By IRNA,
London : Full details were beginning to emerge Thursday about the extent of the shooting-spree carried out by a 52-year old taxi driver that left 12 people dead and another three fighting for their lives before he killed himself.
The massacre carried out by Derrick Bird in and around the port town of Whitehaven in north-west England is the third by a lone gunman in the past three decades.
Investigations into the latest indiscriminate shooting were questioning the motives of Bird, who was a licensed gun-holder, with suggestions that it may centre around a family row.
The rampage is the UK’s worst shooting incident since the Dunblane massacre in Scotland in 1996, when sixteen children and one adult were killed by 44-year old former Scout leader Thomas Watt Hamilton, before he committed suicide.
In 1987, 27-year-old licensed gun owner Michael Robert Ryan, armed with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, shot and killed sixteen people including his mother, and wounded fifteen others, in Hungerford, west of London.
Hungerford and Dunblane each led to official reports, the latter a full tribunal of inquiry. In each case the report was followed by legislation that tightened the gun laws.
Official figures show that Britain, unlike many other countries, is neither a gun-toting society nor one in which order and security are held ransom by a gun lobby as the one whose activities help to allow so much killing in the United States.
Gun crime has also fallen by 41% in England and Wales over the past five years, with only 39 people dying from firearm offences in the whole of 2008-09, the lowest total in 20 years.