ANDY MURRAY SAYS HE ‘CAN’T UNDERSTAND’ WHY US DON’T WANT TO ADDRESS GUN VIOLENCE.
Murray was a 9-year-old student when he survived a deadly school shooting in the UK.
Tennis star Andy Murray, a survivor of childhood gun violence in the U.K., says he “can’t understand” why the U.S. fails to address repeated mass shootings.
Murray decided to speak out this week after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, left at least 19 children and two teachers dead. The tennis pro was a nine-year-old student at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland when a gunman killed 16 students and a teacher before turning the gun on himself.
“It’s really, really upsetting, and I hope they make some changes,” Murray said of the Uvalde shooting in an interview with BBC Sports Tuesday. “I think there’s been over 200 mass shootings in America this year and nothing changes. I can’t understand that.”
The 1996 incident in Scotland, known as the Dunblane massacre, was the deadliest mass shooting in British history. The U.K. decided to enact tough gun laws after the shooting and hasn’t experienced a mass casualty shooting ever since.
“I heard something on the radio the other day, and it was a child from that school,” Murray said. “I experienced a similar thing when I was at Dunblane and a teacher like, coming out and waving all of the children, like 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, as seven-, eight-year-old children,” he continued. “How is that normal that children should be having to go through drills, like in case someone comes into a school with a gun?”
Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott recently called on the Texas legislature to form a committee to investigate the causes and response to last week’s mass shooting in Uvalde that left 21 people dead.
“As Texans mourn the tragedy that occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde last week, we as a State must reassess the twin issues of school safety and mass violence,” the Texas Republican wrote to fellow Republicans Attorney General Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan on Wednesday. “As leaders, we must come together at this time to provide solutions to protect all Texans.”
Abbott asked the legislature to “review what steps previous legislatures have enacted” and “what resources the State has made available to local school districts” in addition to providing recommendations on how policies can be improved in the areas of “school safety, mental health, social media, police training, and firearm safety.”
The shooting has led to calls for more gun control measures in the U.S., and Murray suggested that changes need to happen.
“My feeling is that surely at some stage you do something different,” he said. “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,” he added.
