Originally published 2022-06-07.
When nineteen children and two teachers were shot dead at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on 24 May 2022, people on both sides of the Atlantic began sharing an open letter that was four years old. It had been written by families of the children and teacher killed at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996, and it was addressed to the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after the shooting there in February 2018. Its message was simple: Britain changed its gun laws after a school massacre, and it has not had another one.
Photo: Dave Coustick/Wikimedia Commons, @GalwayGirl2505/Twitter
What happened at Dunblane in 1996
On the morning of 13 March 1996, a 43-year-old local man, Thomas Hamilton, walked into the gym of Dunblane Primary School near Stirling while a class of five- and six-year-olds was having a PE lesson. He killed sixteen children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, wounded fifteen other people and then shot himself. It is still the deadliest mass shooting in British history.
Two details shaped everything that followed. Hamilton was carrying four handguns, two Browning 9mm pistols and two Smith & Wesson revolvers, and he held all of them legally under a firearms certificate. And concerns about his behaviour around boys' clubs he ran had been raised with the authorities before, yet his licence had been renewed. Among the pupils in the school that day were the future tennis champions Andy and Jamie Murray; Andy has said he was too young at the time to understand what was happening.
How Britain changed its gun laws
A public inquiry led by Lord Cullen reported in October 1996. It recommended tighter controls on handguns and better vetting of adults working with children, and it considered, without demanding, an outright ban. Bereaved parents and local residents went further. Their Snowdrop Petition, named after the only flower in bloom in March, gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for private handgun ownership to end, and a group of campaigners set up the Gun Control Network.
Parliament acted in two steps. John Major's Conservative government passed the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997, which banned most cartridge handguns in England, Scotland and Wales but exempted small .22 rimfire pistols. After Labour won the general election that May, Tony Blair's government passed a second Act the same year that removed the .22 exemption too. Licensed owners were compensated through a buyback scheme, and around 160,000 handguns were reportedly surrendered. Northern Ireland, which has its own firearms law, was not covered.
This was not Britain's first post-massacre reform. After the Hungerford shooting in 1987, in which sixteen people were killed, the government had already banned most semi-automatic and pump-action rifles.
The letter to Parkland students
On 14 February 2018 a former student killed seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Within days, surviving pupils were on television and on stage demanding stricter gun laws, and they announced a national protest, the March for Our Lives, for 24 March.
The Dunblane families wrote to them on 13 March 2018, the 22nd anniversary of their own loss. The letter described who they were: parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins and spouses of the dead, plus five people who had survived the attack themselves. It explained that the gunman had owned his weapons legally, that the families had pressed MPs to put public safety ahead of the shooting lobby, and that most politicians had listened. Handguns were banned, they wrote, and gun violence in Britain fell to among the lowest levels in the world.
The heart of the letter was encouragement. "We want you to know that change can happen," the families wrote. They warned the teenagers that people would try to distract, split and intimidate them, urged them to keep telling the story of what happened at their school, and promised to light seventeen candles for Parkland alongside their own seventeen for Dunblane. The closing line, "It can be done. #NeverAgain," borrowed the hashtag the Parkland students had made their own.
Why it spread again after Uvalde
The Uvalde attack was carried out by an 18-year-old who had bought two AR-style rifles legally shortly after his birthday. Officers waited more than an hour before entering the classroom where he had barricaded himself, a failure later examined in state and federal reports. Coming ten days after a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, it pushed the gun debate back to the centre of American politics.
Social media users, including the account credited above, reposted the Dunblane letter because it offered something rare in that debate: a concrete example of a country that responded to a school shooting with a law, and a long record afterwards. In the decades since 1996, Britain has not had another school massacre. American figures look very different; The Washington Post's database, which counts gunfire on school grounds during school hours, recorded 42 such incidents in 2021 alone (source).
What the comparison shows, and what it does not
Gun-control advocates point to Dunblane as proof that legislation works. The evidence is strong on one point: since the handgun ban, firearm homicide in England and Wales has stayed very low, and a BBC comparison cited by Upworthy found that guns were involved in 4% of homicides there in 2019 against 73% in the United States.
The comparison is not perfect, and it helps to say so plainly. Britain had far fewer guns in private hands before 1996 than the United States has today, it has no constitutional right to bear arms, and its ban affected tens of thousands of owners rather than tens of millions. Mass shootings have not disappeared entirely either: a taxi driver killed twelve people in Cumbria in 2010, and a gunman killed five in Plymouth in 2021, both using legally held shotguns or rifles. Those cases led to further scrutiny of licensing rather than to claims that the earlier reforms had failed.
What the Dunblane story does show is that public pressure from bereaved families, sustained over months, can move a reluctant government. Even the Conservative ministers who first resisted a total ban ended up passing most of it.
What the United States did next
After Uvalde, President Joe Biden called for a renewed ban on assault weapons, which most analysts expected to fail, and it did. Instead, a bipartisan group of senators negotiated a narrower package. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed the Senate 65 to 33 on 23 June 2022, with fifteen Republican votes, cleared the House the next day and was signed by Biden on 25 June.
The law expanded background checks for buyers under 21 to include juvenile records, offered states funding for crisis-intervention programmes such as red-flag laws, made straw purchasing and gun trafficking federal crimes, closed part of the so-called boyfriend loophole for people convicted of domestic violence against a dating partner, and put money into school mental-health services. It did not ban any type of rifle, limit magazine sizes or raise the minimum purchase age for semi-automatic weapons. It was the most significant federal gun legislation in nearly three decades, but it fell far short of what the Dunblane families achieved in Britain.
Sources: Upworthy: the Dunblane letter and UK gun reform; Wikipedia: Dunblane massacre; Wikipedia: Robb Elementary School shooting; Wikipedia: Bipartisan Safer Communities Act; NPR: Biden signs gun safety law; The Washington Post school shootings database. Photo: Dave Coustick/Wikimedia Commons.
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