The usual.....
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Dunblane: Ten years on what have we learned?
Can we learn anything from an unimaginable tragedy? By Ian Bell
THOMAS Watt Hamilton was a loser, a nobody. On March 12, 1996, his existence mattered, if it mattered at all, to a bare handful of people. On March 13, just after 9.30am, he had snuffed out that existence by his own hand, with a bullet to the head, and his name was about to be heard across half the world. If the nobody had chosen to commit suicide alone, in some darkened room, the story might have earned four paragraphs in the local newspapers. A follow-up might have inquired why it was that such a plainly unbalanced individual had been given the legal right to own quite so many firearms. The police would have found the question tricky, for a while. In the town of Dunblane, life would have gone on. That happy thought is not the reason why we remember Thomas Hamilton a decade later. We remember him, instead, in terms of a word that is often misused: enormity. These days people think it just means something very big – “the enormity of the crisis” – but in this story that was only ever a half-truth. The older, original meaning does better: a great crime; great wickedness; outrage; iniquity. As a prelude to his suicide, Hamilton had perpetrated something monstrous: the mass murder of 16 children of P1/13 and their teacher, Gwen Mayor. That is why we know his name.
And was that the motive? Posthumous, pointless fame? Motives need not be rational, after all. In the case of Hamilton, people gave up trying to fathom what was going through his head almost on the instant that the news of Dunblane broke. “Psychopath” is one of the emptiest words that medical science has to offer: instability without a specific mental disorder, instability without identifiable cause that can nevertheless lead to murderous behaviour. You could as well say that Hamilton was simply evil, and explain as much. The fact is that only the hierarchy of the Boy Scouts ever spotted that there was something amiss with this individual.
You could point to a disturbed upbringing, if it helps. The report of Lord Cullen’s stumbling inquiry into Dunblane gave chapter and verse for the amateur and professional psychologist alike. Parents divorced soon after the birth; adopted by his grandparents; raised to believe that his mother was his sister. Not propitious circumstances, but many have endured worse. The subsequent, aimless drifting through life was mundane, on the face of it: apprentice draughtsman; keeper of a DIY shop; dole claimant; trader in cameras; “freelance photographer”. Until the March day that he walked into Dunblane Primary, Hamilton was a dull monster.
All varieties of explanation peter out. This, from an American criminology website attempting to define the differences between the mass killer, the spree killer, and the serial killer: “More often than not, mass murderers tend to target particular victims to avenge perceived injustices. There are also, of course, random and indiscriminate patterns. In almost all cases, innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. The more random the pattern, the more likely the perceived injustice is small and insignificant.” It is accurate, as far as it goes, in describing Thomas Hamilton, but just what “perceived injustices” had been meted out by P1/13?
He liked to be around boys. Even in the days before there was a tabloid frenzy over the dangers of paedophilia, the Scouts were on their guard. After a couple of incidents and some proven deceit, Hamilton was booted out: one enduring grievance. Later, he set up a string of boys’ clubs, generally using false credentials, in which (Cullen concluded) he showed a taste for dominating his charges, and for amateur photographs of young males. Some parents and schools were disturbed; Hamilton began to acquire something of a reputation: another grievance. One diagnosis to fit the bill is that the killer was certainly paranoid, in a parochial sort of way.
He was not so blatantly paranoid, in any case, as to fail the inadequate checks that allowed him legally to own the two Browning pistols and the two Smith & Wesson revolvers, together with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, he carried into Dunblane Primary. Ten years on, you are left only with a painful question. What are the real lessons of Dunblane?
Ever stricter gun control? Ever tighter security in and around schools? Ever bigger and ever better registers of those who are not fit to be around children? Improved vetting of anyone, anywhere, who might pose a risk to someone, somewhere? None of these are worthless; some count as the marks of a civilised society. Would they have stopped Thomas Hamilton, come the day of his choosing?
This is not an advertisement for the gun lobby, for whom any excuse will do if it preserves their hobby. Ten years ago, like many journalists, I wrote a lot about Dunblane. The idea that anyone could still defend the private ownership of handguns, for any purpose, struck me as an obscenity. Someone’s sport, even if conducted responsibly, was a reason to allow lethal weapons in our society? Absurd. Then the mail began to arrive.
