When the news of the Dunblane massacre broke on my Roberts radio in 1996, I linked it to the Lockerbie disaster eight years earlier. Another name from my Scottish childhood suddenly on the world’s lips, more gray roads and green shores and pale crushed faces flashing into the eyes of the cameras, another flaming American object dropped from the sky. About the school shooting, maybe because of the Boom Town Rats’ He doesn’t like Mondaysthey were already in my mind as American disasters, perpetrated by people like the San Diego shooter, a nihilistic teenager who was given a semi-automatic rifle by her father for Christmas.
Very wrong, of course. The Dunblane perpetrator was soon identified as a 40-year-old man who had bought each of his four pistols legally and practiced with them at local ranges. Moreover, he would run his own kids’ clubs, work with the Boy Scouts and go in and out of school for 20 years with the unbridled ease of those times, the times when men exposing themselves in the park or sniffing you on buses were common, expected, avoided and unreported dangers, the times of rampant homophobia, the times of uncontrolled car starts. change. The author of Dunblane was a psychopath, but so was the usual: the perv town. He was one of us.
But the people – the single, unified, horrified audience of 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 membership in the gun club, writ large on the ears he wore in the school gym. This can be acted upon, changed. 1996 was a time when citizen action seemed possible, when the old order of Conservative government would change.
Dunblane wasn’t Lockerbie either, not a wee lang toon, but a town with an ancient cathedral, a substantial, well-connected place, a place with civic values. In fact it contained the homes of the Acting Scottish Secretary of State and his Labor shadow, who traveled immediately and together to the city. They were closely followed, in a similar display of decency and unity, by John Major and Tony Blair, a man ever sensitive to popular humour. A group of local women joined grieving parents to start the Snowdrop campaign, a citizens’ petition for a simple but absolute legal gun ban. In a stunning display of perseverance, they collected 700,000 individual signatures on paper and took them to boxes in London, it appeared in Newsnight and at the Labor Party conference and saw their bill passed as one of the first acts of a Labor government.
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The 16 children killed in Dunblane would be in their mid-thirties now, so the loss is not just theirs, but their children’s and their future. The impulse to tear down a school, meanwhile, to destroy, through envy and despair, the apparent happiness and safety of children, has multiplied in the United States until we cannot even remember 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 saw their moment, the killers who have come for our children in the decades since were armed with blades, not guns. In all the sorrow that is something to be thankful for.
(Further reading: Don’t let Britain fall)
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