrying guns to defend ourselves, that we are going to be overrun by alien hordes if we don't get tooled up by tomorrow and that, for some reason which we don't understand, Sir Winston Churchill would be turning in his grave.

For our part, we think that we will be in much more danger if people are given easy access to guns.

Possibly the most disturbing letters display an aggressive attitude which might go some way to explaining the gung-ho right wing American attitude to world politics and other nations.

We would be really worried if it were not for the fact that our American friends and colleagues have hastened to tell us that the writers are not representative of the nation.