Context - The Gun

• 'The Gun' was written by the poet Vicki Feaver
• Vicki Feaver was inspired to 'The Gun' due to her experiences of moving from London to the Scottish Countryside, where she often heard guns but never encountered one
• However, when Vicki Feaver moved to Lanarkshire in Scotland, many of her neighbours were hunters and encapsulated her experiences after her husband bought a gun
• The purchase of handguns, in particular, was stringently controlled in the United Kingdom after the Dunblane Massacre of 1996, where a man shot and killed 17 people at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland
• After the Dunblane Massacre of 1996, two amendments to the Firearms Act of 1968 occurred, making it illegal to purchase or own virtually any kind of handgun in the United Kingdom