Hungerford & Dunblane

A lady comforted by a policeman after the Dunblane massacre in 1996

A Shattering of Trust

It begins with a fracture in the everyday – a moment when the familiar turns lethal, when the air grows thick with acrid sting of gunpowder and the iron tang of lives undone. In two quiet corners of Britain, separated by nine years, horror erupts: massacres so brutal that they carved themselves into the national psyche. Hungerford, 19th August 1987, and Dunblane, 13th March 1996. Each a tableau of devastation, each a hinge in a nation’s arc, each a step toward stripping a people of their means to resist, perhaps forever.

What if these were not mere outbursts of broken men, but something colder, a staged spectacle to provoke dread, to usher in a solution long coveted by those who wield power? The pattern is as old as dominion itself: a crisis unfurls, the public recoils in anguish, and the state tightens its grip, cloaking coercion as deliverance. Hungerford and Dunblane, this narrative contends, were levers, tools to disarm Britain, rendering its citizens bare before a government wary of their latent strength.

Beneath the scrubbed veneer of official tales lurk whispers: vanished evidence, entombed secrets, a design more sinister than grief can bear. This is no flight into fantasy, but a sober reckoning with the plausible, a peeling back of layers to unveil a nation betrayed, not by fate, but by intent. Here, in the crucible of tragedy, we seek not just answers, but the courage to question.

Echoes of Manipulation

The notion that violence can be bent to serve power is no modern heresy, but threads that are woven into our history. In 1605, the Gunpowder Plot loomed beneath Parliament, a Catholic bid to topple a king, or a snare woven by Robert Cecil to crush dissent, tightening royal reins on a fractious realm. Across the centuries and the Atlantic, Chicago’s 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre saw seven gangsters felled in a garage, their deaths splashed across tabloids to spur America’s first federal gun laws, and easing Prohibition’s overreach. In 1798, British agents stoked the Irish Rebellion, goading uprisings to justify martial law’s iron hand. But closer to home, the echoes of war and revolution birthed a subtler clampdown.

The Roots of Control

Long before Hungerford’s bloodied streets or Dunblane’s silenced gymnasium, Britain’s rulers laid the groundwork for a disarmed populace, their gaze fixed on a subtler foe than foreign armies: the spectre of their own people’s unrest. The First World War had ended in 1918 unleashing a flood of firearms into civilian hands, war trophies held on to by returning soldiers or scavenged from a nation awash in surplus. Before 1920, these could be bought as freely as a loaf of bread, no questions asked. Yet the Russian Revolution’s shadow had loomed, and its red tide was lapping at Britain’s shores through strikes, race riots, and whispers of Bolshevist upheaval in 1919.

The British state, rattled by visions of violent proletarians storming Westminster, did not want an armed populace and struck back with the Firearms Act of 1920, which was a law not designed to purge guns outright, but to put them on a leash, until a later date. Certificates, issued at police discretion, became the gate, and “good reason” the key to approval for a firearm. No mass raids ensued, but amnesties coaxed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, into surrendering their weapons, in a quiet cull that was born out of fear but masquerading as order.

The Second World War swelled the tide of unregistered firearms. The Home Guard, armed with 1.5 million rifles, were stood down in 1944, their weapons meant for military vaults or scrap heaps. Yet many lingered, soon to be joined by souvenirs from Europe’s battlefields. The Firearms Act of 1937 had already sharpened the blade of the 1920 act, and post 1945 amnesties pressed even harder, urging citizens to yield their wartime relics, another tens of thousands, by a rough reckoning, melted into oblivion.

This was containment, the slow grind of law and persuasion, stripping a nation’s hands not by force but by consent coerced through civic duty, amnesty and an alternative threat of penalty. By the mid 20^th century, perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 firearms had vanished from circulation in the UK, the start of a legacy of control that set the stage for the sharper cuts of 1988 and 1997, the British state’s long game, honed in the crucible of a genuine fear of revolution.

Australia’s 1996 Port Arthur slaughter unfolded with chilling precision – Martin Bryant, a man of scant intellect, killed 35, ushering in firearms bans cheered on by a public too shattered to question the haste. Britain’s own ledger mirrors this. The 1920s brought MI5-orchestrated IRA bombings, pinned on innocents to expand the surveillance state, while Operation Clockwork Orange smeared dissenters to preserve the status quo. Hungerford and Dunblane slide into this lineage almost exactly: wounds leveraged, liberties lost, power fortified.

