On March 13, 1996, a former Boy Scout leader walked into the gym of a primary school and fired at a group of children.
15 children and a teacher were dead in a matter of minutes. A child died from gunshot wounds. The attack ended with Thomas Hamilton shooting himself. All of Britain was plunged into mourning. The Queen knelt at the school. There were Teddy bears from all over the world.
Sandy Hook was more than a decade away. It would not happen for two decades. The shooting of 20 people, mostly children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was nearly 30 years away. The mass school shooting was a British horror.
A public inquiry was held eight days after the shooting by a tribunal headed by a senior Scottish judge. The entire proceeding was open to the public and recorded in full in shorthand.
He asked for answers to two questions in the report he submitted.
-What were the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the shootings at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996?
-What should I recommend with a view to safeguarding the public against the misuse of firearms and other dangers which the investigation brought to light?
There were four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition in Hamilton's possession. 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 888-276-5932 School shootings had become something schools prepared for with drills and plans before they were carried out by other students. When the principal heard loud bangs from another part of the school, he thought it was building work that he hadn't been told about. After a teacher burst into his office and told him what was happening, he ran to the gym, where he saw a scene of unimaginable carnage.
According to the report, the safety of the public could be better ensured by focusing efforts on the sale and availability of guns, rather than on the fitness of a potential buyer. Despite longstanding uneasiness over the shooter's behavior, laws intended to exclude potentially dangerous gun buyers would be unlikely to prevent a future shooting.
Despite the fact that there is room for improvement in the certification system I conclude that there are significant limitations in what can be done to exclude those who are unsuitable to have firearms and ammunition. There is no certain means of ruling out the onset of a mental illness of a type which gives rise to danger; or of identifying those whose personalities harbour dangerous propensities. On this ground alone it is insufficient protection for the public merely to tackle the individual rather than the gun.
If it was not practical to ban multishot handguns, the government should either implement a system to disabling handguns owned by individuals and keep them at sports clubs when they were not being used for sports purposes, or it should.
Britain might not have had the cult of the Second Amendment, but it did have a culture of guns.
After an earlier mass shooting in 1987, Britain's gun lobby took action to limit discussions of gun law changes. In December 1997 the House of Commons voted by a wide margin for Labour Party legislation to effectively ban all handguns, a law that went even further than the ban proposed by John Major before he lost power in elections that year.
More than 160,000 handguns would have to be handed in. They weren't happy. Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, spoke a very English version of the objection that the NRA has voiced many times.
If a cricketer decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, are you going to ban cricket bats? He apologized after the families of Dunblane expressed anger.
The shooting of 26 people, mostly first graders, at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut in 2012 was not a turning point for people numbed by mass shootings in the US over the past three decades. How could America allow such a thing to happen again? Less than 20% of people favor a handgun ban, and only a little over a third of people want gun laws to be stricter. Nothing has changed despite the terrible school shootings.
In Texas, where an 18-year-old man carried out the 27th school shooting this year in the US, gun laws have been relaxed in recent years.
It is possible that Britain could see such rampages again. The fact that there was only one mass shooting since 2010 suggests that the legislation had its intended effect. That is a credit to the inquiry and to the lawmakers who were persuaded by the grassroots campaigning of the parents of the victims. The parents whose lives were changed forever will always remember that day. Unlike the parents of other mass murderers, the Dunblane parents have not seen their numbers increase in the US over the years. Their experience and that of their children has not been suffered by other parents in the UK.
I was in London at the time the Dunblane inquiry took place, and it stood out among other memories that typified the cultural moment Britain was living through that summer: orange marches in Northern Ireland, and the newspaper column, not the book or movie. When there is a school shooting in the US, I think back to the summer of 1996, when we were shocked that such a thing could happen. The details of the shooting may be very vague for young people in Britain. The only thing they know for certain is that Andy Murray was at the school at the time of the shooting.
Their forgetfulness is not a shame. It is a triumph for a country that understood immediately that a society that allows children to be shot in its schools is a society that is failing. Britain didn't just pay lip service to the idea that life matters. It tried to make it happen.
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