Stephen McGinty is an honest, plainspoken and unsensational journalist, who almost entirely avoids the novelistic touch.

Is it terrible to admit that I felt almost more shock not on that terrible March morning, but in a homegoing taxi one summer evening much later when we passed through a small West Lothian village that stoutly proclaimed, under its name, that it was a “HANDGUN-FREE ZONE”? Were firearms expunged? Or never present? It didn’t say, but the seeming absurdity and irrelevance – this was West Lothian, not the Wild West – of the claim caused me genuine dismay. Worse, and sickeningly, it brought back the memory that on 13 March 1996 a man widely known, disliked and distrusted by police and parents, but in possession of four “legally held” handguns, including a pair of Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolvers, entered Dunblane Primary School and in less than five minutes killed 16 five-year-olds (one had actually turned six), their teacher and then himself.

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