One Morning in March: Dunblane and the Shooting that Changed Britain, by Stephen McGinty Swift, 312 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-1800756090

He hovered for years on the fringes of the community, generating unease. He never married, had no children, lived alone. Seldom was anyone invited to his house. During his short and dismal life he wrote copious letters of self-exculpation, self-defence: to local authorities, school boards, the police, the government – even, once, to the queen. He had few friends, and kept none for long. One acquaintance described him as ‘a very shy, lonely person’. He was a keen photographer. To raise extra cash, he traded privately in photographic equipment. He was also interested in guns.

For over a decade he ran a small DIY shop in Stirling in central Scotland called Woodcraft, which was ‘well-stocked with ironmongery, a choice of domestic timbers, joists and brackets […] everything the enterprising man about the house would need to build a bookcase or fit a kitchen’. He was himself an enterprising man. In his spare time he ran boys’ clubs and summer camps. Between November 1981 and March 1996 he established fifteen such clubs and camps. The clubs ‘focused on gymnastics, physical exercise, and football’. He operated in schools and community centres around Stirling, Falkirk, Dunfermline. He also operated in and around the small town of Dunblane.

If this were the whole story, we would be dealing with a familiar and relatively harmless sort of crank. The letter-writing, the not-quite-neurotypical hobbyism, the failure to establish a mature romantic or sexual life – every community has its example of the type. But of course this is not the whole story. And Thomas Hamilton was not a crank. He was something else entirely.

People sensed this. The journalist Stephen McGinty’s account of Hamilton’s life, which takes up the first third of One Morning in March, is punctuated by descriptions of the unease that his presence and behaviour provoked. In 1970, aged eighteen, he joined the 4th/6th Stirling Scout troop. Three years later, having demonstrated his enthusiasm for the organisation, he was asked to lead a new troop of young boys. But soon a wrong note sounded. The boys complained to their parents that Hamilton would drive them off on excursions only to announce that their hotel accommodation had fallen through and that they must all sleep with him in his van. There were other incidents, other reports. Brian Fairgrieve, a surgeon with a senior role in the Scouts, eventually met with Hamilton and told him that he ‘lacked the necessary qualities to be a Scout leader’. Fairgrieve wrote to the Scottish Scout headquarters to advise that Hamilton be blacklisted. ‘[A]s a doctor,’ Fairgrieve said, ‘and with my clinical acumen only, I am suspicious of his moral intentions towards the boys.’

In letters to various authorities written over the succeeding two decades, Hamilton frequently complained that the Scouts had conspired against him. There was, he pointed out, never any evidence that he had abused or mistreated the boys in his care. Rejected by the Scouts, he began to advertise his own boys’ clubs. He rarely had official sanction for these clubs but parents responded to his promises of fresh air, exercise, soccer practice. In the leaflets he distributed, he sometimes claimed to be a qualified Scout leader.

Brian Fairgrieve’s clinical acumen served him well. Stephen McGinty writes: ‘Hamilton liked to look at boys in black swimming trunks. He purchased a bulk order of identical trunks and insisted every boy who attended his club wear them while performing their gymnastic exercises.’ Parents grew concerned that he was forcing boys to perform exercises that were too difficult for their ages. The Scottish Labour MP George Robertson, later the secretary general of NATO, enrolled his son Malcolm in one of Hamilton’s clubs, the Dunblane Rovers. One evening Robertson went to meet Hamilton to discuss Malcolm’s absence. Through the doors of a school gym he watched him and the fifty boys in his care. ‘I had the gut instinct of suspicion and worry as I watched,’ Robertson later said. ‘I felt the discipline and authoritarianism exercised over children was odd.’ Robertson removed his son from the club.

Over the years many parents removed their children from Hamilton’s clubs. One mother said: ‘I thought, in my mind, there was something perverse about the whole thing.’ Boys returned home with stories of being made to pose for photographs in their black swimming trunks. Rumours circulated that Hamilton was ‘a poof’. A neighbour, Grace Ogilvie, was one of the few people ever to be invited into his home. He showed her a video that he had made: ‘Small boys’, she later said, ‘from the waist down they had very small, shiny bathing pants on.’ As she left, Mrs Ogilvie glimpsed Hamilton’s bedroom: ‘She could see pictures on the wall of small boys in bathing trunks.’ She also knew that Hamilton lit fires in his back garden. She noticed the smell of burning plastic.