Most of the writers took the point, mercifully. A minority – often American, but not always – took another tack. It tended to come down to the familiar, insane, formulation: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. As always, this tended to overlook the fact that, in the United States, more people with more guns somehow kill many more people than is the case in Europe or Japan. Undaunted, one irate American correspondent even insisted that Dunblane’s children could have been better protected by – what else? – a “law-abiding, gun-owning society”. On this side of the Atlantic, the favourite strategy was less confident: criminals will always get a hold of guns so what, really, is the point of another law?
In 1998, a handgun ban was duly enacted; yet gun crime – grant this much to the firearms lobby – continues to increase. Legislation to ban increasingly common imitation weapons is making its way through Parliament. Since the death of two-year-old Andrew Morton, killed last year by a pellet to the head in Glasgow’s Easterhouse, pressure has been growing to outlaw airguns. Only a minority raise serious objections to the belief that something can be done. Yet even a decade after the Hamilton massacre, a national firearms register is still not up and running.
The Gun Control Network, born out of Dunblane, campaigns hard. Its objectives would no doubt win a public referendum tomorrow if the gun lobby was less determined. No-one under 18 to own or use a gun; an end to imitation weapons; airguns to be certified; all de-activated weapons to be certified; a single certification system; a ban on multi-shot rifles and shotguns; “combat” training to be made illegal; and radical reform of the Firearms Consultative Committee.
To most people, this is common, and perfect, sense.
Anything that protects the innocent makes perfect sense. Yet, if you read Cullen’s report today a thought creeps upon you, yet again: Hamilton made no sense. Springing from the fine legal mind of his lordship came recommendations such as this: “Those who have the legal responsibility for the health and safety of the teaching staff and pupils at school should prepare a safety strategy for the protection of the school population against violence, together with an action plan for implementing and monitoring the effectiveness of safety measures appropriate to the particular school.” Would that really have kept the darkness at bay?
Here, at random, is another of the judge’s opinions: “Consideration should be given to the development of a Scottish Vocational Qualification in respect of work with children, including the organisation of clubs and child development and protection.” A fine notion, but a notion advanced in the face of a massacre of infants?
You could criticise Cullen and his inquiry on several, very good grounds – the prosecution service’s possible failures towards Hamilton and his arsenal would be one – but that, a decade on, isn’t really the point. You could meanwhile lay a bet that the Gun Control Network and the International Action Network on Small Arms will win their battle for civilisation one of these days.
But you can also be certain that, in America at least, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” will not be surrendered without a fight. Even after Dunblane, even after Columbine in 1999 (14 students dead, including the two gunmen, and a teacher), you still find the likes of Roger Poe, author of The Seven Myths Of Gun Control. According to the advertising, his volume, “exposes the gun-ban movement’s hidden political agenda, exploring the anti-male, Marxist-feminist ideology that drives the gun haters”.
That, some of the time, is the world in which we live. It was also the world occupied by the gun-loving Thomas Hamilton. Yet the nobody was not some virus thriving in complete, renegade isolation. He was Scottish through and through, a part, albeit a peripheral part, of our society. Not greatly liked, certainly unloved, but known, sometimes employed, his existence a matter of record: almost normal. Then, with no hint of a warning, he was calmly killing small children.
Even at this length of time you can say that someone should have realised how dangerous this man might be around a handgun. Yet who would you blame for failing to wonder whether one day Thomas Hamilton would take it into his head to slaughter a primary school class on a March morning no different from any other? No psychiatric assessment in the world could have come up with that prediction. Only rarely is an enormity predicted: if the Dunblane anniversary reminds us of anything, it reminds us of that.
We can legislate against firearms and hope that the world becomes a safer place. We can panic over paedophiles and aim to make our children secure. We can work to ensure that dangerous people cannot wander into schools. None of these, in the true sense, are the lessons of Dunblane. The profound shock, approaching national grief, that spread through Scotland on the morning and afternoon of March 13, 1996, was in part born of incomprehension, but there was another feeling. These things don’t happen, it said, not here.
