Aren’t all personal firearms illegal in the U.K? How hard would it have been for an ordinary taxi driver to get a 12 gauge? Sorry if these questions are obvious, but I am not a gun advocate, and so have not researched all the gun laws around the world.
I guess what I’m saying is that, if this guy had to go to some trouble to get the firearm, he must have been really wanting to kill a bunch a people for a long time, and didn’t just snap one day.
No, handguns are hard to own, but lots of people (especially in rural areas) have shotguns and/or .22 rifles. There are reasonably strict checks for ownership, but lots of everyday folk own shotguns and will keep them at home. It wouldn’t have been at all difficult to get hold of a shotgun even if he didn’t already own one, particularly in the region he lived in.
Around 30 altogether killed or injured as he drove along apparently at random shooting people? Can’t even comprehend that mindset required, nor I guess would any of us want to.
Condolences to our British dopers. A lot of folks will be suffering for a long time over this one.
It is believed he’d lived in the area all his life, had two brothers that lived nearby, was quiet and likeable and recently became a grandfather for the first time.
I guess there will be some event in the last 24 hrs that pushed him over the edge… he doesn’t sound the same sort of chap as Michael Ryan or Thomas Hamilton (i.e. obsessed loner/nutter).
Interesting that even with Great Britian’s very tough and stringent gun control laws, something like this still happens. Can’t legislate rational sane behavior.
Without wanting to necessarily go down this line of discussion, while it’s certainly true that gun laws won’t stop every event like this, we in the UK have had 3 mass shootings since WW2 in a nation of 60 million, which suggests things are about right.
I guess you could compare that to the number of shootings in the last 10 yrs in the USA, with much more liberal gun laws and a larger population, and it doesn’t look like the UK necessarily needs to change anything.
Ultimately there are “trying to prove a negative” arguments on both sides - it’s hard to prove how many events like this were prevented by UK gun control laws (i.e. someone thought about going on a rampage but couldn’t get their hands on a gun), but by the same token it’s hard to prove how many similar events were stopped by the threat of an armed public in the USA.
Either way this is a very unusual situation in the UK and we’re not really sure how to deal with it.
Current reports indicate a shotgun and a .22 rifle.
It seems he shot his twin brother and the family solicitor in a dispute over a will, then attacked taxi drivers at a cab stand (there are indications of another dispute with fellow taxi drivers), and then set out on a random killing spree before killing himself. He was very deliberate in his actions, calling one of his victims over to his car before shooting. It’s really sad, because it is possible that the escalation after the family related and taxi related killings was an attempt to force a lethal response by police, or to drive up his own self-loathing preparatory to suicide. We will probably never know.