The manager of the photography shop where Hamilton got his pictures developed was also uneasy. The pictures were exclusively of small boys in bathing trunks. The manager called staff at the ColourCare lab, ‘all of whom shared his unease’. He also called the police. Thomas Hamilton was, as the phrase goes, ‘known to’ Central Scotland Police. In July 1988, two CSP constables had travelled to an island in Loch Lomond where he was running a summer camp. They were responding to reports of beatings, slapping and unsanitary conditions. They found that Hamilton was the only adult on the island. The food was poor and the boys lacked adequate clothing for the weather. Several of the boys wished to be taken home. One of the constables, PC Gunn, ‘did not consider the children to be in any particular danger, though he was left with an uneasy, ill-defined concern about Mr. Hamilton, who waved them off from the shoreline surrounded by a cluster of half-naked children’.

****

By August 1991 Thomas Hamilton had come to the attention of the Central Scotland Police so often that a senior officer, Detective Sergeant Hughes, ‘had concluded that Hamilton was a manipulative man with clear paedophiliac interests’. Hughes put together a list of charges against him. But Hamilton counterattacked and made Hughes the subject of an official complaint. (More letters, more tales of persecution.) Hughes was aware that Hamilton owned several guns and ‘thousands of rounds’ of ammunition. He wrote to his superintendent recommending that his firearm licence be revoked. No action was taken.

Hamilton continued to operate ‘just within the law’. He continued to provoke unease, even outright fear, in the people he met. His voice was soft and he had a way of ‘wringing his hands’ when he spoke. He was bald and wore big spectacles and an anorak. In 1985 he sold his Woodcraft business and for the next eight years claimed unemployment benefit, until an investigation by the Department of Social Security in 1993 cut him off. After that he had no dependable source of income. His few friends drifted away, or were frightened off, or grew angry at his increasingly odd behaviour. His boys’ clubs were sparsely attended, when he could get them going at all. At his last club, he began to ask one particular boy about the layout of his primary school in Dunblane. Where was the gym? What time did certain classes go to the gym? ‘He asked the boy the same questions every week for two years.’

One by one, Hamilton’s few tenuous links to the community broke, or were broken. He was by now in his early forties. He came increasingly to depend on his guns for a kind of emotional support. His few conversations with other people began to revolve obsessively around guns. He owned two 9mm Browning semi-automatic pistols and two .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum revolvers. He also owned ‘three steel strongboxes full of ammunition’. He had approached various local shooting clubs and asked to shoot, without ever becoming an official member of any of them. Members of these clubs found his behaviour unseemly, or disturbing. At the range, he would fire off huge numbers of rounds – an etiquette violation. One gun-club member refused to let Hamilton sit in the back seat of his car when he gave him a lift, imagining that he might shoot him: ‘I, as I have said, was very uneasy in the gentleman’s presence.’

On March 12th, 1996, Hamilton rented a white van from a car hire business in Stirling. The receptionist was struck by his lack of affect: ‘He unnerved me quite a bit … the way he spoke mainly. He spoke very slowly, very clearly, precisely, but with no emotion or expression. There was just nothing, nothing in there. You couldn’t have held a conversation with him.’ Hamilton then visited his mother, Agnes. At her house, ‘he had a cup of tea and a hot bath’. For the first twenty-two years of his life, Hamilton had believed Agnes to be his older sister. He was adopted, aged four, by Agnes’s parents – his grandparents. His father had walked out shortly after Hamilton’s birth. The truth was finally revealed to him in 1974. ‘He took it well,’ Agnes later said.

It was a cold night. The next morning, Hamilton had to de-ice his hired van. He drove to Dunblane Primary school. The drive took about twenty minutes. In the van with him were two large canvas bags containing his guns and large quantities of ammunition. He had also brought a pair of ear defenders, of the sort worn on shooting ranges. He entered the school via a side door just after morning assembly had finished. He found his way to the gym, where Gwyn Mayor’s class of five- and six-year olds were about to start PE. ‘He started to spray shots everywhere,’ as Eileen Harrild, the PE teacher, later said. ‘The children started screaming.’

