America needs a calm gun control debate

Istill find it hard to look at the photograph of the Dunblane victims. They stare out with such unbearable cheerfulness and curiosity. What happened to those children is unthinkable. Try to hold it in your mind and your thoughts skim off the surface.

If the rest of us feel that way, what must it be like for those who were in the school on the day, or waiting desperately at its gates? Last week, on the anniversary of the abomination, a group from Dunblane wrote to survivors of the recent school shooting in Florida – a gesture of sympathy with others who had known the ultimate pain.

“We persuaded British lawmakers not to be swayed by the vested interests of the gun lobby,” said the Dunblane families. “We asked them to put public safety first and to heed what the majority of the British people wanted.”

It is commendable to want to salvage something positive from a tragedy. Less commendable, perhaps, is the media’s tendency to apply a “victim test”, measuring government policy chiefly against what survivors think. When people have been through a terrible trauma, they deserve support and sympathy, but they do not become policy experts. Journalists who treat them as if they were do them few favours.

Our justice system rests on the idea that difficult decisions should be made coolly and disinterestedly by people not directly involved in a case. Our political system used to rest on the same principle. But, after Dunblane, that changed. It was decided that policy should be proportionate, not to the requirements of prevention, but to the level of public outrage. John Major had banned handguns, exempting only those used in competition if they were locked in secure clubs.

But that was not enough for the new Opposition leader, Tony Blair, who told delegates at the 1996 Labour conference that anything short of a total ban dishonoured the children: “Conservative MPs complain that our response has been emotional. If they had been in that gym, if they had talked to those parents, sitting on those tiny chairs where once their children had sat, they would have been emotional, too.”

Actually, the only reason that Blair himself had “been in that gym” was that Major, out of sheer decency, had invited him to come. The decency was not reciprocated.

In the event, the ban had little impact: gun crime rose for a further six years, then fell. Would a ban in the United States make a bigger difference? There is certainly a case for stricter controls in many states, but we shouldn’t exaggerate their impact in a country where guns already outnumber people.

All Americans want to prevent school shootings, but a calm debate about how to secure that objective is difficult when one side accuses the other of not sharing it. The dead deserve better than to be used as props in arguments. God knows they have suffered enough.