For British tourists, the US has long been a favourite destination. Brits make up the largest number of overseas visitors to the country.

The skyscrapers of New York to the parks of California – as well as the Fifa World Cup this summer – the USA has a lot to offer. Yet with increased debate over Donald Trump’s effect on the nation he leads and the world’s stability, questions have been raised about whether tourists should visit. Indeed, the US was the only major tourist destination to see a dip in visitor numbers last year.

So should UK tourists boycott the US? Columnist Ian Birrell, War Correspondent Robert Fox and Travel Editor Sophie Lam offer their perspectives.

In places of tensions and violence, of which I have seen quite a few over the years, it’s the zones where the snipers lurk that scare me the most. Sarajevo, Beirut, Ghazni, Kabul – the biggest fear is when no one is about in that deserted street. You have to look up to the concealed door or window.

I have been shot at on dozens of occasions during my time as a war correspondent – but only a handful were serious, in that the ordnance was aimed directly at me, and no mistake. You learn to handle the situation as much as you can. It’s the instinct that urges you to keep to the edge of the crowd in a riot and eyes upwards.

“You seem always to know to look up, not like many of the others,” the then logistics manager of the BBC stated on my first visit to “sniper alley” in Sarajevo shortly after the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the summer of 1992. “Well, the snipers don’t fire from the ground; they try to command the place,” I replied.

I am pretty amateur at it, but I always set out to manage the danger. It goes with the trade. It’s why I am so spooked by the stories of violence from the United States of America – and the addiction to guns, big and small, in the land of the free.

It’s the sheer banality of a lot of the shooting there that bewilders most. The drama in Minneapolis epitomises this. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were milling around as protesters, not particularly menacing or threatening. Yet within a matter of a minute or so of verbal altercation with the law enforcers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) patrols, lethal force was employed. A few shouts and then shoot to kill.

It was much the same when George Floyd was killed in the same city in May 2020. Four police officers led by Derek Chauvin arrested Floyd, then 46, on suspicion of using a fake $20 (£15) bill. It was extraordinary how quickly it all spun out of control, ending with Chauvin pinning Floyd on the ground for eight minutes and 15 seconds. His last words were “I can’t breathe.” This became the battle cry for protests. Protests turned to rioting and 1,500 businesses were burned down. The officers were convicted of manslaughter and Chauvin for second degree murder.

Though I have seen more than a fair share of war, terrorism and violence from organised crime, I am no kind of gun nut. It is the strange allure of guns and violence, and what it leads to, that puts me off going to the US.

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution lays down “the right of the people to bear arms.” But that was then, and to make sure local militias were ready. It seems quite a stretch, and a deadly one at that, to say the Constitution should make everybody entitled to have an automatic assault rifle under the bed and a snub-nosed shooter in the glovebox of the limo.

The US has nearly five times the murder rate of England and Wales. Yet members and former members of Trump’s administration have had no qualms in portraying the UK as riven by mayhem. Both Elon Musk and JD Vance have questioned the UK’s safety, while Donald Trump’s personal Florida lawyer, Robert Garson, a Manchester-born US immigrant, claimed in January that the UK “is no longer safe for Jews.” He has urged Trump to offer immediate asylum to all 300,000 British Jews. Furthermore, as an ardent National Rifle Association leader, he says all should be armed.

It is only since the Bosnian war in 1992 that I started wearing body armour and helmets in the field. In February 1993, I was targeted by a Croat sniper. I was driving “the beast”, The Telegraph’s Land Rover, and the bullet struck where we had put the biggest chunk of agricultural armour, below the plated windscreen. The sniper didn’t realise that the beast was British, a right hand drive, so he was firing on my well protected passenger. At least I was better protected than 10 years before (1982) when David Norris of the Daily Mail and I endured several hours of light shelling bombardment at Goose Green during the Falklands War. I had only a paratrooper’s smock jacket, no armour, and a parachuter’s cork helmet in which the medics had gouged a huge ridge to hold a double ration of morphine ampules.

So it’s the outer wear of the enforcement agents of ICE and their buddies on the streets of dozens of US cities that chills me. They are tooled and masked up to the nines – masks, bandanas, sunglasses to make them as anonymous as possible. It’s a symptom that experts like my pal Dr Julia Ebner call the “gamification” of violence. Law and order take on the traits of a video game, perpetrators and their victims, Floyd, Good and Pretti become dehumanised objects.

It’s not the violence, and the risk of violence itself, that worries me most about America. It’s the cult of guns, and the casual amorality with which enforcement and violence are addressed in Maga America. Matters of life and death, hope and despair on the streets and in homes, become cheap commodities.

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