Dunblane-obsessed student jailed over guns

Published on Wednesday 23 September 2009 22:00

A STUDENT who spent £20,000 buying weapons using his mother's credit card and viewed websites on the Dunblane and Hungerford shooting massacres has been jailed for almost four years.

Ramsay Scott, 21, initially claimed he had spent the money on firearms components because he loved the mechanical challenge of assembling them.

However, he later admitted he had intended taking his own life if he failed an exam, raising fears that he might have run amok and become a "spree killer".

Lord Uist had considered imposing an order for lifelong restriction on Scott, but was told that Scott did not meet the risk criteria for such a sentence.

Sentencing Scott at the High Court in Edinburgh yesterday, Lord Uist said: "It is probably impossible to say what, if anything, you would have done with the weapons had the police not intervened.

"But there must have been at least the possibility that you would have used them to cause injury to others, particularly in view of the websites you had accessed dealing in extreme violence and previous shooting massacres at Hungerford and Dunblane."

Scott is a former pupil of Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, where he developed an interest in shooting and represented Scotland at under-19 level. He was described as eccentric and antisocial.

He was studying at Durham University when he was arrested in August last year.

Customs officers intercepted a parcel from the United States containing the barrel of a Glock pistol. A search of his home revealed assembled Glock and Sig Sauer pistols, parts of Colt pistols, Heckler & Koch submachine guns and Custom rifles, as well as ammunition and several knives.

Scott, of Gosford Road, Longniddry, East Lothian, told detectives he had found a way of avoiding regulations which prevented manufacturers in the US sending components to him.

It was also discovered that Scott had visited websites depicting extreme violence on about 1,400 occasions.

Lord Uist imposed a sentence of four years, discounted to three years and nine months to recognise that Scott had pleaded guilty.