Dunblane

A man walked into the primary school at about half past nine in the morning and went to the gymnasium, where Primary One were having their first lesson of the day.

He killed sixteen children, all five or six years old, and their teacher, and wounded fifteen others, and then killed himself. It lasted about three minutes.

Gwen Mayor, forty-five, was found having gone toward him with her arms out, between the man and her class.

In a class of twenty-eight, one child was left uninjured.

The town asked to be left alone and largely was. Within eighteen months the private ownership of handguns had been banned across Britain, after a petition signed by three quarters of a million people that had been started by the parents.