Andy Murray Recalls Childhood School Shooting in Wake of Uvalde

Editor’s note: This story contains details of a mass casualty event and gun violence.

Tennis player Andy Murray recently spoke his thoughts on the recent mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., that left 21 people dead, including 19 children.

When the three-time grand slam champion was nine years old, he was present at the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.K. history. At Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in March 1996, a gunman killed 16 students, a teacher and himself. This incident led the United Kingdom to enact strict gun laws.

Since he’s been through a similar experience, Murray is upset that the United States has not enacted new gun laws following the deadliest school shooting since 2012’s Sandy Hook shooting left 28 people dead, including 20 children.

“It’s unbelievably upsetting and it makes you angry,” Murray said, via the BBC. “I think there’s been over 200 mass shootings in America this year and nothing changes. 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.”

Murray grew up in Dunblane, Scotland, which is a small-knit community of under 10,000 residents, similar to the community of Uvalde. He’s previously mentioned how he had been given car rides by the shooter, Thomas Hamilton, and attended children’s clubs with him.

The 35-year-old said he hid from the shooter while it was happening. He was so young at the time that it was difficult for him to comprehend what was happening.

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

This is one of the first times Murray has spoken about the mass shooting he experienced as a child. He discussed the incident in his 2019 documentary Andy Murray: Resurfacing as well.