'Angry' Murray likens Texas school shooting survivor's experience to his own

[May 31, 2022] (Reuters) - Britain's two-time Wimbledon champion Andy Murray said the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas made him "angry", adding 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, coming 10 days after a shooting in Buffalo, New York that left 10 people dead, has intensified the long-standing national debate over U.S. 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."

Britain's Andy Murray celebrates after winning his second round match against Canada's Denis Shapovalov REUTERS/Juan Medina

Murray grew up in Dunblane and was a student at the town's local elementary 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?"

(Reporting by Aadi Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

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