Gun Control


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

GUN CONTROL ORGANISATIONS & VIOLENCE PREVENTION PROGRAMMES

Gun Control Network

List of School shootings /ABCNews/ US 1996-1999

School House Hype: School shootings and the real risks kids            face in America.
Child Deaths in America in Context, 1997-98

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.

******************
Million Mom March - Facts

Fiream-related deaths in different coutries (Int.J.Epid.1998)

*******************************

Professor uses history as a weapon against the US gun lobby

http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000913/A61442-2000Sep12.html

             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
***************************************************