They do. That was one lesson and one consequence of Dunblane. Each time humanity imagines that it has made the world a little more rational, along comes a Thomas Hamilton. Had he been stripped of his guns, yet allowed to remain free of a mental hospital, he would have done some other, terrible thing. Still, no-one would have seen it coming.
A decade ago, I wrote a lot about Dunblane, as best I could. My first attempt, I think, had something to do with the inadequacy of language in the face of this species of ours, with its poetry, its wonderful machines, its grasping after liberty, and its Thomas Hamiltons. Then, later, I got angry about guns and those who prefer funerals to the loss of a hobby. In the immediate aftermath, nevertheless, there was one task I refused: under no circumstance would I travel to Dunblane and “report”.
Unprofessional, of course. The point was this: if I couldn’t possibly begin to understand a Thomas Hamilton, how could a grief-stricken town and grief-stricken parents understand? What could anyone have told me? If I had never lost a child, least of all in circumstances beyond contemplation, why dare to intrude? Why turn up with the rest of my trade to record the most private scenes anyone could imagine? At the very least, at minimum, there was no point.
I suspected, in any case, that the people of the town, and the bereaved in particular, would have had none of it. They had already learned another lesson of Dunblane: sometimes darkness descends, from a clear blue sky, for no reason anyone can name. Sometimes, the universe is malevolent and irrational. If you cannot explain Thomas Hamilton, you cannot explain any of the dangers humanity poses to itself.
As the 10th anniversary of the massacre approaches, most of the bereaved are keeping their thoughts to themselves. That is their right. They, and their town, do not want the world’s attentions. They do not want articles such as this, I’m sure. They have been groping in the cold darkness for a decade, almost unaided. Suddenly, because of an arbitrary date, the rest of us remember. Briefly, we pay attention.
The exception among those who lost a child in that primary school gym is Dr Mick North, whose daughter, Sophie, was killed. Active in the Gun Control Network, his is a minority voice, one that says no-one should be allowed to forget, least of all the firearms lobby. He has taken a lonely road but that, equally, is his right. Honour to him.
You return, nevertheless, to the nobody, to Thomas Hamilton. Looking back, you can think of him only as a malign event, a disease waiting to erupt: it doesn’t help. At Dunblane, he destroyed lives, but he also destroyed childhood. The prosperous, contented, Western world, the safe little town, the happy school, the thing we call innocence: none of it could ever be quite the same again.
The greater the fear, the more we protect our children, and ourselves. We believe we can demand guarantees from our society. Sometimes we can; sometimes there is no way to frame any sort of a guarantee. Why did Hamilton elect to kill children , not scout masters? Why didn’t he just kill himself rather than children ? Did the sound of gunfire matter so much to him? Add those to the list of a thousand questions.
In the most brutal sense, there have been no useful lessons learned in the 10 years since Dunblane that could prevent another Thomas Hamilton. What real lessons were learned after the Hungerford massacre in 1987, when gunman Michael Ryan slaughtered 16 people? No lessons as to the nature or meaning of Michael Ryan’s life and mind, certainly. Strathclyde Police and other forces are meanwhile coming across increasing numbers of illegal guns. A banker is shot on his doorstep in Nairn, for reasons unexplained. Some killings arise from a twisted logic, and some flow from the darkness at the core of a Thomas Hamilton.
In America, school massacres still shock, but they are no longer unique. Gun control activists would argue, correctly, that the statistics are a function of the sheer quantity of available weapons. Means and opportunity come together.
In America, equally, there has been nothing like Dunblane, nothing that has struck so hard at the heart of a community. But does loss follow some sort of sliding scale of atrocity?
Thomas Hamilton was mad: who would disagree? Thomas Hamilton was lost to all human feeling: dead children attest to that. The world is full of risk and unspeakable cruelty because, now and then, it throws up a Thomas Hamilton: this much we know. But the facts alone supply none of the answers about humanity, and never have. It is an abject, pitiful lesson, impossible to learn.