Hungerford: A Day of Horror

19th August, 1987. Hungerford basks in late summer sun, its half-timbered houses aglow, flower baskets swaying in a gentle breeze. A market town of unlocked doors and neighbourly nods, it hums with rural ease – cricket scores the day’s gravest concern. Then, at lunchtime, that gentle ease is ruptured, forever.

12:40 PM: Marjorie Ellis, a cashier with 20 years at the Golden Arrow Service Station, dials 999. “A man fired at me! The glass exploded… shards everywhere. He’s in a red car, driving off!” Her voice quavers, hands trembling as she grips the receiver, splinters piercing her arm, crimson trickling onto the counter. “I ducked, just in time,” she later recalls, her eyes still wide with the memory.

12:47 PM: Harold Grayson, a retired mechanic on Southview, calls in a frenzy. “He’s got a rifle… shooting at cars! My neighbour’s down, blood across the driveway!” A crack splits the air. “He’s coming! He’s aiming at me!” The line cuts to static. His wife, Elsie, finds him slumped against the kitchen door, a bullet through his shoulder, his breath ragged. “I thought he’d fix the sink that day,” she weeps to a reporter, the mundane undone by terror.

12:53 PM: Near Hungerford Common, a woman’s scream pierces the switchboard. “He shot a policeman! There’s blood pooling on the grass! He’s turning on us now!” Her toddler wails as she drops the phone, fleeing with the child clutched tight, her husband’s fate unknown. Over 120 calls flood in Thames Valley Police, a cacophony of despair from a town unravelling at the seams.

Michael Ryan, 27, a reclusive gun enthusiast, wields a Beretta pistol, an M1 carbine, and a Type 56 rifle. In six hours, he claims 16 lives, his mother Dorothy among them, shot in their home at 88 Priory Road, her eyes frozen as the life ebbs away. Dozens more bear wounds that scar body and soul. Susan Godfrey, 33, is dragged from a picnic with her children, executed with 13 bullets in a wooded clearing off Fairview Road; her four-year-old son hides behind a tree, his sobs muffled by leaves. A shopkeeper peering from his window recalls, “He reloaded like a soldier, smooth, fast, muttering to himself, lost in his head.” A teenage girl, who had crouched behind a wall, whispers later to police, “His eyes were empty, yet focused. No flinch, no haste.”

PC Roger Brereton arrives at 1:02 PM, unarmed and alone, only to fall in the lino of duty in his patrol car on Southview, radio crackling with unanswered pleas as crimson seeps across the dashboard. His widow, Linda, will raise their two daughters in his absence.

Armed units, summoned at 12:43 PM, are nowhere to be seen until a full 50 minutes after the first emergency call, then kept a safe distance, ordered not to engage, and Ryan roams unchecked for several hours. A survivor recounts, “They watched from the cordon. I begged them to stop him, but they stood there, rifles lowered, useless.” By 6:52 PM, he barricades himself in John O’Gaunt School, ending his spree with a shot to his skull, leaving a town in ruins, windows broken, pavements stained, a stillness as heavy as the death-toll.

Questions continue to gnaw. Ryan had amassed an arsenal, with permits granted despite his fixation on firearms, his rapid stockpiling and his retreat into isolation. His mother boasted of his ties to RAF Greenham Common, a U.S. base 10 miles away hosting nuclear missiles and shrouded in Cold War intrigue. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, protesting since 1981, reported strange happenings, disorientation, blamed on low-frequency weapons or psy-ops, fuelling whispers of a mind control program akin to MK Ultra. A camper’s log which came to light in 2016 reports seeing “a man like Ryan near the fence in 1986, muttering, vacant, watched by suits.”

His tactical skill alone, trigger control, reloading under fire, evading pursuit, all hint at training beyond a hobbyist’s scope. Was he a subject, a lethal weapon in unseen hands? No records confirm it, and the official report is mute. Yet the proximity, his mother’s words, and Greenham’s opaque past keep the ember glowing. Within months, the Firearms Act of 1988 bans semi-automatic weapons and curbs shotguns, a legislation poised as if pre-drafted, embraced by a public too dazed to resist.

