Re: The UK banned guns after they had a mass shooting and there have not been any since
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Date: March 19, 2019 10:54PM
Britain
In 1996, a gunman opened fire at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, killing 17 people. The handguns he had with him were owned legally with a firearms certificate.
The massacre led to a change in the law in Scotland, England and Wales which effectively outlawed all private ownership of handguns.
An amnesty led to the surrender of 165,353 licensed handguns and 700 tonnes of ammunition by the spring of 1999.
This built on law changes that had been introduced a decade earlier, after a mass shooting in Hungerford in the south of England, which was carried out with legally licensed firearms.
The law change following the 1987 massacre banned semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, and certain types of ammunition, and tightened controls on shotguns.
There has been one mass shooting in Britain since Dunblane - in Cumbria in 2010.
The Cumbria shootings was a shooting spree which occurred on 2 June 2010 when a lone gunman, Derrick Bird, killed 12 people and injured 11 others before killing himself in Cumbria, England. Along with the 1987 Hungerford massacre, the 1989 Monkseaton shootings, and the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, it is one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.
The series of attacks began in mid-morning in Lamplugh and moved to Frizington, Whitehaven, Egremont, Gosforth, and Seascale, sparking a major manhunt by the Cumbria Constabulary, with assistance from Civil Nuclear Constabulary officers.
Bird, a 52-year-old local taxi driver, was later found dead in a wooded area, having abandoned his vehicle in the village of Boot. Two weapons that appeared to have been used in the shootings were recovered. A total of 30 different crime scenes were investigated. The event was the most deadly shooting incident in the UK since the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, which left 18 people dead.
There was a rise in gun crime in the years immediately following Dunblane, largely to do with changes in the gun market including a trend for air weapons like BB guns.
From the early 2000s until 2016 there was a significant, and relatively consistent, fall in gun crime excluding air weapons in England and Wales. However, this was against a backdrop of generally falling violent crime in that period, so we cannot pin the fall on gun laws alone.
There have been small rises in gun-related crime in the past two years and violent crime in England and Wales has risen by 19% in a year.