Dunblane was a tragedy of inconceivable proportions for the parents of the 15 young children shot down with their teacher in the local primary school by a maniac. It sent shock waves through a society that had failed to apply the lessons of a similar outrage at Hungerford eight years earlier. It also confronted Mr Major's government with a political decision that, along with so many other causes of division in the Tory party, cannot have been welcome as the general election drawl closer.
In the event, he has shown some courage in going" further than the recommendations of the Cullen report on the tragedy by deciding that a line must be drawn under the archaic and dangerous practice of allowing people access to hand guns for sporting purposes. In Britain, the gun lobby is not as powerful as it is in the United States, but it is vocal and insistent, using arguments calculated to appeal to conservative backbenchers based on freedom of action. The problem, 59 the slogan goes, is not with guns but with a minority of people who use them. And consequently, any new restriction should be confined to more stringent yetting of applicants for gun licences.
That would be all very well except that the perpetrators of both the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres, Thomas Hamilton and Michael Ryan, were notoriously fond of guns Ryan had a large collection and yet they managed to outwit the system before going on the rampage. It is not possible to predict infallibly who is likely to have the extraordinary impulse to go out one day and murder as many fellow human beings as he can.
There is also the worrying probability that the desire to do so can grow with the use of guns for target practice. Advocates of shooting, who claim that theirs is a peaceful and normal sport, find it difficult to explain why, if that is the case, targets so often take the form of outline human figures.
Does the sport sublimate the killer instinct or encourage it? Certainly in some cases it encourages it. The British government's willingness to grasp 80 per cent of the nettle by outlawing all but single shot target pistols means that 160,000 handguns will be taken out of use. There is no logical reason why the remaining 40,000 should not also be withdrawn, as the Labour Party urges in its counter proposals instead, under the draft legislation, they are to be allowed, subject to being kept under lock and key in gun clubs. No doubt some Conservative MPs will accept this as a compromise, but it leaves a dangerous loop hole which, have pointed out as some of the anti gun campaigns could result in another Dunblane.
In this State, handguns are illegal, which has not eliminated the possibility of mass murder, as the Brendan O'Donnell case showed. Three people lost their lives in that massacre, and at least two others were lucky to escape uninjured. There are also, as in Britain, large numbers of illegally held firearms which are available for criminal use. But these pose a different problem, without diminishing the need to deal with the ones which are legally held. There is an onus, in both jurisdictions, to tighten control of weapons which, like shot guns used by farmers, cannot reasonably be subjected to a total ban.