When Hamilton was finished, sixteen small children were dead or dying. Gwyn Mayor was also dead. Fifteen children and adults had been injured, including Eileen Harrild. Hamilton removed his .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum from one of his canvas bags. He put it in his mouth, pointing upwards, and fired. ‘The bullet passed through his skull, bounced off the stone wall behind and fell tinkling to the wooden floor.’ The massacre had lasted for approximately five minutes, from 9:35 am to 9:40 am. One of the surviving children kept repeating, ‘What a bad man … what a bad man … what a bad man.’

****

Dunblane remains the largest mass shooting in British history. Because Hamilton was dead, there was no criminal investigation. John Major’s Conservative government, then in its dying days, commissioned a public inquiry, chaired by Lord Cullen. Cullen’s report, published in September 1996, looked at the state of legislation around handgun ownership in the UK (at the time, a police-issued licence was required if you wanted to own a handgun, and no one was permitted to own two handguns of the same calibre). Cullen recommended that the ownership of certain handguns be restricted by law. Many of the parents of Hamilton’s victims, some of whom had, in the aftermath of the massacre, formed a nonprofit gun control lobbying group called Snowdrop, felt that this did not go far enough. Tony Blair, then leader of the Labour Party, agreed with them. One of the first pieces of legislation passed by Blair’s Labour government in 1997 restricted the ownership of all handguns, effectively making them illegal.

It is in this sense that Stephen McGinty calls Dunblane ‘the shooting that changed Britain’. And it is true that since the passing of the Firearms (Amendment) Acts in 1997, mass shootings on the scale of Dunblane have been rare in the UK. In June 2010 a taxi driver named Derrick Bird killed twelve people – including his twin brother – and injured eleven others in a series of random shootings in and around the Eskdale Valley in Cumbria. And in August 2021, an apprentice crane operator named Jake Davison killed five people – including his mother – and injured two in a series of random shootings in Keyham, Plymouth. Neither Bird nor Davison used handguns. Bird used a double-barrelled shotgun and Davison a pump-action shotgun. Both guns were legally owned. After these shootings, the Home Office issued updated – and more restrictive – firearms licensing guidelines.

****

Three years almost to the month after Dunblane, on April 20th, 1999, two teenagers named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed fourteen people and injured twenty-three others in a school shooting in Columbine, Colorado. They used shotguns, a carbine rifle, and a TEC-9 handgun. Investigators later determined that Harris and Klebold had fired 188 rounds of ammunition during the massacre. Dave Cullen’s book Columbine (2009) offers an account of Harris as a high-functioning psychopath, alongside an account of Klebold as a troubled, angry, impressionable follower. Harris and Klebold, in other words, represented the twin poles of the authoritarian personality. Both were attracted to Nazism – Harris wrote a school essay on the Third Reich – and both repeatedly telegraphed their intentions, generating unease in parents, teachers, friends.

The US legislative response to Columbine was effectively to do nothing. Everybody knows why: the US gun lobby, funded by firearms manufacturers, campaigns to protect the Constitution’s Second Amendment provision for ‘a well-regulated militia’ which is, the Amendment claims, ‘necessary to the security of a free state’. A militia, it is worth remembering, is an amateur army.

In Richard Ford’s novel Be Mine (2023), an aging Frank Bascombe visits ‘the Comanche mall’. Here, ‘as in many public places now – and for perfectly supportable reasons’, Frank feels that ‘someone from somewhere may be about to shoot me’. An American undergraduate recently told me that every day for five years, between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, she imagined constantly that she might be murdered: because she was in school. American kindergartens and elementary schools routinely conduct ‘active shooter drills’: what to do when somebody from somewhere arrives to shoot you.

In the quarter-century-plus since Columbine, the mass shooting – of which the school shooting has become a kind of nightmarish subgenre – has become an American folk ritual. The alienated or mentally ill young man, alone in his room. The efforts by parents to reach him – or the absence, physical or emotional, of father, mother, carer … The growing cache of weapons. The warning signs. The unease. The massacre. The numbers of the dead and wounded. The suicide. The statement by the local sheriff. The vigil. The psychological autopsy of the shooter: could we have known? The call for ‘gun control’. The legislative void.

