Member-only story
Featured
Fuck Guns and Fuck You if You Think Otherwise
Now it’s children killing children
Yesterday, the BBC reported that a sixteen-year-old killed three children and a teacher in a shooting at an Oregon primary school before an armed passerby gunned him down.
If the details are confirmed, another community has been plunged into the kind of grief that no parent should ever have to endure. And once again, I find myself asking how something so horrific has become so depressingly familiar.
There are no words to make this better.
I’m Scottish. I’m a retired police officer. I can tell you how to make this less likely to happen again, and it’s not through thoughts and prayers. It’s from experience.
On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane Primary School in Stirlingshire carrying four handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He opened fire on a class of five- and six-year-olds. Among the pupils that morning were two brothers who would later become world-famous tennis players, Andy and Jamie Murray. It could easily have been them.
Hamilton killed sixteen children and their teacher before putting the gun to his own head. It was the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
