It’s the state in which Billy the Kid first shot and killed a man in a saloon bar row, where the Gunfight at the OK Corral became Wild West legend, and the Boothill cemetery is filled with the bodies of itinerant gunslingers too slow to draw.

Now America’s powerful gun lobby is pushing for the introduction of “commonsense” laws in Arizona that would allow people to walk into bars with guns — just as they did in the old days. Tennessee and Georgia have approved the measure in the past year and a similar law is now being considered by Arizona’s state legislature.

Supporters claim that 40 out of 50 US states already allow licensed gun-owners to carry concealed weapons in bars and restaurants.

Gun-control advocates dispute this figure but recognise that they are in retreat across the country with President Obama wary of alienating voters in rural and Western states who have shifted decisively towards the Democrats in recent elections.

Talk of restoring a ban on assault weapons, which triggered a surge in gun sales this year, has now been put on the back burner in the face of strong opposition from Congress.

Every year more than 30,000 Americans die by gunshot, most of them suicides, but at least 10,000 by murder. This is twice the number of 4,316 US soldiers killed in six years of the Iraq war. England and Wales, by contrast, had 50 deaths through gun crime in 2005-06.

The Arizona Bill, which has been approved by the state senate, would give bars discretion over whether to allow patrons to carry guns provided that they do not drink alcohol and do possess a concealed weapons permit.

Some bar owners believe that the measure threatens a throwback to the kind of saloon bar gunfights that once characterised the Wild West.

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