Citation #2:Gun Culture or Gun Control?: Firearms and Violence: Safety and Society Squires, Peter

Summary:The book is about how in 1996 the shooting and killing of 16 young children in a Dunblane primary school provoked wide reaching parliamentary reform to British gun laws and how after this this casualty Britain wanted to enforce the laws against gun ownership. 

Reflection:The reflection of this book is that after Britain experience this casualty Britain learn from this experience and made laws against gun ownership.

Quotation :The tragedy at Dunblane, in particular, undoubtedly exposed shooting in the UK to the kind of public scrutiny it had never previously received and which, arguably, was long overdue. However, the technical histories alluded to above are not my chief concern here. This is not to say that these discourses are not themselves interesting for what they tell us about our orientations towards violence, personalized killing and a certain kind of human interaction, it is simply that my main focus is somewhat different. That said, of course, it often has been the case that technological developments in firearm design and production have impacted fundamentally upon the social relations of firearm use – typically, giving an advantage in any conflict to the adversary with the more powerful, most portable, more accurate, most rapidly reloaded or, perhaps more recently, most concealable weapon. However, these wider social relations of firearm use (including production issues, distribution issues, wider cultural factors and, above all, their use in human interactions) are almost entirely absent from the historical and technical literature. The purposes of this and the following chapter, by contrast, are to examine precisely the social and historical discourses relating to firearms with a view to drawing out the social, cultural and political significance of firearms for human beings and human societies. John Ellis in his fascinating, if paradoxically titled book, The Social History of the Machine Gun (if ever there were a technology that merited an ‘anti-social’ history, the machine gun is probably it) describes his objective as, ‘a study of what the history of the machine gun tells us about society’ (Ellis, 1976: 20). In this chapter, as a prelude to the more contemporary and focused chapters which follow, with certain caveats, my purpose is essentially similar.