LAST Friday, the people of Dunblane marked the 30th anniversary of the massacre at the primary school. Many of our readers will remember the horror as the news broke. The fact that children as young as five and six had been so brutally gunned down in their school gym, moments after practising Easter hymns in assembly, was (and remains) profoundly distressing. Sixteen children and their teacher died that day, and another 13 children and three teachers were injured. The news was all the more shocking as the UK had never before witnessed a mass gun attack in a school. The nearest equivalent had been the shooting of 31 people — 16 of whom died — in the Berkshire town of Hungerford in 1987.
The Dunblane attack was all over in just three or four minutes. Thomas Hamilton entered the gym with 743 rounds of ammunition and opened fire indiscriminately. He went into a second classroom, fired more shots, and then returned to the gym to take his own life. The consequences for the bereaved families and survivors were anything but over: the terrible events of that day inflicted a life sentence on them. After Hungerford, Parliament had introduced tighter restrictions on gun ownership. People, such as farmers, who wanted to own a shotgun had been told that their weapons would need to be registered and kept under lock and key. Crucially, however, the purchase or possession of a handgun remained legal.
Dunblane represented the end of innocence about gun ownership in the UK. Hamilton had licences for six guns — and nobody had ever asked him why he needed so many firearms. The view in Dunblane was that, if only sufficient measures had been taken after Hungerford, the massacre could have been prevented. A group of tenacious local people set up the Snowdrop Campaign, determined to see greater gun controls introduced, in spite of considerable opposition from the gun lobby. The Cullen report, published later the same year, recommended an outright ban on the private ownership of handguns, but it took until the following year — and the election of a new government — to make this happen.
The ban represented a triumph for the campaign, but, as one of the bereaved parents told a recent Channel 4 documentary, “It’s hard to think of anything in terms of winning and losing when you’ve lost your only child.” Others spoke of the lives — unknown and uncounted — saved through the change in legislation. Any doubt about its significance can be dispelled by a look across the Atlantic. In the past 25 years, there have been a truly astonishing 642 school shootings in the United States, resulting in the deaths of 498 people and the injuring of another 953. Sixteen of those events are classified as “mass murders”, in that more than four people (not including the shooter) lost their lives. There has not been another school shooting in the UK since Dunblane. We owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to those who used their appalling experience of loss to create a lasting legacy.
