MAPPED: How deadly semi-automatics guns have been used in shootings from Texas to Vegas

In Las Vegas last month, sick killer Stephen Paddock shot more than 500 people, 58 of whom died, from his casino hotel window.

A bump stock allowed him to fire thousands of bullets onto the helpless crowd below him.

And yesterday Devin Kelley burst into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas and opened fire with a AR-556 rifle.

As the above map shows, they have been used from California on the West Coast during the 1980s to New Hampshire in the north-east, with gunmen finding it all too easy to use the weapons to slaughter helpless victims.

One particularly heartbreaking example was the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which saw 20 children aged 6 or 7 shot dead.

Mr Obama said: “Five years ago this week, a sitting member of Congress and 18 others were shot at at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. It wasn’t the first time I had to talk to the nation in response to a mass shooting, nor would it be the last.

He has already blocked plans put in place by Mr Obama which would have stopped 75,000 people with mental health disorder buying guns.

“And so if it’s a place where somebody has the ability to carry, there’s always the opportunity that the gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people.

“We need in churches … at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond if something like this, when something like this happens again.”