When the news about the massacre in Dunblane crackled through to me on my Roberts radio in 1996, I associated it with the disaster at Lockerbie eight years earlier. Another name from my Scottish childhood unexpectedly in the world’s mouth, more grey streets and green banks and pinched pale faces blinking in the eye of cameras, another blazing American object fallen from the sky. For school shootings, probably because of the Boomtown Rats’ Don’t Like Mondays, were already in my mind as American disasters, perpetrated by people like the San Diego shooter, a nihilistic teenager given a semi-automatic rifle by her father for Christmas.
Quite wrong, of course. The Dunblane perpetrator soon proved to be a 40-year-old who had acquired each one of his four handguns legally and practised with them in local ranges. More than that, he’d run his own children’s clubs, worked with the Scouts, and walked in and out of schools for decades with the blithe unchecked ease of those times, times when men exposing themselves by the park or feeling you up on buses were somewhat ordinary hazards, to be expected, avoided and not reported, times of rampant homophobia and scant information, times of scarce help, times that were only just starting to change. The Dunblane perpetrator was a psychopath but also that common thing: the town perv. He was one of ours.
But people – the single, unified, horrified audience of the Roberts radio and BBC news – could see that. They could also see with absolute clarity that the difference between him and the average dirty old man was his gun club membership, writ large by the earmuffs he wore into the school gym. That could be acted on, changed. The mid-Nineties was a time when civic action seemed possible, when the old order of Conservative government was about to shift.
Dunblane wasn’t Lockerbie, either, not a wee lang toon but a substantial, well-connected place, a place with civic values with an ancient cathedral. In fact it contained the houses of both the serving Scottish secretary of state and his Labour shadow, who travelled immediately and together to the town. They were closely followed, in a similar show of decency and unity, by John Major and Tony Blair, a man ever sensitive to the popular mood. A group of local women joined bereaved parents to begin the Snowdrop campaign, a civic petition for a simple but absolute legal ban on handguns. In a staggering display of perseverance, they gathered 700,000 individual signatures on paper and took them in boxes to London, appeared on Newsnight and at the Labour Party conference and saw their law passed as one of the first acts of a Labour government.
The 16 children killed in Dunblane would be in their mid-thirties now, so the loss is not just of them but of their children and their futures. The impulse to shoot down a school, meantime, to destroy, through envy and desperation, the happiness and apparent security of children, has multiplied in the United States until we cannot remember even the names of the places, let alone the victims. But not here. Because of the individual courage and collective action of the people of Dunblane, because they grasped their moment, the killers who have come for our children in the decades since were armed with blades, not guns. In all the grief that is something to be thankful for.
[Further reading: Don’t let Britain decline]
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