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A woman and a policeman look at floral tributes to the 16 children and their teacher who died at Dunblane in March 1996.
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CNN
Shortly after 9 a.m. on March 13, 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old former Scout leader, burst into the gymnasium of a primary school in the tranquil Scottish town of Dunblane. Within minutes 15 children aged five and six had died in a hail of bullets. One died later in hospital. Their teacher, Gwen Mayor, a 44-year-old mother of two, died in the attack, reportedly while trying to shield her pupils. Two other teachers were also seriously injured while heroically trying to protect children. Hamilton turned one of his four handguns on himself and was found dead at the scene.
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Many local people said Hamilton was an oddball -- a loner obsessed with guns and young boys, someone who didn't fit into society. He was reported to have held a grudge against the Scouting movement and his local community after police questioned him about inappropriate behavior to boys in his care. Raymond Reid, secretary of a local shooting club that rejected Hamilton for membership, described him as "sleazy."
The massacre, one of the worst incidents of gun violence in mainland Britain, had a massive impact in Scotland, the rest of the UK and around the world. "This is a slaughter of the innocents, unlike anything we have ever seen in Scotland, and I think Scotland is going to have to come to terms with it," said Scottish MP Helen Liddell at the time.
After the massacre, appalled residents of Dunblane and bereaved relatives demanded to know how a person like Hamilton could be allowed to own guns. A highly successful public campaign in the months after Dunblane against gun ownership culminated in a petition being handed to the government with almost 750,000 signatures, according to British media reports. In response, then Conservative Prime Minister John Major set up a public inquiry to look into gun laws and assess ways to better protect the public.
Within a year and a half of the Dunblane massacre, UK lawmakers had passed a ban on the private ownership of all handguns in mainland Britain, giving the country some of the toughest anti-gun legislation in the world. After both shootings there were firearm amnesties across the UK, resulting in the surrender of thousands of firearms and rounds of ammunition.
Britain has never had a "gun culture" like that of the United States, but there were about 200,000 legally-registered handguns in Britain before the ban, most owned by sports shooters. All small-bore pistols, including the .22 caliber, were included in the ban, along with rifles used by target shooters. Penalties for anyone found in possession of illegal firearms range from heavy fines to prison terms of up to 10 years.
"It was one of the most shocking things that has ever happened in this country and it united the country in a feeling that we had to do something," Gill Marshall Andrews, of the Gun Control Network, told CNN. "And I don't think that it would have been possible to make the kind of progress that we have made without that tragedy."
The public generally supported the ban, with most saying they saw no need for guns. However, others complained bitterly that the ban deprived legitimate sports shooters of their hobby and demonized them.
NY REV OF BKS Garry Wills 12/17/12
MOLOCH
What happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture. Ancient Romans justified the destruction of Carthage by noting that children were sacrificed to Moloch there. Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with bloodRead more at NY REV OF BKS
Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)
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NY TIMES CHARLES BLOW
An analysis published earlier this year by Mother Jones of the 61 mass shootings in America over the last 30 years found that: “Of the 139 guns possessed by the killers, more than three-quarters were obtained legally.”
This comes after Jacob Roberts, a 22-year-old man, armed with a semiautomatic AR-15, carrying extra magazines and wearing a hockey mask walked into a shopping mall in Oregon filled with 10,000 people and began shooting. He killed two people, and then took his own life.
How many more deaths and mass shootings will it take for Washington to begin to lead the country in a deeper conversation about sensible gun controls? What will it take for our politicians to take firm and principled positions on gun policies and stand up to the gun lobby in this country? Surely this is a moment that calls all of us to reckoning.
According to the Web site ThinkProgress, Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, wasted no time trying to pin Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates. ThinkProgress quoted a statement of his that read, in part: “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”
A gunman opened fire at a Connecticut elementary school Friday killing 26 people, most of them children. The tragedy is the sixth mass shooting in the United States this year, according to data from Mother Jones.
In the last 30 years, there have been 61 shootings across the country in which at least four people have been killed. Eleven of those incidents, according to Mother Jones, took place at schools.
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The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence provided The Huffington Post with data on where mass shootings have occurred in the U.S. since 2005.
Click on the interactive map below to see the location of the shootings, as well as more information about each of the incidents.
LOOK: HUFFINGTON POST
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Jill Lepore's thorough look at the evolution of U.S. gun laws — from the Second Amendment, to the 1968 Gun Control Act, to the N.R.A.'s rise to political prominence — is an excellent primer for the modern day gun debate. Contributed by @Corinneavital
THE NEW YORKER Battleground America 4/23/12
Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore#ixzz2FYUgexz8