Ryan was born in 1960 and lived with his mother in Hungerford, a market town in Berkshire. He was unemployed, had few friends, and held a firearms certificate and a shotgun certificate, both lawfully granted, covering the semi-automatic rifles and the handgun he used.
On August 19, 1987 he shot a woman in Savernake Forest, drove home, killed the family dog, set his house alight and began shooting people in the streets of Hungerford. Sixteen people died, including his mother and an unarmed police officer, and fifteen were wounded. He shot people at their front doors, in their gardens and in passing cars over the course of an afternoon, in a town with a single police response and no armed unit within reach for a considerable time.
He was cornered in the John O'Gaunt School, where he had been a pupil, and shot himself.
No motive was ever established. There was no note, no history of psychiatric care and no dispute that accounted for it, and the inquest heard no explanation.
The consequence was legislative. The Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 banned semi-automatic centre-fire rifles and tightened the shotgun regime, and the case is the first of the two British mass shootings, with Dunblane in 1996, that produced the firearms law now in force.
This is a single incident, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.