#dunblane

[gnarkillluvr]

The Dunblane Massacre

The deadliest mass shooting in British history.

Trigger warnings; child murder, school shooting, suicide

Overview:

Date and Time: 13th of March, 1996 from 9:35am to 9:40am

Perpetrator:

Thomas Watt Hamilton

10th of May, 1952 - 13th of March, 1996

Born in Glasglow, Scotland

Weapons used:

9mm Browning HP Pistols x2

Smith and Wesson M19 .357 Magnum Revolver x2

[BOTH LEGALLY OWNED]

Attack Type:

School Shooting

Pedicide (Child murder)

Mass Murder

Murder-Suicide

Mass Shooting

Location:

Dunblane Primary School, Dunblane, County of Stirling, Scotland.

(A primary school holds children from four to six years old.)

Victims:

Victoria Elizabeth Clydesdale (5), Emma Elizabeth Crozier (5), Melissa Helen Curry (5), Charlotte Louise Dunn (5), Kevin Allen Hassle (5), Ross William Irvine (5), David Charles Kerr (5), Mhairi Isabel MacBeath (5), Gwen Mayor (45), Brett McKinnon (6), Abigail Joanne McLennan (5), Hannah Louise Scott (5), Emily Morton (5), Megan Turner (5), Sophie Jane Lockwood North (5), John Petrie (5), Joanna Caroline Ross (5).

Teacher Gwen Mayor and her class, 16 of who are listed as victims above.

Timeline:

8:15am

Thomas Hamilton was seen shaving ice off of his car at his house on Kent Road, Stirling. He left soon after and drove 5 miles to Dunblane. From Kent Road to Dunblane Primary School, the journey would take 16-18 minutes to drive, but Thomas Hamilton arrived at about 9:30am, which means he had 1hr15mins to reconsider, whilst on his way to the primary school.

Thomas Watt Hamilton, the shooter.

9:30am

Thomas Hamilton parked his car near a telephone pole and severed the phone line, cutting connections to several nearby houses. He could've done this so that there was no way civilians could raise alarms and call the police if gunshots were heard.

By this time, a class of 28/29 students along with Gwen Mayor; Teacher, Eileen Harrild; P.E Teacher, and Mary Blake; assistant teacher, were in the middle of a lesson.

Sophie North, a victim in the shooting, was having a PE lesson in the gymnasium.

9:30am-9:35am

The shooter headed towards the northwest side of the building to a door near the toilets and gymnasium. He entered and fired shots into the assembly hall stage and the girl's toilets.

Dunblane Primary School after the Massacre.

9:35am-9:38am

Thomas Hamilton entered the gymnasium and opened fire. Teacher Gwen Mayor was shot and killed immediately. PE Teacher Eileen Harrild was shot in the arms and chest trying to protect herself. She proceeded to stumble into an open-planned store cupboard, bringing four children and Mary Blake, the Teaching Assistant, who was shot in the head and both of her legs.

At the same time, Thomas Hamilton, moved to the east, firing six shots as he walked, Then firing eight shots at the opposite side of the gymnasium (west). Walking to the centre of the gym, he then callously fired 16 shots at the injured children he had earlier capacitated, at point-blank range. Potentially spotting an adult in the playground, he fired 24 shots in various directions (window next to the fire exit, southeast). Four more shots were then fired.

An adult and child potentially heard the loud bangs and screams, moving to check what was happening, causing the shooter to fire towards them. The child was injured by shattering glass.

Thomas Hamilton exited the gym through the fire exit, firing four shots into the library cloakroom, injuring member of staff Grace Tweddle, though not hitting any students.

Amy Hutchinson, a survivor, who was shot by Thomas Hamilton in the leg, was in the gymnasium.

9:38am-9:40am

Catherine Gordon, a teacher in the mobile classroom nearest the fire exit, saw Thomas Hamilton approaching and told the students inside to get on the ground mere seconds before he fired 9 shots inside, hitting school equipment, books and a chair a child was sitting in a few seconds before.