05 March 2006
http://www.sundayherald.com/54398
ME
NEWS
INTERNATIONAL
ANALYSIS
OP-ED
SPORT
SEVENDAYS
BUSINESS
MAGAZINE
Dunblane: Ten years on what have we learned?
Can we learn anything from an unimaginable tragedy? By Ian Bell
THOMAS Watt Hamilton was a loser, a nobody. On March 12, 1996, his existence mattered, if it mattered at all, to a bare handful of people. On March 13, just after 9.30am, he had snuffed out that existence by his own hand, with a bullet to the head, and his name was about to be heard across half the world. If the nobody had chosen to commit suicide alone, in some darkened room, the story might have earned four paragraphs in the local newspapers. A follow-up might have inquired why it was that such a plainly unbalanced individual had been given the legal right to own quite so many firearms. The police would have found the question tricky, for a while. In the town of Dunblane, life would have gone on. That happy thought is not the reason why we remember Thomas Hamilton a decade later. We remember him, instead, in terms of a word that is often misused: enormity. These days people think it just means something very big – “the enormity of the crisis” – but in this story that was only ever a half-truth. The older, original meaning does better: a great crime; great wickedness; outrage; iniquity. As a prelude to his suicide, Hamilton had perpetrated something monstrous: the mass murder of 16 children of P1/13 and their teacher, Gwen Mayor. That is why we know his name.
And was that the motive? Posthumous, pointless fame? Motives need not be rational, after all. In the case of Hamilton, people gave up trying to fathom what was going through his head almost on the instant that the news of Dunblane broke. “Psychopath” is one of the emptiest words that medical science has to offer: instability without a specific mental disorder, instability without identifiable cause that can nevertheless lead to murderous behaviour. You could as well say that Hamilton was simply evil, and explain as much. The fact is that only the hierarchy of the Boy Scouts ever spotted that there was something amiss with this individual.
You could point to a disturbed upbringing, if it helps. The report of Lord Cullen’s stumbling inquiry into Dunblane gave chapter and verse for the amateur and professional psychologist alike. Parents divorced soon after the birth; adopted by his grandparents; raised to believe that his mother was his sister. Not propitious circumstances, but many have endured worse. The subsequent, aimless drifting through life was mundane, on the face of it: apprentice draughtsman; keeper of a DIY shop; dole claimant; trader in cameras; “freelance photographer”. Until the March day that he walked into Dunblane Primary, Hamilton was a dull monster.
All varieties of explanation peter out. This, from an American criminology website attempting to define the differences between the mass killer, the spree killer, and the serial killer: “More often than not, mass murderers tend to target particular victims to avenge perceived injustices. There are also, of course, random and indiscriminate patterns. In almost all cases, innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire. The more random the pattern, the more likely the perceived injustice is small and insignificant.” It is accurate, as far as it goes, in describing Thomas Hamilton, but just what “perceived injustices” had been meted out by P1/13?
He liked to be around boys. Even in the days before there was a tabloid frenzy over the dangers of paedophilia, the Scouts were on their guard. After a couple of incidents and some proven deceit, Hamilton was booted out: one enduring grievance. Later, he set up a string of boys’ clubs, generally using false credentials, in which (Cullen concluded) he showed a taste for dominating his charges, and for amateur photographs of young males. Some parents and schools were disturbed; Hamilton began to acquire something of a reputation: another grievance. One diagnosis to fit the bill is that the killer was certainly paranoid, in a parochial sort of way.
He was not so blatantly paranoid, in any case, as to fail the inadequate checks that allowed him legally to own the two Browning pistols and the two Smith & Wesson revolvers, together with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, he carried into Dunblane Primary. Ten years on, you are left only with a painful question. What are the real lessons of Dunblane?
Ever stricter gun control? Ever tighter security in and around schools? Ever bigger and ever better registers of those who are not fit to be around children? Improved vetting of anyone, anywhere, who might pose a risk to someone, somewhere? None of these are worthless; some count as the marks of a civilised society. Would they have stopped Thomas Hamilton, come the day of his choosing?