Greif Beyond Measure: Dunblane

13th March, 1996. A bitter wind scours Dunblane, frosting the windows of its grey stone cottages. The Lowland stirs beneath a leaden sky, narrow streets tracing past the old cathedral spire, a steadfast watch over a community nestled by the Allan Water’s gentle murmur. At Dunblane Primary School, childhood unfolds, coats hung askew, laughter bouncing off brick walls, the smell of crayons and powder paints in the air. In the gymnasium, the five and six-year-olds gather for PE, their voices a chorus of warmth and trust. At 9:35 AM, that trust shatters.

Having cut what he thought were the schools only lines of communication, Thomas Hamilton, aged 43, enters the school armed with four handguns: two Brownings, two Smith & Wessons, and 743 rounds of ammunition. In just three minutes, he extinguishes the lives of 16 innocent children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, their bodies strewn across the gym floor, tiny limbs tangled in mats, faces locked in terror, while seventeen others cling to life amid smoke and devastation.

9:43 AM: After discovering the carnage Headmaster Ron Taylor, barricaded in his office, dials 999. “He’s shooting in the gym. There are kids shot! Bleeding! Get here now!” Screams filter through the walls as his voice cracks. “I can’t see them all,” he stammers, hands shaking on the receiver. “How many?” the dispatcher presses. “Too many – God help us,” he whispers, choking on the words.

Seconds later, Eileen Harrild, shielding pupils behind a table, calls in a hushed frenzy. “He’s firing. I hear the clicks, he’s reloading. They’re so scared. Please!” Her arm stains the floor, a bullet graze weeping red as a child whimpers beside her. Across the road, Margaret Fraser, on her doorstep, sobs into the phone. “My girl’s in there! Kids are running out, faces covered with blood. Do something!” Her knees buckle as her daughter, Sophie, stumbles free, a graze on her cheek, her cries lost in the wind. What they are yet to realise is that at 9:38 AM, Hamilton had turned a gun on himself, collapsing amongst the carnage, a grotesque sentinel over the wreckage he had wrought.

Known to locals as a misfit, Hamilton faced years of complaints, leering at boys, photographing them in scant trunks, yet Central Scotland Police renewed his licence in 1995 despite numerous reasons to object. Harrild later recounts, “He moved like a machine. No rage, just purpose.” A surviving boy, huddled in a corner, whispers to police upon rescue, “He didn’t look at us. He just kept shooting, like he couldn’t stop.”

On 15th March, DI Angus McFarlane discovers that Hamilton’s firearms logbook is missing from the evidence vault; he reports it to Superintendent Iain Gordon, only to be sidelined to desk duty, his career stalled. Fiona MacDonald, a clerk, uncovers photos in a sealed envelope – Hamilton with stern men outside a Masonic lodge at 10 Doune Road, his posture submissive. Her supervisor confiscates them, warning, “Say nothing,” leaving her sleepless. Lord Cullen’s inquiry seals hundreds of files, police logs, witness statements, until 2096, a shroud of secrecy unprecedented for a civilian crime.

Hamilton’s ties to Queen Victoria School (QVS), a military boarding school three miles away, deepen the riddle. He accessed its firing range and ran camps, linked via a shadowy “Friends of QVS” group. In his blog, Sir Fixed It For Jim, Tom Minogue alleges that Masonic elites shielded Hamilton; Glenn Harrison, a former housemaster, claims Hamilton’s visits overlapped with George Robertson’s, a local MP, who went on to become New Labour’s Defence Secretary in 1997 and Secretary General of NATO in 1999, leading to speculation that Robertson knew too much; his rise, no accident.

Was Hamilton a pawn in a paedophile network, his obsessions honed by intelligence shadows? MI5’s legacy, Tavistock’s perception games, Kincora’s blackmail, all offers a template, yet proof remains elusive, a whisper in the dark. By 1997, the Firearms Acts ban handguns, completing Britain’s disarmament, the earth still loose over tiny graves, barely ready for headstones.

