The
Shootings at Dunblane Primary School on 13 March 1996
The Public Inquiry and The Government Response
Thomas Hamilton entered the school, shot Mrs Gwen Mayor and
16 members of her Primary 1/13 class and inflicted gunshot wounds
on 10 other pupils and three other members of the teaching staff.
.. Thomas Hamilton fired 105 rounds with a 9 mm Browning
self-loading pistol over a space of about 3-4 minutes before
committing suicide with one shot from a .357 Smith & Wesson
revolver.
CRIMINAL
STATISTICS England and Wales 1990-2000
Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of
State
for the Home Department by Command of
Her Majesty
December 2000
Search for Official Documents of The Stationary Office
Two line from the Table 2:
40 -The number of people (including some adults) that
were shot and killed in school during the academic year, 1997-98.
********
3,024 -The number of children who die from gunfire every
year.
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Million
Mom March - Facts
Fiream-related deaths in different coutries (Int.J.Epid.1998)
By MARTIN KETTLE
WASHINGTON
Wednesday 13 September 2000
The belief of many Americans that gun
ownership has been central to their way
of life since colonial days is a 20th
century invention, says a book published
in the US this week.
There are estimated to be more than 250
million firearms in private hands and
every year five million new guns are
bought. More than 16,000 people are shot
dead each year on average.
Those who oppose tough laws restricting
firearms argue that access to such
weapons is part of America's gun-toting
militia history before, during and after the
independence revolution that began in
1775.
Not so, says Michael Bellesiles of Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, in a book
which, according to a New York Times
review, "deflates the myth of the
self-reliant and self-armed virtuous
yeoman of the revolutionary militias".
Professor Bellesiles says the fact that the
modern US has more gun shops than
schools would have shocked the early
frontiersmen.
The National Rifle Association and other
pro-gun lobbies often evoke a picture of
the 18th century pioneer armed and ready
to kill and standing shoulder to shoulder
with his equally armed neighbors against
oppressive government - British or
American - in defence of a free way of
life.
Professor Bellesiles says this image is
almost wholly false. Most Americans in
the time of George Washington and the
"founding fathers" were growers and
traders, not hunters, he says.
His book, Arming America: the Origins of
a National Gun Culture, says only 14 per
cent of households in northern New
England and Pennsylvania had firearms
in the years 1765 to 1790 - years typically
thought of as the heyday of gun
ownership and use.
Perhaps because they were unfamiliar
and unpractised with the firearms of the
day, early Americans were not very skilled
with them.
Professor Bellesiles points to the
encounter that set off the revolutionary
war in earnest in April 1775 near Boston.
Military accounts speak of British troops
withdrawing through a 25-kilometre
gauntlet of "incessant firing". Yet, the
book says, 3763 armed Americans hiding
along this corridor managed to hit only
273 of the withdrawing British soldiers.
These were the years in which the
founders of the US wrote the second
amendment to the constitution, on which
the legal claims of today's gun culture
rest. The amendment, adopted in 1791,
says: "A well regulated militia being
necessary to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed."
"America's gun culture is an invented
tradition," Professor Bellesiles writes. "It
was not present at the nation's creation,
whenever we fix that point."
Individual ownership of guns really
became possible, he argues, only when
Samuel Colt began to perfect the pistol in
the 1830s. But the civil war of 1861-65
was "the moment when a large proportion
of the country tried to replace elections
with gunfire".
- GUARDIAN
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