For every parent, it was their worst nightmare come true - a crazed gunman invading a primary school and leaving 16 children dead on the floor.

Political feuds were put aside, newspapers forgot the problems of the royal family, commuters struggling to work stared at photographs of the victims in disbelief and horror.The massacre in the neat and quiet Scottish town of Dunblane on Wednesday has gripped and traumatized the country.

For parents, the chilling thought that "it could have been my child" could not be swept away.

Stuart Higgins, the editor of Britain's mass-selling tabloid newspaper, the Sun, wrote a personal message to readers telling how his 8-year-old kissed him and waved as he ran into the school playground on Wednesday morning.

A day delving into gossip about Princess Diana's friendship with England rugby captain Will Carling and the chances of British boxer Frank Bruno against Mike Tyson stretched ahead.

But the news of Wednesday's massacre pushed even hardbitten tabloid reporters close to tears.

"Never have I seen the Sun's newsroom - usually a bustling frenzy of ribald comment, sarcasm, cynicism and frustration - so hushed and moist-eyed over one story," Higgins wrote.

"This morning nothing else matters: not Bruno, Diana, Carling, the lottery, Europe. Just the children of Dunblane and the parents who grieve for them."

British Prime Minister John Major, returning from the counterterrorism summit in Egypt, said the news had affected him as a parent, not a politician. His rival, Labor leader Tony Blair, the father of three young children, was emotional.

"These were little children who at the weekend were playing with their brothers and sisters, their mothers and fathers," said Blair, appearing close to tears, in a television interview.

Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the minority Liberal Democrats, called it "every parent's worst nightmare."

Suzanne Moore, a columnist for The Guardian, wrote how she panicked about the safety of her children after reassuring a friend over the phone that their school was secure.

"Were my own children all right? It was a long time since I'd seen them. Four hours maybe. Anything could have happened in four hours," she wrote.

"Words are not enough, but, without words, what else is there but silence? And none of us can bear this terrible silence. It reminds us too much of what death is like. All those little children are now quiet forever."

Under a stark cartoon showing a hand with shears approaching a row of fragile spring flowers, columnist Hugo Young wrote: "We have to stand, mute and mystified, before the enormity of a crime there is no way to stop happening again."

But it was the unreported, personal tales that bore witness to the extent of the grief and fear.

Two children refused to go home with their mother from a London school until they had been taken to see their father in his office to make sure they were all safe. Another wide-eyed toddler asked his father: "Will he come for me, Daddy?"

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The massacre awoke barely sleeping memories in other towns visited by tragedy. Parents of 116 children killed in the Welsh town of Aberfan 30 years ago when a coal tip buried its junior school sent their sympathy to the families of Dunblane.

"It brought everything back again with all those distressing memories. It is all so terrible and senseless," said Brynley Carpenter, 70, whose 10-year-old son Desmond died in 1966.

But the final word lay with the people of Dunblane who piled flowers outside the school.

Many just bore the message "Why?"

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