A leading US newspaper which used its first front page editorial in almost a century to call for tightening gun laws has contrasted the UK's decisive response to the Dunblane massacre with the "gun epidemic" that persists in the US.
The New York Times devoted its front page to opinion for the first time since 1920 yesterday "to deliver a strong and visible statement of frustration and anguish about our country's inability to come to terms with the scourge of guns" and the nation's "failure to protect its citizens".
Under the headline "In Scotland, Unlike America, Mass Shooting Led to Stricter Gun Laws", the paper praised the UK's response to the murder of 16 children by Thomas Hamilton before he turned the gun on himself in March 1996.
The UK government banned the private ownership of automatic weapons and handguns the following year.
The New York Times said: "Such swift action has been absent in the United States, even after years of deadly rampages, at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conneticut, where the collective trauma is perhaps most similar to what this small town (Dunblane) continues to feel.
"Still, after more mass shootings, including one last week at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and another at a government building in San Bernardino, California, people pushing for stricter gun safety laws in the United States struggle to marshal the consensus that took hold so quickly in Scotland and made the ban there so welcome".
Sir Stephen House, who stepped down as Police Scotland's chief constable last month, told the New York Times that "only one or two" of the 55 killings in Scotland in in the last 12 months were shootings and the last gang-related fatal shooting happened two years ago.
"Gangs in Scotland don't tend to have guns," he said.
"We do have organised crime, and they have access to firearms. They don't use them very often, but they have access to firearms and it's pretty intensely drugs -related; they're bringing the drugs into the country either direct from Europe or direct from Spain or up from England."
He said the Dunblane response reduced the number of guns in circulation in Britain.
"I guess it meant there was less to be stolen in burglaries that would go into the criminal underworld," he said.
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