Snowdrop Campaign
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The Snowdrop Campaign was founded after the Dunblane Massacre in March 1996 to call for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the United Kingdom. Founded by friends of the bereaved families and so called because March is snowdrop time in Scotland, it successfully gained over 705,000 signatures to a petition within 6 weeks. A parallel petition by shooting organisations against any tightening of the law gained less than a tenth this number of signatures over a longer period.
Following presentation of the petition and a notable speech by one of the founders, Mrs Ann Pearston, to the 1996 Labour Party conference, the new Labour government of Tony Blair introduced the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997, which banned private ownership of handguns.
The petition was also notable for being perhaps one of the first campaigns to make extensive use of the internet for distributing material. Extensive use of the then relatively new medium of email allowed the petition to be rapidly distributed as a Word document widely across the UK. Because of slight differences in the layout of the internet and photocopied forms used the organisers were able to estimate that between a quarter and a third of all forms had been sent by email at some point.
