THE WEAPONS DEBATE : Tragedy shows it is time to do something for Scotland

Why not a ban on all handguns in Scotland? asks Ian Bell

The world stops rarely. Things go out of focus, time ceases to march, trivia becomes of consuming importance. Questions you had never given a second thought become the only ones worth asking. You forget yourself.

But people are weeping in the street. Parents are scurrying for home, or fumbling for the telephone, or huddling at school gates. No one says anything worth hearing. This happens everywhere, simultaneously, while television becomes hypnotic and the people paid to put things into words discover precisely how useless words are. That was Dunblane.

A small nation is its own world, parochial, introverted, engulfed by intimacy. This is both comforting and claustrophobic, but it is a fact you forget until something profound enters the nervous system of your society. And here is another fact: Dunblane happened in Scotland, but it also happened to Scotland.

According to the parliamentary friends of the gun lobby, begging the only question, emotion makes for bad law. It is their duty to be above such things when they defend the rights of decent, ordinary shooters against hysterical grief. (Quite a phrase, "hysterical grief": there's another kind?) So we elect to Parliament people capable of debating, with exquisite discrimination, the relative potencies of various killing machines who yet refuse to allow the human currency of simple misery into their deliberations.

But they won that point, the shooters, if no other. Parliament and the media bought the line that any law made in response to the Dunblane murders had to be dispassionate, infinitely reasonable, and above all immune to anything people actually felt. This, somehow, is how good law is made. Emotion is illegitimate; what people feel is not a fit subject for legislation.

So Michael Howard produced his scales. The tonnage of hard evidence was weighed against the tonnage of lobbying. In the end an ounce of real feeling - the "emotional blackmail" of the parents and the Snowdrop campaign - tipped the balance a little. But just to ensure that Tory MPs did not let feelings get the better of them, the whips noted on behalf of all. The beating of children is a matter of conscience; the response to their murder, somehow, is not.

It is difficult to convey precisely how inadequate all of this, particularly for Scots. The very tone of the parliamentary arguments seemed out of scale and tawdry; the nature of the people making the decision ugly and obvious.

It is tempting to believe the Tories, for their part, have no more mistakes to make in Scotland. That, in itself, might be a mistake. The anger over this miserable compromise runs deep. It is more potent than any row over toy parliaments and tax-raising powers. We will ban some guns, they allow. We will care a bit, feel a little. But not, when a hobby is at stake, too much. Now vote for us, please.

The Scottish National Party proposes, meanwhile, that handguns should at least be banned in Scotland. In the Westminster way of things, this is held to be impossible, if not ridiculous. But how so? Pub licensing laws differ, why not gun laws? It is the wish of the majority of Scottish MPs. It is the wish, come to that, of the vast majority of Scots. Something terrible was done to Scotland at Dunblane. This story will not be over, you suspect, until something adequate is done for Scotland.

Ian Bell is a columnist for `The Scotsman'