A Nation Unmoored

The scars are cut deep, beyond flesh wounds. Marjorie Ellis, nursing her pierced arm in a quiet flat, flinches at sudden sounds, her trust in authority shattered by police inertia and impotence. “I still see his car, red, roaring away,” she confesses, her voice all a tremor. Elsie Grayson stares at an empty chair, Harold’s absence a void that no words ever fill. Margaret Fraser clutches her daughter Sophie through sleepless nights, haunted by a state that ignored Hamilton’s red flags. “I check her window every hour,” she admits, fear her constant shadow.

This trauma reshaped Britain’s very soul. Post-Dunblane, Stirling’s child services logged a 30% spike in anxiety cases by 1997, parents and pupils alike. Two decades on, Dunblane’s residents recount a town reshaped by grief, their words heavy with the sting of police impotence. “Schools stand as targets now—doors barred, trust shattered,” one mother laments, her voice a quiet echo of a safety forever lost.

The Tavistock Institute observes that mass trauma shatters a people’s collective resolve, rendering them malleable to control. Hungerford and Dunblane instilled a bitter lesson in helplessness, each shot reverberating as a reminder of human fragility, each subsequent law forging a link in a chain that bound a psyche to yield to greater state dominion. Yet, the promised safety falters as knife crimes surge, London’s blade offences climbing by 20% just four years later, and Glasgow’s streets torn by new violence, a stark rebuke to the assurances of healing, revealing a nation not restored but subdued. Philosophers like Hobbes might contend that fear unites societies; here, it sundered one, leaving its people to confront the disarmed shadow of their former selves.

In this void, the right to defend oneself stands as a bulwark against such fragility, a primal shield woven into society’s fabric, ensuring not just survival but sovereignty over one’s fate. Stripping away a nation’s firearms, as Britain did, dismantles this shield – once a given, but now long since faded from the collective memory – leaving citizens reliant on a state too often impotent in crisis: Hungerford’s dawdling armed response, Dunblane’s ignored warnings. Far from bolstering safety, it gives rise to a paradox: violence shifts to blades, fear deepens, and the powerless face threats unarmed, proving that disarming a people does not heal their wounds but lays them bare to new ones.

The Unseen Hand: Who Pulled The Levers?

Thames Valley’s Chief Constable Colin Smith retires in 1989, resurfacing as a consultant at a security firm with ties to MI5, his silence rewarded with a soft landing. Greenham’s proximity at just 10 miles from Hungerford raises questions of psy-ops, peace campers reporting disorientation that mirrors Ryan’s calm precision. “We felt watched, heard hums that weren’t there,” one recalls. No records link him to the base, but his skill fuels doubts unanswered by official accounts.

Lord Cullen, a Freemason tied to Edinburgh’s elite, seals Dunblane’s truth until 2096. Hamilton’s protection, his guns permitted despite complaints, and the missing logbook point to MI5’s influence. Tom Minogue writes, “He was no lone wolf, but a tool, shielded by those who knew his purpose.” Robertson’s QVS connections and later rise to NATO chief suggests complicity, though proof stays an elusive persistent unanswered question.

Inquiries deliver containment, not clarity. Thames Valley Police insist on “lessons learned” after Hungerford, but fail to explain why armed officers took fifty minutes to arrive, despite initial calls flooding in at 12:40 PM, citing staff shortages and staff training, yet the delay’s full cause remains unclear. For Dunblane, Cullen’s locked files, hundreds buried for a century, block any real investigation, while Robertson’s vague promises of justice leave Hamilton’s unchecked arsenal unaddressed. The state tightens its hold through these efforts, key figures retreating from scrutiny as public resistance weakens. Trust erodes, replaced by an illusion of order. Far from seeking truth, these inquiries serve as carefully staged acts, obscuring the mechanisms that shape control and leaving unresolved questions in their wake.

A Disarmed Dominion

But why disarm a nation? An armed citizenry checks tyranny, Magna Carta’s barons wielded swords, the Levellers muskets, to wrest rights from power. Hungerford and Dunblane were catalysts, each ushering in laws to bind a populace the state feared might defy it. How convenient, then, that each horror spotlighted a distinct arsenal: Hungerford’s rifles, Dunblane’s handguns, both offering bespoke pretexts for a stepwise purge. First they came for the rifles in 1988, then the handguns in 1997, a progression too neat to dismiss as chance, as if scripted to dismantle resistance piece by piece.

