An Anniversary Never to be Forgotten

Regular readers will know that I like anniversaries. Especially those that mark something significant, something that changed either this country or the wider world.

At first glance, the anniversary that falls this week isn't one of these. Instead, it appears to be one of such an appalling nature that it would be better to forget it.

On March 13th 1996, sixteen Scottish primary school children and their teacher were shot dead during a PE lesson in the school gym. After opening fire, the gunman turned the gun on himself. With the exception of one six year old, and their teacher, all those children were five. They were the same age as me. The headteacher, Ron Taylor, summed it up. Evil had visited the town of Dunblane.

The motive has never really been properly established. There had been rumours about the gunman for years; he had been expelled from the Scout Association, and various levels of officialdom were uneasy about the youth clubs he used to run. But there were no charges ever brought, and he legally owned the handguns he used to commit mass slaughter on that March morning.

It would be easy to pass off the actions of Thomas Hamilton as that of a deranged madman, which cannot be explained. A tragedy, yes. But an isolated one. Yet it was not an isolated event. The effects of the Dunblane shooting live with us today.

A campaign was quickly launched to ban all handguns, and in 1997 Parliament did just that. The ownership of handguns in Mainland Britain has been illegal ever since. There were howls of protest from thousands of gun owners, all of whom enjoyed a perfectly legitimate sport. But public pressure was too much, and all of those weapons had to be handed in to the police and melted down. The UK Olympic pistol shooting team have to train abroad. The very competition in which they won a gold medal in 2012 was only held with special permission from the Home Secretary.

But the strangling of a sport has been a small price to pay for the benefits. Since 1996, not a single British school child has died in school because of a shooting. The UK has one of the lowest rates of gun crime in the Western World. In the USA, a quick glance at Wikipedia says that number is well over 250, and rising. The NRA's much vaunted 'good guy with a gun' has failed to stem the tide of killings. And last year we were reminded of the dangers of guns in terrible scenes on the streets of Paris.

So, remember the children whose PE lesson was interrupted on that horrific morning, twenty years ago. The senseless slaughter of the innocents led directly to a safer Britain. And for the terrible price it took to achieve that, they deserve to be remembered.