There's silly, there's crazy, and there's mass gun ownership

The never-ending grief
Mourning murdered kids after the latest US school shooting

There are moments that are permanently seared into your memory.

For me, one of them was hearing a radio interview, years ago, with Judy Murray, mother of the Scottish tennis star Andy Murray. It was during that interview that I learned that Andy had attended Dunblane Primary School as a child. Specifically, that he’d been in the school on the day in 1996 that Thomas Hamilton burst into it with a gun and killed 16 children and a teacher.

Judy Murray described the time she spent in a room at the school, waiting for information about whether her two sons had been shot, indeed whether either was still alive. Another mother was with her, and just as stressed by fear. Judy Murray eventually had good news, but the other mother had the worst a parent can receive.

It was an interview that made my blood run cold.

Let’s be clear. The British can be extraordinarily inept. Not to say self-destructive.

Britain currently has the only Prime Minister in its history to have been found guilty of a crime: he was fined for breaking the Covid lockdown rules that he was imposing on everyone else. What’s more, that hypocrisy seems to be reflected in the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police, which fined him only for one attendance at a lockdown-breaching event, though it has been confirmed that he attended others for which more junior people have been penalised. It’s galling to admit, but it appears that Britain’s premier police force is as guilty of double standards, and incompetence, as the Prime Minister.

The latest sorry step in this sorry saga is that Johnson has now amended the rules governing the behaviour of Ministers, so that if the current parliamentary investigation into his behaviour comes up with an unfavourable conclusion, he won’t have to resign. An offender changing the rules to duck punishment? Sadly, if you’re the Prime Minister, it seems you can.

What’s truly sad is that a huge minority of the British electorate simply wants to move on from all these shameful stories. As though, somehow, having a crook in your top job is just something you can complain about for a while but, if nothing changes, you should stop complaining once it gets boring.

Even more powerful testimony to the extraordinary mindlessness of many Brits is what’s happened with Brexit. The writer Anthony Horowitz recently told a literary festival that he is “still waiting to see the benefit” of Brexit. So am I. And I saw the other day that the Bank of England now calculates that Brexit is costing the country £440m a week. That’s a weekly cost. The leaders of the campaign to get Britain out of Europe promised us a saving of £350m a week.

Despite that, there’s no sign of any kind of apology from the campaigners who spun us that story. Nor is there much sign of many Brexiters ever admitting their error.

All this to show that Britain is fully capable of responding in a brainless way to events. In its reaction to the Dunblane school massacre, however, it didn’t. There it showed immense good sense and responsibility.

John Major and his wife pay their respects at Dunblane
But then he did more and brought in legislation against handguns

With across-the-board support, the government of the day moved quickly to ban ownership of high calibre handguns across Britain. More lethal guns were already illegal. A few months later, following a change in government, the ban was extended to all handguns.

The measure was truly draconian, a word I know is generally used pejoratively, but I mean it here as a positive. Draconian enough to give the American National Rifle Association apoplexy which, in my view, is just draconian enough. As the event has proved.

Guess how many school shootings Britain has suffered since Dunblane in 1996.

If you guessed zero, you’d be right.

Guess how many there have been in the United States since Sandy Hook in 2012.

If you said 948, you’d be right on the money.

So, here’s the thing. Gun control clearly works. It’s just like vaccination. It, too, clearly works. But there are people out there who deny both these obvious truths, despite mountains of evidence. Funnily enough, they’re often the same people. 

There is still gun crime in Britain, of course. But, according to the Washington Post, UK homicide by firearm so far this year is running at 0.23 cases per 100,000 people. The equivalent figure in the US is 12.21. And, let’s say it again, no school shootings since 1996.

I’m pretty certain that the NRA people don’t actually favour killing kids. After all, many gun fans are terribly keen on protecting unborn children. Presumably they’d also  like to do something for the ones that have been born. But by blocking the adoption in the US of the kind of measures Britain took in 1996, they’re ensuring kids will keep right on dying.

They’re always telling us that gun ownership makes you safer. But where do they think kids live in greater safety? In the US or the UK?

You have to be pretty dumb not to see the evidence. That leaves me wanting to adapt a fine old North Country saying: in my view, there’s none so daft as folk.