All of this is known, all of this is grimly tedious to tell. In June 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a bill that funded crisis centres and school mental health programmes, as well as school security: metal detectors at the school doors, and so forth. Since Biden signed the bill, there have been over 100 shooting incidents at schools and universities in the US. The statistics, too, are tedious to recount. In the first four months of 2026, there were 134 mass shootings in the United States, where a mass shooting is defined as involving three or more victims. A study conducted in 2025 by criminologists at the University of Colorado Boulder found that one in fifteen Americans had witnessed a mass shooting, and that two per cent of the US population had been injured in a mass shooting.

According to the Rockefeller Institute for Government, ‘Mass shootings have been steadily increasing [in America] since 1966’ – the year, that is, when Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and began firing his rifle at strangers, killing fifteen people. (The mass shooting is, among other things, a template for more mass shootings. Lionel Shriver, in her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, made her school-shooter antagonist obsessively competitive with other school shooters: a canny insight.)

America: the feral republic. In the summer of 2002 I stayed with a friend of my brother’s in a house in West Roxbury, a mostly white, mostly working class suburb of Boston. The house had belonged to my brother’s friend’s grandparents, both of whom were now dead. It was a two-story clapboard house with a slump-roofed veranda and nicotine-stained wallpaper. The veranda was packed solid with unsorted piles of grandparental heirlooms. Among these was an unloaded M1 carbine rifle. It was very heavy. My brother’s friend handed it to me casually, in a spirit of ‘ain’t that crazy?’ Just lying there on the veranda. I think about it sometimes, and about its fellows. All the guns of Boston.

****

Charles Whitman, the Texas tower shooter, was probably affected by a brain tumour above his amygdala. Eric Harris was probably clinically deficient in empathy. Adam Lanza, who killed twenty small children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, suffered from severe anxiety and depression, and was probably on the autistic spectrum, though undiagnosed (and therefore unhelped); when Lanza was twelve a teacher observed that his written work exhibited ‘feelings of rage, hate and (at least unconscious) murderous impulses’. All these men gave ample warnings about what they would eventually do. But a warning is not precognition. Unease is not proof.

Rejected by, or never integrated into, the community, the mass shooter feels that he is nothing. To commit a mass shooting is a way of being something. It is a way of being a mass shooter: a potent figure of horror and dread. Schools are chosen because schools are sites of civic promise. They represent not just the community but the community’s hopes for its future. And the mass shooter is finished with community. Community is now the object of his revenge. By the same logic, universities, nightclubs and offices are also targets. But none of these places incarnate the fragility of our shared hopes in quite the way that a school does. At a memorial service in Dunblane Cathedral for the children who died on March 12th, held a week after the massacre, the Reverend Colin McIntosh found a form of words to express this: ‘When our parents die, they take with them a large portion of the past. But when children die, they take away the future as well.’

****

What a bad man. Thomas Hamilton differs from many of his fellow mass shooters in one key respect. He was, from his early twenties, a paedophile who arranged his life in such a way as to gratify his impermissible desires. When he could no longer do this successfully, he became isolated and consumed by rage – rage, we can speculate, against the parents and institutions (that is, schools) that no longer permitted him access to young boys.

There is no evidence that Hamilton ever sexually abused any of the boys in his clubs. He appeared content to dress them in small black swimming trunks and shout at them; he appeared content merely to take photographs. At least until late in his life, he was clever enough to know exactly how far he could push his behaviour before it struck people as definitely wrong. He could also be charming, in a limited way. At points, he had his defenders, among parents of the boys. Nonetheless, he was a predator. And you didn’t need a doctor’s clinical acumen to detect this. His guns increasingly made it clear, even if nothing else did. Now and then he would visit the houses of boys who had joined his clubs; he would carry a holdall containing ‘a semi-automatic rifle and three handguns […] he thought the boys would like to see his guns’.

