Thirty years after the Dunblane school massacre, Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander has said the tragedy “haunts many of us still to this day”.
On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 children and their teacher at Dunblane Primary School in central Scotland, before shooting himself.
Mr Alexander said he has “deep admiration” for parents affected by the tragedy who campaigned for tighter gun controls.
A further 15 people, most of them children, were wounded in what remains Britain’s deadliest mass shooting.
Mr Alexander said those who remember that day “look back with horror at what unfolded”, recalling images “of parents running to the school gate, the horror of what then emerged”.
It was, he said “unprecedented and haunts many of us still to this day”.
Amid widespread outrage, a consensus that a ban on handguns was needed offered “one small glimmer of light in the enveloping darkness”, Mr Douglas said.
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In 1997, those weapons were outlawed by John Major’s Conservative government and the ban was extended to include all cartridge ammunition handguns by Tony Blair’s Labour government later that year.
Mr Alexander said those who remember the horror of that day share the commitment of those parents and of wider Scottish society to get policy right on gun controls.
“I look back with a sense of deep admiration for the campaigning work of the affected parents, a deep sense of sorrow, both for the children who were lost, the teacher who was lost, and the parents who suffered an unimaginable loss on that day,” Mr Douglas said.
“I also feel a shared determination to honour their memory by continuing to uphold those tight gun laws which have been so critical to Scotland’s safety in the last 30 years.”
