Rachel Fieldhouse
Caring

“How is that normal?”: Andy Murray speaks out on Texas school shooting

Two-time Wimbledon champion Andy Murray has said he “can’t understand” how nothing has changed in the US following the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, with one survivor’s account being similar to his own experience 26 years ago.

The shooting, which saw an 18-year-old gunman storm an elementary school and kill 19 children and two teachers, came just 10 days after 10 people died in a shooting in Buffalo, New York and has reignited the national debate over US gun control.

The British tennis star, who survived the 1996 Dunblane massacre in Scotland, said the recent shooting made him “angry”.

“It’s incredibly upsetting and it makes you angry. I think there’s been over 200 mass shootings in America this year and nothing changes. I can’t understand that,” Murray, per the ABC.

Andy Murray, who grew up in the Scottish town of Dunblane, was at school when a gunman entered and killed 17 people in 1996. Image: @andymurray (Instagram)

“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.” 

Murray grew up in Dunblane and was hiding down the hall when a gunman killed 16 pupils and a teacher before killing himself at Dunblane Primary School, in an incident which is the deadliest mass shooting in modern British history. 

“I heard something on the radio the other day and it was a child from that school,” he 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 [in Uvalde] 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?”

Image: @andymurray (Instagram)

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Andy Murray, Caring, School Shooting, Texas