Dunblane almost immediately became, and has remained in the public memory, a story about guns. But there were also versions of the story that emphasised institutional failure. Lord Cullen’s report on the massacre criticised a senior officer of the Central Scottish Police, Douglas McMurdo, who had signed off on the renewal of Thomas Hamilton’s firearm licence. McMurdo duly resigned. But in Stephen McGinty’s telling, the story of Dunblane isn’t really about institutional failure. It is at least partly the story of a predator who manipulated his community and its institutions until, perceiving what he was, and without any kind of official or even unofficial consensus, they rejected him.

Reading about Thomas Hamilton, I was reminded of certain sections of the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, also known as the Ryan Report (2009), in which it is made clear that Irish institutions, chief among them the Catholic Church, ignored or covered up clear cases of paedophilic abuse by priests until well into the 1990s. By contrast, the communities and institutions described by McGinty made it increasingly difficult for Hamilton to operate. Parents, school administrators, police, neighbours, friends, the Scouts, the Department of Social Security, the local gun clubs: in various official and sub-official ways, each of these rejected Hamilton, and for similar reasons. ‘Unease’: the word recurs.

When community receded beyond his reach, what Hamilton had left were guns. He called his handguns ‘my darlings’. What do we lose – what do we miss – when we make Dunblane a story about guns? Dunblane tends to pop up, nowadays, as a rhetorical token in online arguments about America’s gun laws. After a single school shooting, handguns were banned in the UK; therefore banning guns works; yet America continues to disgrace itself by passing no such ban. There is a comfortable European superiority detectable in the use of this rhetorical move, and an equally comfortable anti-Americanism. In this account, the existence of men who want to murder large numbers of small children is taken for granted. It is the ability of such men to procure guns that is important, and that must be changed.

The first recorded mass shooting in America occurred in Camden, New Jersey, on September 6th, 1949, when a WWII veteran and former sheet-metal worker named Howard Unruh shot thirteen people as he walked along a city block near his home. Unruh was almost certainly experiencing a psychotic episode arising from undiagnosed PTSD at the time. His wartime experiences had left him sullen, paranoid and increasingly isolated. The federal response to Unruh’s ‘walk of death’ was to improve social resources and healthcare for veterans. The availability of guns – Unruh had purchased his Luger P08 handgun at a Philadelphia sporting goods store – did not enter into it.

In other words, Unruh’s spree killing was understood to be a freak incident, originating in the psychological illness of one man. Since 1966, and Charles Whitman’s spree killing in Texas, we have increasingly tended to reject psychological explanations and to seek systemic, that is to say rationalist, causes for mass shootings. The spiralling sophistication of the weapons manufactured by arms makers; the growing profits reaped by those arms makers (the US firearms and ammunition industry made, in some estimates, over $90 billion in 2025); the lobbying industry maintained to protect those profits; the existence, or promotion, of ‘gun culture’ (How many American movies and TV shows feature guns? All of them?); failures in mental health services; the fraying of the American social safety net; and, pre-eminently, the wide legal availability of guns in the United States.

What is seldom said: you need both the systemic and the psychological explanations, and you need to acknowledge that no two cases are exactly the same; and even all of this will prove, in the end, inadequate. What mass shootings confront us with – and this is most especially and acutely true in the case of school shootings – is the problem of evil, and the poverty of our solutions to it. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, responsibility is often delegated to God (the phrase, now mostly trotted out by lazy satirists, used to be ‘thoughts and prayers’). In the United States, this is a way of refusing collective social or political responsibility. But it also expresses a hidden truth: we do not know what to do with these men, or how to explain the atrocities they commit. We do not know where to locate the fault. In the mind? In childhood? In trauma? In the failures of parents, in the lapses of a school counsellor, in the corruptions of a decaying polity? In the soul?

****

Three days after the massacre, John Major visited Dunblane. He was accompanied by Tony Blair. Major had not wanted to go. He disliked what he called ‘tragedy visits’. Before they visited the primary school, the politicians were briefed by Chief Constable William Wilson of the Central Scotland Police. Major did not ask about Thomas Hamilton’s access to guns. Instead, he asked if Hamilton had watched violent videos. The murder of toddler Jamie Bulger by two young boys in Merseyside in February 1993 was presumably on Major’s mind; the consoling public narrative built in the aftermath of that event had to do with the pernicious influence of ‘video nasties’, some of which Bulger’s killers had watched. Major’s reaction, on seeing the pools of blood in the school gym, was to turn to Ron Taylor, the deeply traumatised headmaster of Dunblane Primary, and say, ‘We must tear it down.’ The gym building was duly demolished at the end of March 1996: out of sight, out of mind.

