Hungerford - 1987 Massacre

1987 Massacre

The Hungerford massacre occurred on August 19, 1987. A 27-year-old unemployed local labourer, Michael Robert Ryan, armed with several weapons including an AK-47 rifle and a Beretta pistol, shot and killed 16 people including his mother, and wounded 15 others, then fatally shot himself. A report on this incident was commissioned by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd from the Chief Constable of Thames Valley Police, Colin Smith. It remains, along with the Dunblane massacre and Cumbria shootings, one of the worst criminal atrocities involving firearms in British history. The massacre led to the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988, which banned the ownership of semi-automatic centre-fire rifles and restricted the use of shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two rounds. The Hungerford Report had demonstrated that Ryan's collection of weapons was legally licensed.