It is well understood that as the Cold War’s end in 1991 the battlefield shifted inward – Britain, aligned with NATO’s order, neutered domestic threats to its role as a pliant ally. The US, post-Columbine in 1999, kept its guns as a counterweight to overreach, while Britain’s surrender softened its sovereignty, a vassal state in all but name.

This was no quirk of policy, but a sophisticated manoeuvre. The 1980s saw Thatcher crush unions; the 1990s, Blair’s New Labour cements globalist ties. Disarmament ensured no yeoman’s rifle could challenge a government tethered to Washington’s orbit, or defend itself against a fracturing social order. They feared a militia rising from the council estates, and the cost? A nation laid naked, its vaunted safety a mocking whisper as knives usurp bullets, belying the lie fed since the 1980s that stripping arms breeds peace, when once, an armed populace stood courteous, bound by the quiet strength that is the threat of self-defence.

Conclusion: The Unseen Weight of a Disarmed Destiny

What lingers after Hungerford and Dunblane is not merely the echo of gunfire or the names etched on gravestones, but a question that gnaws at the edges of comprehension: were these ruptures in Britain’s quiet fabric the work of lone mad men, or the faint outlines of a purpose too vast to fully understand? Michael Ryan’s methodical precision, Thomas Hamilton’s mechanical detachment, these are not just portraits of madness, but traces of something that might have been shaped, directed, set loose to rend and reshape. The sanctioned narratives of errant souls undone by their own chaos crumble when pressed, yielding glimpses of a harder reality: tragedy is a forge, and what it crafts is dominion.

This is the story’s marrow. Across these pages, we have walked the bloodied streets of a market town and stood amid the gymnasium’s ruin, tracing the threads from shattered lives to sealed vaults, from Greenham’s whispers to Queen Victoria School’s shadowed halls. Marjorie Ellis, her arm pierced by glass, still hears the roar of a red car in her sleep. Elsie Grayson tends an empty home, Harold’s tools rusting in silence. Margaret Fraser watches her daughter’s scarred face, a mother’s vigilance now her only shield. Theirs was the toll – the currency of a shift that left Britain’s hands empty, its streets no longer its own, policed by a state that brooks no rival. The Firearms Acts of 1988 and 1997 were not responses, but outcomes, the fruit of a harvest sown in terror.

Yet this is more than a tale of laws or lost rifles, it is a meditation on what it means to live beneath power’s gaze. History reveals no innocent sovereign; it is a ledger of crises bent to bind, of freedoms bartered for the mirage of safety. The past murmurs its cautions through the Levellers’ defiance, the Irish rebels’ crushed hopes, but those voices fade as recollection dims. What remains is a nation altered, its spirit not broken but bowed, accustomed to the weight of a quiet victory it did not choose. To peer into this abyss is not to chase phantoms, but to confront a clarity as stark as it is unsettling: what we have relinquished was not merely gunmetal and powder, but a piece of our capacity to stand against the oppression.

This legacy of doubt is no mere academic quibble, it is a call to reckon with the unseen. Hungerford and Dunblane stand as markers, not endpoints, of a continuum where power thrives by turning sorrow into submission. They ask us to look beyond the official ink, to weigh the silences, to ponder why a people once armed with both will and means now walk a land where the state’s shadow stretches unbroken. The cost was paid in lives lost and lives unmade, a sacrifice not just of the fallen, but of a sovereignty surrendered. In the end, this is the grand unravelling: not a conspiracy etched in stone, but a possibility that haunts: a mirror held to a nation’s face, reflecting what it has become, and what it might yet refuse to be.

Afterword: Framing and Context

Hungerford and Dunblane are no outliers, but not too long ago I stood far from such thoughts. I acknowledged conspiracies, such as, Watergate, Iran-Contra, JFK, and the rest, as historical facts, blemishes on a West I believed to be, at its core, just. I certainty held that view until COVID. The silencing, doctors struck off for questioning vaccines, platforms purged of dissent, governments locking down lives while elites flouted rules, ripped away the mask. That faith has crumbled watching official narratives grow brittle, their contradictions glaring.