Thomas Hamilton then returned to the gymnasium, dropping one pistol and taking out his revolver placing the barrel at the back of his mouth, pointing it upwards and proceeding to pull the trigger, killing himself.

Dunblane Primary School after the shooting, possibly the assembly hall or the gymnasium.

9:41am

Assistant Headmistress Agnes Awlson alerted Headmaster Ronald Taylor, who called the police. Ronald said he "assumed the noises were from builders he hadn't been informed about".

Headmaster Ronald Taylor, who was the first to witness the aftermath, had to take control and identify the bodies.

9:43am

Ronald Taylor ran to the gym. Seeing what had happened, he told Deputy Headmistress Fiona Eadington to call the ambulance.

Dunblane Cathedral, where the memorial for the victims was taking place.

9:48am

Stirling Royal Infirmary was informed of a major incident having unfolded.

Isabel, Mhairi MacBeath's mother holding her picture. She had recently lost her husband to a stroke and was on her way to the memorial service when she got a call about the shooting. Her daughter was dead by nightfall.

9:57am

The first ambulance arrived.

Mothers comforting students after the massacre.

10:04am

A medical team from Dunblane Health Centre arrived. Both the Dunblane and the ambulance teams were involved in the initial resuscitation. Teams from Doune and Callender arrived shortly after.

Parents rushing to Dunblane Primary school after hearing about the shooting.

10:15am

Stirling Royale Infirmary medical team arrive on the scene.

Queen Elizabeth the 2nd and Anne, Princess Royale, placing flowers at the scene.

10:35am

Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary medical teams arrive.

Gwen Mayor, the 1st victim of the massacre. She was a primary school teacher.

11:10am

By this time, all injured had been taken to hospital.

Children outside Dunblane Primary School a day after the massacre.

Summary

743 rounds of ammo in total.

106 shots were fired.

105 by the pistol.

1 by the revolver.

32 gunshot wounds all between a three to four-minute time period.

16 were inside the gym.

Children with injuries were taken to either the District Royal Infirmary or the Royal Hospital For Sick Children in Glasglow.

One child died en route to the hospital.

The shooter, Thomas Hamilton, was wearing shooting earmuffs, showing inexperience, with his ears not yet used to the sound of gunfire.

Aftermath

Parents of the victims petitioning for new gun legislation, October 1996.

After the Massacre, a professional inquiry was held by William Cullen, Baron Cullen of Whitekirk, called The Cullen Reports. It focused on 3 significant events, Piper Alpha; an oil rig fire that killed 167 of the 229 people on board in 22 minutes, Ladbroke Grove; the deadliest train crash in British history and the massacre itself.

The public campaigned to ban handguns from being privately owned across Britain. The Snowdrop Petition was created to press forward the petition. It proved successful, helping to bring about new legislation, specifically two firearms acts. The acts prohibited the private ownership of most types of handguns in Britain. Licensed gun owners had to hand in their handguns in exchange for compensation.

[larimar]

jack.lowden

The boy fae Dunblane. I grew up watching your matches at Wimbledon on tv in the kitchen. Staying up late into the summer nights after school. Crumpling ma mum’s top from gripping onto her in suspense. Ma Dad doing nervous, muttering loops of the house before every break point. ‘Nut, he’s fucked it’. You echoing that through the tv, the mic picking up you calling yerself every name under the sun at the smallest mistake. And then that grit would kick in. That Perthshire built engine. And the hands on the boy! Those Maradona hands. The touch, the impossible lobs and the ‘get tae fuck see ye later’ angle bending passing shots. And then there was you. That self deprecation & sense of fairness you maintained alongside your unwavering, tetchy, Shankly-esque self belief made me proud of who we build at hame.

Beauty and iron.

But best of all, was watching ye grow from a bairn to man to a God on that grass.

