By AL BAKER

New York Times

DUNBLANE, Scotland >> It is a simple plaque for the 16 children gunned down that day in March 1996, set on a small, stone column outside the primary school that continues to educate this town’s young. Built on a slope between trees and overgrown shrubs, it is easy to miss.

But the impact of the loss the memorial reflects endures, nearly 20 years after a 43-year-old man with four handguns stormed the schoolhouse gym in a three-minute shooting spree that seared abhorrence for gun violence into Britain’s national psyche.

The following year, the public outcry over the killings, distant though it was from the halls of power, spurred political action: The British government banned the private ownership of automatic weapons and handguns on Britain’s mainland.

Such swift action has been absent in the United States, even after years of deadly rampages at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where the collective trauma is perhaps most similar to what this small town continues to feel.

Still, after more mass shootings, including one last week at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs and another at a government building in San Bernardino, Calif., people pushing for stricter gun safety laws in the United States struggle to marshal the consensus that took hold so quickly in Scotland and made the ban there so welcome.

“I thought, ‘Well that’s a good thing,’” said Simon Foy, who commanded a murder squad in London for the Metropolitan Police, or Scotland Yard, at the time of the Dunblane shooting and studied the deadly event, referring to the public response that followed.

Those who live and work on the stone streets of this town just north of Edinburgh agree.

As Margaret Weir put it as she served coffee in a deli on The High Street, “It’s that kind of place where everyone knows someone” hurt by the tragedy. Teachers who taught at the school that day still work there. Relatives of those killed sit in their classes.

The tightening of Britain’s gun laws, which gave the authorities more control over the licensing of weapons, is seen as both a boon to public safety and a salve to the town’s collective grief.

“You can’t just carry them, willy-nilly,” said Weir’s 20-year-old daughter, who was also working in the deli and asked not to be identified by name because “it’s difficult to have an opinion” on the shooting and its aftermath.

“It doesn’t take care of all the crime,” the younger woman added, “but it reduces the amount.”

Across the ocean and 16 years later, the United States absorbed its own massacre of 5- and 6-year-olds at the school in Newtown. The inaction that emerged from Washington, however, was the opposite of what came out of Westminster after the Dunblane shooting. And in the three years since 20 children were fatally shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School, no consensus on the rewriting of national gun laws in the United States has formed.

Rather, some say, supporters of gun rights have seemed to gain strength, stymying President Barack Obama’s efforts to craft laws that would help reduce the kind of mass shootings that now occur regularly around the country. The support for an automatic weapons ban, in fact, has seemingly been silenced.

While the killings at Sandy Hook might have “hit over the head” people predisposed toward action intended to counter the United States’ epidemic of gun violence, “the rest of the nation was not hit in quite the same way,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska.

“There were more people who said, ‘Well, we ought to put more guns in schools,’” in the hands of law enforcement or security officers, Walker said.

To him, such a response reflects the worship of guns that exists in U.S. culture.

“It’s like a religious object, an extension of your body,” he said. “We can’t begin to make any progress in controlling it.”

The United States has “high levels of interpersonal violence,” greater than anywhere in Western Europe, and it has embedded a cultural preference for guns in many corners of society, Walker said.

To police commanders, though, illegal guns are a menace in an era of overall crime reduction. In many cities, armed gang members are the persistent causes of violence. In New York, they engage in tit-for-tat shootings over turf, narcotics, relationships and low-level disagreements, with the same person often on either side of the barrel: shooter and shooting victim.

In Scotland, a nation of 5.3 million people, the weapon of choice for criminals, by far, is the knife. Guns remain tools for farmers and hunters.

“You never see people with guns in this country,” said Sir Stephen House, who stepped down last month as chief constable of the Scottish police. “If you do, you’re in a rural area and it’s a bloke out shooting rabbits.”

Of the roughly 55 homicides in the country in the last 12 months, “one or two of those” were by shooting, House said.

Guns were not a major national problem in Scotland before the shooting in Dunblane. But the laws enacted afterward have increasingly helped the police fight crime.

Even for those with gun licenses, which the Dunblane gunman, Thomas Hamilton, had, “You have to justify what kind of weapon you have, and if you can’t justify it, then you’re not getting it,” said Deputy Superintendent Gordon Crossan, who heads criminal investigations in Edinburgh. “And that’s a sensible way to go, whereas, in America, in several places, you can walk in and buy whatever you want.”

And the availability of guns has been limited even further.

“It reduced the numbers in circulation, so I guess it meant there was less to be stolen in burglaries that would go into the criminal underworld,” said House.

Many officers embrace such change, including Foy, who is retired from Scotland Yard.

He recalled being “called together” after the Dunblane shooting, to join with officers from Scotland who were leading the case, to meticulously study the investigation for lessons.

At one point, they reviewed video from the shooting.

“There was just stunned silence when they played the film of the crime scene, with the bodies on situation,” Foy said. “It was pretty shocking to us. There is something deeply, deeply disturbing about young children being shot and killed.”

On The High Street, in Dunblane’s downtown area, several people said the pain of that day still colors their daily lives. They try to carry on, many said, yet never forget. The custom is not to speak too much about a day that still feels raw.

The same balance is struck at the Dunblane primary school, where the understated memorial to the dead is surrounded by the sound of children’s voices from a newly built gymnasium and the sight of them filing past large hallway windows in blue and red uniforms.

Inside John Hill Butchers, a visitor’s mention of the massacre drew a reproach. “Keep your voice down,” said a man ordering meat. “It’s a very small community.”

John Hill, the shop’s owner, was behind the counter, slicing black pudding and haggis. He attended the school, he said. Relatives of those killed are his customers. He knows their families.

“I could write a book about it,” he said. “But I wouldn’t really want to.”

© 2015 The New York Times Company