Eeyore wrote:

Neil Barker wrote:

How many deaths resulted from legally held handguns in say 1995, before
the handgun ban ?

You got the wrong date for the handgun ban !

No he didn't, he clearly stated tht 1995 was BEFORE the handgun ban.

I apologise for the resort to CAPITALS but it seems to be the only way
you notice things.

The very reason for it was Dunblane.

I don't think it is udner dispute that the handgun ban was a stupid
reaction by weak-minded politicians.

" Thomas Hamilton walked into the school armed with two 9 mm Browning HP
pistols and two Smith and Wesson .357 revolvers. He was carrying 743
cartridges."

" As the law stood at the time, the police were unable to revoke
Hamilton's firearms certificate (gun licence) because there were no
substantiated grounds to do so."

That last paragraph is a lie, there was more than adequate evidence that
Hamilton should not have had a firearms certificate. But the police were
aware of his character:

'A Scotsman News article by Dan McDougall indicated that Detective
Sergeant Paul Hughes, the former head of Central Scotland Police's child
protection unit, wrote a damning report in which he recommended that
Hamilton's gun license be revoked because of his "unsavory character"
and "unstable personality."'

http://preview.tinyurl.com/24e96e

Claims that there was insufficient evidence to revoke his firearms
licence are drivel. A firearms licence could be revoked without
evidence. It merely needs the opinion of a FLO that the person is unfit
to hold a firearm. Handing firearms into the care of unsupervised
children as was alleged is more than sufficient reason.

However it seems likely that the real reason that Hamilton did not have
his licence revoked was his close association with police officers:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/256bm3

In March 2004, Dr. Mick North, parent of deceased Dunblane victim Sophie
North, brought forth new allegations of a possible cover-up. According
to Marcello Mega's article, Dunblane Cover-up, North listed six key
points that the Cullen Inquiry failed to address, which included:

1. The failure to hear evidence from Catherine Kerr, a neighbor of
Hamilton's, who saw him emerge from a gray-colored car outside his home
on the morning of the shootings. The driver has never been traced.
2. The failure to account for Hamilton's exact movements from the
time he left his home to drive to Dunblane Primary School, a 15 minute
journey that took him more than three quarters of an hour.
3. Why an off-duty police officer who was mysteriously at the school
on the morning of the shootings was never called to give evidence.
4. The failure by police to identify Hamilton as a pedophile who was
almost certainly involved in supplying photographs of virtually naked
boys, which he took on camps.
5. The failure to establish who Hamilton's friends in the police
were. A number of witnesses testified that police cars often stopped
outside his home.
6. The failure to investigate links, revealed by three witnesses,
between Hamilton and the Queen Victoria School, a military school at
Dunblane with a small shooting range that Hamilton used and where it is
claimed by a former teacher that boys were abused.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_massacre

Understand now ?


I understand that if all your opinion is formed by scantily researched,
badly written consensus articles that it explains a lot about what
appear to be lazy thought patterns on your part.