Murray was an eight-year pupil at a school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996 when a gunman killed 16 young children and a teacher in Britain’s worst mass shooting.

Reflecting on last week’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in the Texas town of Uvalde, the former world No 1 told the BBC: “It was obviously terrible, it’s unbelievably upsetting.

“It makes you angry and it’s incredibly upsetting for parents,” the 35-year-old said.

Addressing the debate in the US about gun control in the wake of the shooting, which was carried out by an 18-year-old man, Murray said that “surely at some stage you do something different (about gun laws)”.

“I heard something on the radio the other day and it was a child from that school, and I experienced a similar thing when I was at Dunblane and a teacher coming out and waving all of the children under tables and telling them to go and hide,” Murray, a three-time Grand Slam champion, said.

“And it was a kid telling exactly the same story about how she survived it.

“They were saying that they go through these drills as young children, as seven, eight-year-old children. How? How is that normal that children should be having to go through drills in case someone comes into a school with a gun?”