We now stand at a place and time, where we must question everything we are being, or have ever been, told, taking it as a given that official government and mainstream media narratives drift between tales so stripped of context and shrouded in falsehoods that they bear no likeness to truth, or even worse, reflect the stark opposite of what is true.

Over the past two years, I have watched American politics with keen interest, and around the first attempted assassination of Trump, amid the debates that followed, two truths struck me as undeniable, insights I could hardly believe I had overlooked before: the 1st and 2nd Amendments, freedom of speech and the right to bear arms, inseparably bound, the former unprotected without the latter’s might. Their stark brilliance recast the American Revolution, once dismissed in my mind as elite greed exacted through the blood of common men, into what I now believe to have been history’s truest people’s uprising.

That realisation stirred a question: why are we unarmed in the UK? There must have been a time, even a fleeting one, years ago, before gun control took hold. Then Hungerford and Dunblane surfaced in my memory, and with them a sudden question: could two of the most indelible tragedies on British soil in recent memory have been false flags? So, with little hope of finding anything to support my suspicions, I began digging, and to my surprise…

These massacres are but threads in a broader tapestry of deception stretching across decades and continents, where Western states have conspired against their own – not as aberrations, but as policy. History, peeled of its sanitised veneer, reveals a litany of orchestrated chaos, silenced dissent, and engineered crises, all designed to tighten the noose of control, and it is a pattern too consistent to dismiss, demanding we look harder at the hands that govern.

Take the United States’ COINTELPRO, a clandestine campaign waged by the FBI from 1956 to 1971, exposed by a break-in at an office in Media, Pennsylvania. It targeted civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and Black Panthers with infiltration, disinformation, and assassination. Martin Luther King Jr. was hounded with fabricated sex scandals, his hotel rooms bugged, his life threatened by letters urging suicide, all documented in declassified files. Fred Hampton’s 1969 murder, shot in his bed by Chicago police guided by FBI intelligence, tore the Panthers apart, his blood a warning to dissenters. The program’s end marked nothing more than a shift to subtler methods which linger still in modern surveillance.

Britain’s 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike, which was no mere labour dispute, saw MI5’s deep infiltration of the National Union of Miners, planting agents to sow discord and justify police violence. At Orgreave, on June 18, 1984, mounted officers charged strikers with truncheons, fracturing skulls, while BBC footage framed miners as aggressors, and yielding over 90 arrests with no convictions, but breaking the union’s back for pit closures, all the same.

Across the Irish Sea, Bloody Sunday’s 1972 bullets felled 14 unarmed civilians in Derry, whitewashed by the Widgery Tribunal as “reckless but justified” until the 2010 Saville Inquiry confirmed they had been deliberate killings, while exposing planted evidence and perjured testimony. MI5’s Stakeknife orchestrated murders within the IRA to prolong conflict; Pat Finucane’s 1989 killing – shot 14 times in his home as his family watched – was tied to intelligence collusion with loyalists.

Beyond these shores, the 2003 Iraq War, sold on fabricated WMD claims – Colin Powell’s UN vial, the Downing Street Memo’s “fixed” intelligence – cost over 100,000 lives for profit and geopolitics.

Canada’s 1970 October Crisis invoked martial law after the kidnapping of a British diplomat and a Quebec labour minister by the FLQ (a Marxist, separatist terrorist group), amid inflated claims about the groups reach and capabilities by Royal Canadian Mounted Police playing provocateurs in order to crush Quebec separatism.

Australia’s 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, orchestrated by the U.S. via pressure on Governor-General John Kerr, saw an unelected Crown representative sack a democratically elected leader who threatened to expose CIA operations and shut down secretive American military bases on Australian soil.

Each instance unveils a state not guarding but dominating its own, a policy of control dressed as protection. Hungerford’s dawdling police, Dunblane’s sealed vaults slot perfectly into this mould: chaos as leverage, tragedy as currency. Ties of Greenham to Porton Down’s chemical trials, QVS to elite networks spanning Westminster. Power thrives when the masses lack a means of defence, or a will to match it.

The lesson is stark: those who govern us do not serve. They shape us, break us, bind us, all while cloaking their hands in the guise of protection. To see this is not wild-eyed suspicion, but clarity: a recognition that the past is a prologue, and the present is a chapter yet to be written.