M’ANDEHH! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @andymurray

[tweetingukpolitics]

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[theragingmoon]

dunblane cathedral ❄️

[househuntingscotland]

2 bedroom cottage for sale on Station Road, Dunblane

Asking price: £165,000

Sold price: £183,150

[international-photos]

United Kingdom photo gallery : London - Edinburgh - Belfast - Manchester - Glasgow - Liverpool - Glen Coe - Pitlochry - Fort Augustus - Inverness - Loch Lomond - Dunblane - Tomatin - Fort William

[notfleenz]

First and foremost, in the UK, our subset of millennials grew up with Section 28. Whatever views the adults in our lives actually had about lgbt+ people, a decently large proportion of the ones met outside families were legally not allowed to be in any sense positive, and in the long term i'm fairly sure this has fed into issues with internalised homophobia, and caused the closet position to be the default for a big chunk of our age group. given it was a Thatcher-era policy, that may have been the sole point. i have vivid memories of my school science teacher, who in hindsight was almost certainly neurodivergent himself, trying to deflect direct questions about homosexuality by musing on the tensile strength of the rectal epithelium to avoid having to outright either condemn or speak positively of it in front of pupils. this was in the final school term the relevant legislation applied in Scotland. it applied a few years longer in England.

The other big one would be that UK tabloids are... generally not nice about this kind of thing, historically. Taking this tack because of Dan's previous "I don't wanna be outed by The Sun" comment. Back in 2009 the Press Complaints Commission was run pretty much exclusively by newspaper editors and had some degree of notoriety for being ridiculously lenient on some offences. i can elaborate on that a bit if people want it, but given the deletion of report type sources over time and the removal of primary sources with changes in the regulatory regime, it's likely to be a bit of a slog to both write and read. Frankly this one probably won't be great on that score, either, but it's to give a sense of the social and cultural background against which Dan and Phil made some of their decisions.

i was into this area of interest at the time because i got pissed at a newspaper article on a relatively straightforward volcanic eruption (i can't even remember which one now, only that it was before eyjafjallajokull grounded flights) where the terminology indicated the journalist had clearly talked to someone who knew what they were talking about, but the way they had constructed it in the article made it equally clear they didn't. Frankly it wasn't the first or the worst thing, it's just the first one that managed to rile my autistic ass as a person with internet access.

Suffice it to say, before the Leveson Inquiry in 2012, we had a tabloid press that was cheerfully invasive in the lives and families of anyone even vaguely famous, vaguely (but aggressively heteronormatively) misogynistic (see all the Page 3 history and commentaries, all the shit the Daily Mail's photojournalism stories used to drag out, and for all i care probably still do), broadly racist (one of the PCC policies that caused regular complaint on the old Tabloidwatch blog was that formal complaints were only accepted if made by a named individual who had been specifically targeted, so there wasn't much recourse for generally maligning the dead, or targeting immigrants or other outgroups as a collective; even after regulation changed, the latter shit continued and escalated until the day Aylan Kurdi washed up on the shore and certain people had a sudden attack of conscience at - or possibly realised that their commercial interests would otherwise be hurt by - the image) and demonstrative of an interesting interplay of homophobia (any britons who see this remember the headlines referring to Derren Brown as a bender when he came out, and the associated articles? weird and occasionally overly prurient shit about Will Young and others? "There was nothing natural about Stephen Gately's death"?) and classism (a systemic result of the centralisation of UK-scale print media in London, the state of basically everything in the local economy of London, and the prevalence of unpaid internships as entry-level positions in the industry at the time; some Scottish papers are subsidiaries of the English nationals or otherwise had offices there too; some Irish and Welsh media are or were also subsidiaries but i'm not especially informed on those). *

Fun fact, this is also partially why English libel laws and cases can seem so out of whack to others; there are a lot of underlying assumptions about the motivations and means of the people making the disputed claim. "libel tourism" is a related emergent phenomenon.

