Britain’s two-time Wimbledon champion Andy Murray has said the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, made him “angry” and that a survivor’s account of the incident was similar to his own experience in the 1996 Dunblane massacre in Scotland.
An 18-year-old gunman armed with a semi-automatic rifle stormed an elementary school in Texas last week, killing 19 children and two teachers.
The attack, 10 days after a shooting in Buffalo, New York that left 10 people dead, has intensified the longstanding national debate over US gun laws.
“It’s unbelievably upsetting and it makes you angry. I think there’s been over 200 mass shootings in America this year and nothing changes,” Murray said. “I can’t understand that …
“My feeling is that surely at some stage you do something different. You can’t keep approaching the problem by buying more guns and having more guns in the country. I don’t see how that solves it.
“But I could be wrong. Let’s maybe try something different and see if you get a different outcome.”
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Murray grew up in Dunblane and was a student at the town’s primary school when a gunman killed 16 pupils and a teacher before killing himself. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Britain’s modern history.
“I heard something on the radio the other day and it was a child from that school,” Murray told the BBC. “I experienced a similar thing when I was at Dunblane, a teacher coming out and waving all of the children under tables and telling them to go and hide.
“And it was a kid telling exactly the same story about how she survived it.
“They were saying that they go through these drills, as young children … How? How is that normal that children should be having to go through drills, in case someone comes into a school with a gun?”