Once again, news from the US has provided a shocking reminder of the pain and devastation of losing a loved one in a shooting. Nothing can prepare you for how it feels to drop your child off at the school gates in the morning and never see them alive again. Twenty-six years ago, that’s what my family was forced to endure. My five-year-old daughter Sophie was one of the victims of the Dunblane primary school massacre on 13 March 1996.
Not for the first time, parallels are being drawn between what happened in a small Scottish town and what took place yesterday in another small town in the US. The horror of the events is the same, but while Dunblane was Britain’s only school shooting, the same cannot be said of the events at Robb elementary school in Uvalde. It was the latest in a litany of mass shootings in the US, often at schools.