The reason the Leveson Inquiry took place in 2012 is as a followup to the discovery that various publications were remotely accessing the voicemail inboxes of public figures to get gossip style article fodder or stand up or 'scoop' more serious ones, and the revelation that, for The News Of The World, "public figures" included the murder victim Milly Dowler. And their activities in her case interfered with the investigation by leading the police and her parents to believe she was still alive after her death, because there had been activity on her voicemails in that period. and the resulting massive public outrage - after all, anyone subjected to misfortune, without agency, even children, who the regulator had officially declared off-(poorly enforced)-limits, was now clearly treated as fair game - led to a mass boycott and campaign for advertiser boycotts, ultimately leading to the NOTW's closure in the summer of 2011.

for the purposes of this post, i need you to understand that this development was in no way obscure. probably few uk based non-geologists gave a flying fuck about errors in reports about popocatapetl or wherever the hell it was, but a murdered child being targeted, and speculative stories on the means, that shit was all over the news in all formats. the inquiry itself was pretty dry, so [long rant about celebrity culture and selective reporting redacted here], but in theory they'd have been capable of following it. it's also relevant that the post-Leveson regulatory regime is still a form of self-regulation where editors and representatives of proprietors are very well represented.

So, consider their perspective during the early days. they were not established to wider society yet. it's quite likely they had limited financial stability (and the more recent iteration of Dan's rationale for law school made it very clear that the independence that would afford was important to his sense of safety as a hypothetically out person in the future, and Phil has demonstrated caring about his serious concerns, if occasionally in unusual ways). by default, older media could be considered to some extent hostile to online media figures, because of the combination of "kids today" prejudice** and the emerging effects of social media and online ads on their bottom lines. metaphorically stick your neck out too far while having a recognised following on the internet and someone will start looking into your private life, and their means may be utterly shameless and remorseless, and there will be people prepared to mount widely-publicised personal attacks based on what they find. under anonymous bylines like "Daily Mail Reporter" or "Sun Showbiz", if the editors deem it lurid enough or the actual author is cowardly enough. that's without getting into things like the apparent ties between various papers and the tories during David Cameron's time in office, which became contentious on a few occasions around Leveson. also without getting into whether they'd each be at risk of personal harm if or when a story broke. i know that fear is likely to have been there to some extent, at least.

some things have changed in the intervening decade. a public figure being gay is no longer a point-and-stare case by default - in at least some fields. the publications calling homosexuals unnatural back then even employ some, and promote them as pundits, themselves now. i'm not fully convinced that this represents an overall improvement in our culture, as opposed to redirecting towards transphobia, sectarianism and ragebaiting, but it has eased some recognisable fears.

i can't fault Dan and Phil for having concerns in the context of that time, even from a position where the culture has become more permissive and the personal and professional stakes are so much lower.

---

*Possibly the most infamous example of the latter is the coverage of the Hillsborough disaster. In what we may now consider "copaganda", the police who were present at the stadium blamed the deaths entirely upon the behaviour of attendees and failures of other parties; they were thereafter found to have been grossly negligent in their conduct, and to have caused some proportion of the deaths. I don't even mean close to the time; the incident was in 1989, the coroners reports started coming out in '91, and the latest negligence charges i'm aware of came out in 2017. but the tabloid coverage, particularly by the Murdoch papers, and most especially The Sun, was consistently dismissive of, and occasionally viciously accusatory towards, the largely Northern, perceived working-class victims and survivors at every time they were referenced until police culpability was proven. In turn, many people in the northern regions of England have consistently boycotted The Sun since the incident, to the extent that retailers in those places don't even bother to stock it.