Blair’s response was different. McGinty’s account reminds you that Blair was at one time a gifted politician, with a real if narrow moral sense, and an unfailing instinct for the public mood. Listening alongside Major as parents of victims – most vocally Isabel MacBeath, who had lost her five-year-old daughter Mhairi – criticised the Central Scotland Police for leaving them in the dark for hours about their children’s fates, Blair felt constrained by protocol to remain silent (he could not upstage the prime minister). Between that meeting and the official visit to the gym, he dashed off an empathetic letter to Isabel MacBeath. ‘The letter would mean more to the young mother that he would ever know,’ McGinty writes. After Dunblane, Blair, with the support of Alastair Campbell, resolved to back a handgun ban in the Labour manifesto.

But Labour was not yet in power. Demonstrating the extraordinary capacity to disgrace himself that has marked his entire career in public life, Boris Johnson wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph a week after the massacre suggesting that a handgun ban was pointless and that a Tory MP who supported such a ban was in an ‘ecstasy of politically correct sycophancy’. Johnson spoke, as McGinty makes clear, for a majority of Tory MPs. The impulse, in government, was to understand, and therefore to dismiss, Dunblane as a freak incident, originating in the mind of a disturbed man. The final third of One Day in March tracks the public and official responses to the massacre, including various moves by the British gun lobby after Dunblane to keep British gun laws unchanged. Make no mistake: real efforts were made to protect an Englishman’s historic right to own and shoot a gun. Real money was spent, and real venom was directed at the (quietly heroic) gun-control campaign group formed by some of the bereaved parents of Dunblane.

But McGinty’s account leads more or less inescapably to the conclusion that ‘gun culture’ is and was simply a weaker force in British public life than it has ever been in the United States. To castigate the United States for failing to respond to Columbine (or Virginia Tech or Sandy Hook or Parkland, et cetera) as the UK responded to Dunblane is to elide the contexts that made the UK response possible. Handgun owners made up a tiny minority in Britain. The Tories, after eighteen years in power, had exhausted their political capital. The bereaved parents used their own unwanted political capital bravely and well. Tony Blair saw that a handgun ban would be a popular electoral promise. If Dunblane had occurred in the mid-1980s, with Thatcher in Number 10 – well. Context is everything.

And the American context – we cannot avoid it – is intractable. There is simply too much money to be made by selling machines of death on the mass market; the Second Amendment might as well have been written by the arms industry, its only beneficiary. Out in the lonely reaches of the fraying republic, young men – and it is overwhelmingly men – increasingly find no thriving communities in which they themselves might thrive. Online, they find parodies of community, and parodies of thriving. Gradually they begin to see the world through the crosshairs of a rifle; they begin to understand ‘community’ as a disappointment, a betrayal. They begin to plan their revenge. Where does evil begin? Perhaps in the unseen moments when we fail each other, or in the gathering of many such moments, over a damaged lifetime. Or perhaps the damage is there from the beginning; perhaps this is the thing we cannot see.

The children who died in the school gym in Dunblane were in Primary 1. We would call them Junior Infants. Their names were Victoria Clydesdale (age five), Emma Crozier (five), Melissa Currie (five), Charlotte Dunn (five), Kevin Hasell (five), Ross Irvine (five), David Kerr (five), Mhairi MacBeath (five), Brett McKinnon (six), Abigail McLennan (five), Emily Morton (five), Sophie North (five), John Petrie (five), Joanna Ross (five), Hannah Scott (five) and Megan Turner (five). Their teacher was Gwen Mayor.

Two years after the shooting, the Dunblane Charitable Trust was formed. The Trust had a single purpose: to construct a memorial to the dead that would also be a place for the living. What they built was a community centre. It is still in use.