The Dunblane Tapes (Ch4)
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For all his songs of outlaws and gangsters, Bob Dylan made it very clear where he stood on gun control laws when the children of Dunblane wrote to ask him if they could record one of his greatest hits — and change the lyrics.
‘Lord, these guns have caused too much pain. This town will never be the same,’ ran the 1996 campaign anthem, a cover of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. ‘So for the bairns of Dunblane, We ask, please never again.’
Within 24 hours of contacting Dylan’s manager, a fax came back. On this one occasion, and solely because of the reason behind the recording, the world’s greatest protest singer was granting his permission.
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door duly went straight to No 1 as part of the Dunblane Snowdrop campaign. Months later, Parliament passed a total ban on private handgun ownership in Britain.
The Dunblane Tapes told how, in the aftermath of the horrendous mass murder at a primary school in Scotland, the grieving town organised a petition to stop people from keeping small arms in their homes.
The first 20 minutes of the documentary relived the atrocity, when 16 children aged five and six were slaughtered by a gunman. Their teacher, Gwen Mayor, was also killed, trying to protect them.
Les Morton and John Crozier, who both lost children in the Dunblane tragedy
The Dunblane Tapes includes interviews with parents of the victims
The grief and shock of parents, as news cameras arrived in the hours after the shooting, is still unbearable to watch, 30 years on. Former MP Lord (Michael) Forsyth, who was Secretary of State for Scotland at the time, choked up as he described his horror on going into the school gym where the bodies lay.
‘I completely lost it,’ he said.
‘It was a scene from hell.’
Other footage came from home video recorded by grieving father John Crozier, whose daughter Emma was one of the victims. He befriended another man, Les Morton, whose overwhelming distress at the loss of his own child, Emily, took the form of white-hot anger.
Even at his most distraught, pouring out his feelings to his friend’s camcorder, Mr Morton’s emotion was always expressed with savage eloquence. ‘Who would ever have thought,’ he demanded, ‘that the guy next door to you quite legally could be armed to the teeth?’
As their campaign to ban all handguns gathered pace, they met bitter resistance. Anonymous gun fanatics sent hate mail. Pro-gun MPs protested the ban was a nonsense, since shotguns (not included under the restrictions) were even more dangerous.
‘My daughter’s right not to be shot by a legally held gun,’ retorted Mr Crozier, ‘is more important than anybody’s right to legally hold that gun.’
Today, private ownership of handguns is regarded as unthinkable. We look across the Atlantic to the U.S. in bafflement at their impossibly lax gun laws.
This documentary ended on the most telling note of all: since Dunblane, there has not been a school shooting in the UK.
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