** On the Scottish side, the applicable Mail subsidiary attracted complaints (in 2006, iirc) for Facebook-stalking Dunblane survivors until they were all over-18 (because children rule), and then trying to stir up a scandal about them posting photos and videos of themselves going out and drinking alcohol. y'know, that thing that some traumatised people can pick up as a coping mechanism, as well as that teenagers can generally be expected to try out, and that they were all legally allowed to do at the time without having to be accused of "shaming" the memories of those who died. yes, this is a gratuitous sub-rant.

ngl i get annoyed so much with the amount of people who say phil went back in the closet for dan.. have you ever thought maybe he had to do it for himself?

not everything phil does is because of dan, he went back in to protect himself, like come on??

you guys know phil didn’t go on big brother cos he accidentally outed himself in the audition and didn’t want anyone to find out? that doesn’t sound to me like someone who was out outside of their private circle

how can he go back in the closet for some one when he was pretty clearly not really out of it in the first place??

[awakenlng369]

DUMBING DUNBLANE - TO PROTECT GUILTY POLITICIANS AND LAWYERS

What happened at Dunblane A 100 Year Ban on Documents protecting The Guilty Dunblane Whitewash The Public Inquiry into the Shootings at Dunblane Primary School What happened at Dunblane ON MARCH 13, 1996, sixteen children and their teacher were mercilessly shot dead in their school gym as they took part in a PE lesson: ON MARCH 13, 1996, sixteen children and their teacher were mercilessly…

[lady1505]

It is the 27th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre that tragically killed 16 innocent children and their teacher who tried to protect them. As this is in Scotland where I am from this tragedy is quite close to me and I just hope all the families and friends of these poor innocent people are doing well and I am so sorry for their loss on this terrible day.

But this absolutely horrific crime was the turning point for the UK and gun control and because of this horrendous shooting gun control was stricter and now little to no shootings happen.

Overall I just want to say RIP to the victims and thoughts are with family and friends

[mouth-almighty]

27 years ago today a man entered Dunblane Primary school in Scotland, armed with a pistol and a revolver. He proceeded to kill 16 children, aged 5 and 6 years old, and 1 teacher before turning a gun on himself. Today we remember the victims, and the heroism of their teacher.

These are their names: Victoria Elizabeth Clydesdale (age 5), Emma Elizabeth Crozier (age 5), Melissa Helen Currie (age 5), Charlotte Louise Dunn (age 5), Kevin Allan Hasell (age 5), Ross William Irvine (age 5), David Charles Kerr (age 5), Mhairi Isabel MacBeath (age 5), Gwen Mayor (age 45) (teacher), Brett McKinnon (age 6), Abigail Joanne McLennan (age 5), Emily Morton (age 5), Sophie Jane Lockwood North (age 5), John Petrie (age 5), Joanna Caroline Ross (age 5), Hannah Louise Scott (age 5), Megan Turner (age 5).

[vaulties]

i’m house-hunting currently and it’s like the wild west out there. everything is overpriced and falling apart. i finally found one that looked nice, roof intact, reasonably priced. then it turned out that the neighbour on one side has never replaced the (wooden, rotting) doors or window frames in the 60+ years he’s lived there and has at least six scrap cars lying in his garden. the neighbour on the other side has stolen half the driveway in building an illegal extension that is bigger than his house. it’s not even cheap enough to justify being sandwiched between two nutcases

[calamitys-child]

God its been almost 30 years since the Dunblane massacre and it still breaks my heart I cannot fathom any country's politics withstanding even one mass school shooting. Jesus christ. The class picture of all those weans absolutely breaks my heart and I can only hope that other places take the same lesson of Never Let This Happen Again.

[ur-mag]

Gun nut bought pistol, 100 bullets and searched Dunblane massacre & school holiday dates | In Trend Today

Gun nut bought pistol, 100 bullets and searched Dunblane massacre & school holiday dates Read Full Text or Full Article on MAG NEWS

[househuntingscotland]

2 bedroom house for sale on Backcroft, Dunblane

Asking price: £195,000

Sold price: £225,000