This is not an advertisement for the gun lobby, for whom any excuse will do if it preserves their hobby. Ten years ago, like many journalists, I wrote a lot about Dunblane. The idea that anyone could still defend the private ownership of handguns, for any purpose, struck me as an obscenity. Someone’s sport, even if conducted responsibly, was a reason to allow lethal weapons in our society? Absurd. Then the mail began to arrive.
Most of the writers took the point, mercifully. A minority – often American, but not always – took another tack. It tended to come down to the familiar, insane, formulation: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. As always, this tended to overlook the fact that, in the United States, more people with more guns somehow kill many more people than is the case in Europe or Japan. Undaunted, one irate American correspondent even insisted that Dunblane’s children could have been better protected by – what else? – a “law-abiding, gun-owning society”. On this side of the Atlantic, the favourite strategy was less confident: criminals will always get a hold of guns so what, really, is the point of another law?
In 1998, a handgun ban was duly enacted; yet gun crime – grant this much to the firearms lobby – continues to increase. Legislation to ban increasingly common imitation weapons is making its way through Parliament. Since the death of two-year-old Andrew Morton, killed last year by a pellet to the head in Glasgow’s Easterhouse, pressure has been growing to outlaw airguns. Only a minority raise serious objections to the belief that something can be done. Yet even a decade after the Hamilton massacre, a national firearms register is still not up and running.
The Gun Control Network, born out of Dunblane, campaigns hard. Its objectives would no doubt win a public referendum tomorrow if the gun lobby was less determined. No-one under 18 to own or use a gun; an end to imitation weapons; airguns to be certified; all de-activated weapons to be certified; a single certification system; a ban on multi-shot rifles and shotguns; “combat” training to be made illegal; and radical reform of the Firearms Consultative Committee.
To most people, this is common, and perfect, sense.
Anything that protects the innocent makes perfect sense. Yet, if you read Cullen’s report today a thought creeps upon you, yet again: Hamilton made no sense. Springing from the fine legal mind of his lordship came recommendations such as this: “Those who have the legal responsibility for the health and safety of the teaching staff and pupils at school should prepare a safety strategy for the protection of the school population against violence, together with an action plan for implementing and monitoring the effectiveness of safety measures appropriate to the particular school.” Would that really have kept the darkness at bay?
Here, at random, is another of the judge’s opinions: “Consideration should be given to the development of a Scottish Vocational Qualification in respect of work with children, including the organisation of clubs and child development and protection.” A fine notion, but a notion advanced in the face of a massacre of infants?
You could criticise Cullen and his inquiry on several, very good grounds – the prosecution service’s possible failures towards Hamilton and his arsenal would be one – but that, a decade on, isn’t really the point. You could meanwhile lay a bet that the Gun Control Network and the International Action Network on Small Arms will win their battle for civilisation one of these days.
But you can also be certain that, in America at least, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” will not be surrendered without a fight. Even after Dunblane, even after Columbine in 1999 (14 students dead, including the two gunmen, and a teacher), you still find the likes of Roger Poe, author of The Seven Myths Of Gun Control. According to the advertising, his volume, “exposes the gun-ban movement’s hidden political agenda, exploring the anti-male, Marxist-feminist ideology that drives the gun haters”.
That, some of the time, is the world in which we live. It was also the world occupied by the gun-loving Thomas Hamilton. Yet the nobody was not some virus thriving in complete, renegade isolation. He was Scottish through and through, a part, albeit a peripheral part, of our society. Not greatly liked, certainly unloved, but known, sometimes employed, his existence a matter of record: almost normal. Then, with no hint of a warning, he was calmly killing small children.
Even at this length of time you can say that someone should have realised how dangerous this man might be around a handgun. Yet who would you blame for failing to wonder whether one day Thomas Hamilton would take it into his head to slaughter a primary school class on a March morning no different from any other? No psychiatric assessment in the world could have come up with that prediction. Only rarely is an enormity predicted: if the Dunblane anniversary reminds us of anything, it reminds us of that.
We can legislate against firearms and hope that the world becomes a safer place. We can panic over paedophiles and aim to make our children secure. We can work to ensure that dangerous people cannot wander into schools. None of these, in the true sense, are the lessons of Dunblane. The profound shock, approaching national grief, that spread through Scotland on the morning and afternoon of March 13, 1996, was in part born of incomprehension, but there was another feeling. These things don’t happen, it said, not here.
