Painful memories were stirred in Dunblane yesterday as the town awoke to the news it most dreads.
For Eileen Harrild, the teacher who tried to shield children in the Dunblane massacre more than three years ago, the news sickened her. "Everyone was hoping nothing like this would ever happen again," she said. "It makes me very sad."
Charlie Clydesdale, whose daughter, Victoria, aged five, was killed in the horror, said it all came back with the news from Colorado. "I feel for all those concerned, including the killers' parents," he said. "When I heard the news I thought, `Here we go again'. This just brings it all back."
A spokesman for the local authority, Stirling Council, said they would offer any help and advice about dealing with the aftermath of the crisis that the Colorado town of Littleton required of them.
Dunblane, like Lockerbie, is a quietly prosperous, traditional community which has international fame for all the wrong reasons, being linked in the public mind with both notoriety and sympathy.
At 9.30 on March 16th, 1996, Robert Hamilton entered Dunblane Primary School, wearing combat fatigues and carrying two guns with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
A social misfit and gun enthusiast, he had developed a grudge against society, because his suspect behaviour in running boys' clubs meant he was being thwarted in his attempts to continue running them.
His revenge was to enter the gym, where a class of the youngest pupils were starting their day's classes, and in a few minutes he had shot 16 of them and their teacher dead, before killing himself.
Once the world's media had departed, the town sought to get on with its life. The gym, too full of traumatic and painful memories, was demolished and replaced with a garden of remembrance.
"People say it takes time to get over it," said the mother of one murdered child. "But you never get over it. You just learn to live with it."
But the most effective memorial to Dunblane was the rapid move by politicians to ban handguns. At first the Conservative government in London imposed a partial ban, on larger-calibre weapons.
But the community around Dunblane had started the Snowdrop Petition, so named because it was aimed at achieving a ban before the March snowdrops blossomed again in 1997.
Sensing the popular tide of opinion against guns, the incoming Labour government swiftly banned handguns, and more than 9,000 weapons were handed in.
Ann Pearston, founder of the petition, yesterday called on US gun-control lobbyists to follow Britain's lead. "America is sitting on a time-bomb, and unless they do something to defuse it, these shootings of innocent children will continue."