There is something special about small towns, an aesthetic and an innocence that makes them charming and homely, even for outsiders. The way that everyone knows everyone, the way in which old fashioned values of community and politeness prevail, the slower pace of life: all these things contribute to the joys of small town life. There is, however, always a dark side. The heightened feeling of shared values and shared lives can become suffocating for some and the closeness of life can lead to gossip, rumours and paranoia. Sometimes this all becomes too much and, in fits of range, people snap. That’s why there are small towns out there in the world that will be forever associated with outbreaks of extreme violence that shatter the rural idyll and make the town famous for something else entirely.
There are some places that are so overshadowed by one event that they never recover in the public consciousness. Vietnam, for many people, will always be a war first and a country second, while one need only breathe the name Fukushima, Bhopal or Hillsborough to know exactly what is being referred to. The name becomes a synecdoche for the incident and replaces the place itself as the primary meaning of the word. Mass killings can have the same effect as well, and when they occur in previously sleepy, backwoods places, this is exacerbated even further. Indeed, it can be that the place-name becomes a placeholder for the type of killing and the exact parameters of the evil that has been meted out. Every school shooting in the United States is compared to those of Columbine and Newtown, while in the UK, Dunblane is the benchmark. When a single active shooter goes on the rampage in Australia, it is Port Arthur that comes to mind for the media and the public at large.
It is these massacres, plus a few lesser known incidents, that we will discuss in this article: ten small towns that have been destroyed by spree killers.
1 – Hungerford, United Kingdom
There is a public perception in the United Kingdom that mass killings are an American problem. The free availability of guns and the public perception in certain parts of the United States that gun ownership is a necessary and good thing baffles many in Europe, but particularly in Britain. Simply put, most Brits have no idea why Americans are so in love with guns and regard mass shooter events as somewhat inevitable when the public at large are allowed to arm themselves so easily. There is also a general feeling that, if you allow people to have guns so easily, then mass shootings are a natural consequence.
It was not always thus. The British disdain for firearms is a relatively recent development and dates back, largely, to a summer’s afternoon in 1987 in the small town of Hungerford, Berkshire. It was in this tiny town, with a population of just under 6,000 people, that tragedy struck on that August day.
The Hungerford Massacre – the word “massacre” is not needed in the UK, as everyone knows immediately what is implied on the mere mention of the town’s name – was the work of Michael Ryan, an unemployed man who was 27 at the time of the attack and lived with his mother. He was described – and this will become a theme – as being a loner with few friends and who suffered from mental health problems. He was a licenced firearms owner who had been granted a certificate to own pistols, semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.
Around lunchtime on August 19, he shot a mother of two in front of her children, before getting into his car and driving to a petrol station, where he filled up his vehicle and attempted to shoot the cashier, but accidentally released the ammunition from his M1 carbine. Undeterred, he went home, picked up more guns and tried to drive off. When the car wouldn’t start, he shot it up, before setting fire to his own house and killing his pets. He shot two neighbours, then walked to town’s common green area, shooting and killing people watching from windows, as well as a dog walker and a police officer who was responding to a call. He would go on to kill 16 people in total – including his own mother – and wound another 15, before turning the gun on himself after a four-hour siege in his old school, where he had barricaded himself into a classroom.
Ryan killed himself and his mother and had no real friends, so it was difficult to ascertain motive. “No one has ever explained why Michael Ryan did what he did. And that’s because, in my opinion, it is not something that can be explained” said the local vicar on the first anniversary of the tragedy. His actions were attributed to one or both of psychosis and schizophrenia, but in truth, there is no way of understanding what was going on in his head when he carried out the attack.
The response from the British government, however, was swift. The public was outraged that access to such deadly weapons, which seemed to serve no purpose in hunting, could be so easy. Within a year, semi-automatic rifles were banned and shotgun ownership severely curtailed. Hungerford would not be the end of mass shootings, but it would mark a sea change in the way the British public saw guns.