Looking Back at the Atrocity of Thomas Hamilton Who Killed 16 Innocent Children, One Teacher and Then Himself in 1996! We Must Never Forget…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

It was the 13th of March 1996. It was crisp and frosty in the morning; the type of morning when you had to scrape the ice from your car windscreen. By around 9.30am, a 43-year-old man had driven 5 miles from his home to the Primary School. Parking his van next to a telegraph pole, he cut the cables serving the phone lines to the school, walked across the car park and entered the school.

He headed towards the gymnasium. In the gymnasium, there was one class. That was twenty-eight 5 and 6 year olds, and three adult members of staff.

Minutes later, Thomas Hamilton had shot sixteen children dead, one teacher and then turned the gun on himself.

He had over 700 rounds of ammunition and four legally held handguns when he entered the school.

I know where I was when I heard the news of this atrocity. It is hard not to remember though it was 25 years ago.

This was a tragedy like no other and it left an indelible effect on all of us.

Joe Biden over the last few weeks has reignited the debate on gun ownership and restrictions upon it. From over here every time there is a mass shooting at any educational facility in the US, I am afraid that we all shake our heads.

We believe that your gun laws make sense only for the Wild West and a mockery of civilized society.

Twenty-five years ago, not long after the massacre, it took little time before the vast majority of the people in the UK came down on the side of removing guns from the hands of people legally qualified to hold them but with no fit purpose. In the UK, because of this massacre, massive restrictions on handgun ownership were introduced. The initial change by the Conservative Government was tightened by the following Labor one.

There was very little dissent. Why?

Because the lives of five year olds outweigh the right to bear arms. The right to life is much more important than the right to walk round with the means to end it.

Since then, there have been no more school shootings, anywhere in the UK. None. Not one. Nada. Nothing.

I recognize that this feels a tad simplistic, given the way in which, in the US, the right to bear arms is rooted in the constitution and the memories of the forefathers of your country. I suppose when you are suppressing the rights of Native Americans whilst colonizing their country it makes you a little nervous a century or so later when they and the descendants of them there pesky slaves start to feel a little restless about it all.

But like segregation, the liberation of slaves and everything else that was wrong about the beginning, having the maturity to look at long held beliefs and challenge them is a sign of a maturing democracy and not of an infantile one that refuses to give up their favorite toy when asked to.

When we hear of the power of the gun lobby, after the loss of innocence, we worry about your state of mind. It suggests that for mothers and sons, daughters and aunts, grandfathers and cousins and family relationships, when asked if you would do anything to keep them safe, there is an American voice that starts with: “Well, apart from…”

Who knows what we lost that morning when those children were killed? It is suggested that had Hamilton turned in the opposite direction and away from the gymnasium to with his evil intent he would have found Jamie and Andy Murray and we might have lost two of our brightest tennis stars. It is an indication not of the luck they enjoyed but of the magnitude of what may have been taken from us. Those 16 young children had the potential to have been more than a coldhearted statistic. In fact, we made sure they were far more than that. We took away from people the very weapons that could repeat that mistake in their honor.

Would we do anything to keep other children safe? We did. Over to you…

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(kailyard n. a genre of sentimental Scottish literature turned into effective invective comment from one Donald worth reading…)

[si-contact-form form=’2′]