They do. That was one lesson and one consequence of Dunblane. Each time humanity imagines that it has made the world a little more rational, along comes a Thomas Hamilton. Had he been stripped of his guns, yet allowed to remain free of a mental hospital, he would have done some other, terrible thing. Still, no-one would have seen it coming.
A decade ago, I wrote a lot about Dunblane, as best I could. My first attempt, I think, had something to do with the inadequacy of language in the face of this species of ours, with its poetry, its wonderful machines, its grasping after liberty, and its Thomas Hamiltons. Then, later, I got angry about guns and those who prefer funerals to the loss of a hobby. In the immediate aftermath, nevertheless, there was one task I refused: under no circumstance would I travel to Dunblane and “report”.
Unprofessional, of course. The point was this: if I couldn’t possibly begin to understand a Thomas Hamilton, how could a grief-stricken town and grief-stricken parents understand? What could anyone have told me? If I had never lost a child, least of all in circumstances beyond contemplation, why dare to intrude? Why turn up with the rest of my trade to record the most private scenes anyone could imagine? At the very least, at minimum, there was no point.
I suspected, in any case, that the people of the town, and the bereaved in particular, would have had none of it. They had already learned another lesson of Dunblane: sometimes darkness descends, from a clear blue sky, for no reason anyone can name. Sometimes, the universe is malevolent and irrational. If you cannot explain Thomas Hamilton, you cannot explain any of the dangers humanity poses to itself.
As the 10th anniversary of the massacre approaches, most of the bereaved are keeping their thoughts to themselves. That is their right. They, and their town, do not want the world’s attentions. They do not want articles such as this, I’m sure. They have been groping in the cold darkness for a decade, almost unaided. Suddenly, because of an arbitrary date, the rest of us remember. Briefly, we pay attention.
The exception among those who lost a child in that primary school gym is Dr Mick North, whose daughter, Sophie, was killed. Active in the Gun Control Network, his is a minority voice, one that says no-one should be allowed to forget, least of all the firearms lobby. He has taken a lonely road but that, equally, is his right. Honour to him.
You return, nevertheless, to the nobody, to Thomas Hamilton. Looking back, you can think of him only as a malign event, a disease waiting to erupt: it doesn’t help. At Dunblane, he destroyed lives, but he also destroyed childhood. The prosperous, contented, Western world, the safe little town, the happy school, the thing we call innocence: none of it could ever be quite the same again.
The greater the fear, the more we protect our children, and ourselves. We believe we can demand guarantees from our society. Sometimes we can; sometimes there is no way to frame any sort of a guarantee. Why did Hamilton elect to kill children , not scout masters? Why didn’t he just kill himself rather than children ? Did the sound of gunfire matter so much to him? Add those to the list of a thousand questions.
In the most brutal sense, there have been no useful lessons learned in the 10 years since Dunblane that could prevent another Thomas Hamilton. What real lessons were learned after the Hungerford massacre in 1987, when gunman Michael Ryan slaughtered 16 people? No lessons as to the nature or meaning of Michael Ryan’s life and mind, certainly. Strathclyde Police and other forces are meanwhile coming across increasing numbers of illegal guns. A banker is shot on his doorstep in Nairn, for reasons unexplained. Some killings arise from a twisted logic, and some flow from the darkness at the core of a Thomas Hamilton.
In America, school massacres still shock, but they are no longer unique. Gun control activists would argue, correctly, that the statistics are a function of the sheer quantity of available weapons. Means and opportunity come together.
In America, equally, there has been nothing like Dunblane, nothing that has struck so hard at the heart of a community. But does loss follow some sort of sliding scale of atrocity?
Thomas Hamilton was mad: who would disagree? Thomas Hamilton was lost to all human feeling: dead children attest to that. The world is full of risk and unspeakable cruelty because, now and then, it throws up a Thomas Hamilton: this much we know. But the facts alone supply none of the answers about humanity, and never have. It is an abject, pitiful lesson, impossible to learn.
05 March 2006
