Then the man, whom police identified as Thomas Hamilton, 43, of nearby Stirling, shot and killed himself.
All around the gunman, 15 children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, lay dead or dying. Another child died at a local hospital. Twelve children and two teachers were wounded in what a Scottish member of Parliament called ``a slaughter of the innocents.''
All of the dead children were 5 years old - 11 girls and five boys. It was Britain's worst mass killing this century.
News reports and accounts by local residents portrayed Hamilton, a gun enthusiast, as a peculiar recluse who apparently was embittered by being asked to leave a Boy Scout leadership post in the 1970s amid allegations of child abuse.
A member of a local gun club, Hamilton later formed his own youth organization, but local boys felt ``weird'' in his presence, one Dunblane high school student said.
``He was a very unusual man, a man easy to dislike,'' a local politician, Anne Dickson, said on Scottish television. ``He never mixed with other adults. He was a loner, and if a violent streak came out in his nature it came out today, because none of us suspected that.''
David Urquhart, 13, said he and several friends had attended Hamilton's athletic club, but left because he frightened them.
`STAND TO ATTENTION'
``In the gym hall he wanted to film me doing a flip,'' Urquhart told the Associated Press. ``At the end I had to stand to attention with my ribs sticking out. He used to take photos of people all the time. He always told us to take our tops off.''
Frena Davidson, a member of the Stirling Regional Council, said some parents had expressed concern about Hamilton. She said Hamilton apparently made the boys ``strip to their waist and change into striped underpants and then he would take photographs of them before they embarked on their sports activities,'' she said.
``Some boys seemed to enjoy the club but others didn't, and their parents took them away,'' Davidson said.
