They were shocked, quiet. It was before mobile phones. Nobody knew anything. The families were moved to a classroom and told to wait, the year-old said, packed in so tightly that she was sharing a chair with a woman she had been to school with. Eventually a policeman came and asked the parents of one particular class to leave with him. She lost her daughter. Murray said she couldn't remember the moment when she saw her sons again, but "on the drive home I knew I had to stop the car to tell Jamie and Andy what had happened — they didn't know, and it was clearly going to be everywhere.
It was an impossible thing to explain to children. I'm very glad they were too young to understand the enormity of it. Both Andy and Jamie, who won the Wimbledon mixed doubles championship in , had known Hamilton as children.
He was a bit of an odd bod, but I wouldn't have thought he was dangerous. So he'd been in my car. Comparatively, the U. Whereas in Great Britain, they actually were able to get stuff done. He was coming toward me, so I just dived under my desk when he turned and fired at us.
Then there was a few seconds of a pause and he started again. Though authorities never outlined a definitive motive for the attack, the Scottish Herald reported that the gunman had referenced Dunblane Primary School in a letter seeking to clear his name. Around a. After shooting at students and staff in the hallway, a nearby classroom where Hopper was sitting and the library cloakroom, he returned to the gym and turned the gun on himself.
In just three to four minutes, the gunman had fired more than times, striking 32 people and killing 17 , himself included. Another injured child died of their wounds en route to the hospital, bringing the final death toll to But once he was ready, he found himself discouraged from speaking out about the broader issues underlying the shooting.
After the attack, North made a career change, leaving academia to partner with lawyers, scholars and other bereaved parents in launching the U.
Around the same time, a parallel movement spearheaded by a group of Dunblane mothers prepared a petition to ban all handguns in the U. Dubbed the Snowdrop Campaign in honor of the only flower in bloom on the day of the massacre, the call to action garnered , signatures in just ten weeks and more than one million by the time it reached Parliament in the summer of Squires says that the British gun lobby and shooting industry acted far faster—and more effectively—in the aftermath of the Hungerford massacre.
Under immense pressure from an increasingly pro—gun control public, Conservative Prime Minister John Major introduced the Firearms Amendment Act , which banned high-caliber handguns like those used by the Dunblane shooter but allowed. Whereas once the field was dominated by often narrowly conceived American studies, a broad new emerging agenda is now in evidence. A conference hosted by the University of Arizona in held, ironically, only a week after the Las Vegas shooting which left 61 people dead took this new agenda forwards.
Likewise, the connections between an informed research community and political support for sensible gun law reform might also begin to contest the hegemony of the gun rights lobby in the US — meaning the National Rifle Association.
The dangers of weapon proliferation, firearm misuse and the normalisation of gun ownership in many parts of the world suggest there is little time to lose.
Almost three-quarters of a million people die directly or indirectly as a result of gun violence each year. There is still much ground to catch up on in stemming the tide of firearms, even in the safest societies.
Terrible as it was, the awful shooting at Dunblane 25 years ago was a real wake-up call. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth.
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