Britain - lone gun killers

On August 20, 1987, I was in Venezuela. I picked up a copy of USA Today and was greeted by a headline that stunned me:“Gunman kills 16 in quiet English town.” I'd never heard of anything like this in Britain. Michael Ryan, a 27 year old unemployed labourer, had run amuck in Hungerford, Berkshire armed with three guns, shooting dead his mother and 15 other people before killing himself.

Then, nine years later, another loner - unemployed former shopkeeper, Thomas Hamilton, aged 43, marched into a school in Dunblane, Scotland, and shot dead 16 children and a teacher before turning one of his two revolvers on himself. The tennis star Andy Murray was a pupil in the school at the time.

Yesterday, it was the turn of the Lake District. A 52 year old taxi driver, Derrick Bird, left his home in the village of Rowrah, and began by shooting dead his twin brother and the family’s solicitor. There are reports of a dispute over a will.

Then Bird travelled seven miles to Whitehaven and killed a fellow taxi driver. His other nine victims appear to have been chosen at random. After murdering them, he shot himself. People are usually most afraid of crime in our great cities. Well, Hungerford has a population of fewer than 6,000; Dunblane just less than 8,000, and Rowrah a few hundred (Whitehaven is about 25,000). (See also my blogs of March 12 and April 4, 2009)

Massacres by lone gunmen + Cardiff air crash

Two massacres by lone gunmen in the space of a day. A small town in Germany named Winnenden was the scene of one of them. Seventeen year old Tim Kretschmer walked into the secondary school he used to attend dressed in combat gear, and started spraying bullets around. He killed 8 girls, one boy and three women teachers. Then he left the school and shot three more people, before killing himself.

Earlier a 28 year old American shot dead his mother and burned down the house they had lived in in Alabama, and then went on a killing spree that left another 9 dead before he too shot himself.

We are used to hearing about mass shootings in the USA. The worst happened at Viginia Tech in Blacksburg on April 16, 2007 when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 teachers and students before committing suicide. As usually happens in America, the massacre was followed by a great deal of hand-wringing then a bit of minor tinkering with the gun laws.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced the Winnenden shootings “incomprehensible.” Perhaps, but not unique. In April 2002, a 19 year old student who had been expelled from a school in the German city of Erfurt returned to kill 13 teachers, two students and a police officer before killing himself.

In Britain, we had the Hungerford massacre of 1987 in which Michael Ryan murdered 16 people, before killing himself. Then nine years later, Thomas Hamilton killed 16 small children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School before turning one of his guns on himself. The tennis star Andy Murray, then aged 8, was one of the survivors. Both of these events were followed by severe tightenings of Britain’s gun laws.

On this day...59 years ago what was then the world’s worst civil aviation disaster happened close to the village of Sigingstone in South Wales. Eighty people were killed on a charter flight bringing home Welsh rugby fans from an international against Ireland. The full story is in A Disastrous History of Britain.