Yesterday marked the half-century anniversary of the mass murder by a crazed ex-Marine at the Texas Tower.
Few remember the role armed citizens played in pinning him down and cutting short the death toll.
Fortunately, the Washington Post DOES remember.
Thanks to the Evil Princess for reminding me.
Remember this well. Innocent folks attacked, the secondary targets return equal force, police scramble for necessary firepower. Don’t recall any unintended casualties resulting from privately owned weapons. Of course anti-gun folks are expecting Texas college campuses to devolve into a bloodbaths because of the new laws.
I began college two years after this incident. I would routinely clean my Marlin 1894 lever action .38/40 while sitting on my rear bumper in the parking lot in front of my dorm room. Local police would stop by and talk guns with me and we would talk of going shooting together. The point is, nobody was upset with that scenario in 1968, on a Texas college campus.. And of course their were no campus rapes, robberies, or shootings either.(we did have the annual “panty -raid”)
Numerous reports in last couple of days erroneously stated Whitman was start of “mass shootings”. Lazy or politically driven reporting forgot that in 1949 a wwii vet named Unruh in NJ walked down a town street and calmly killed a dozen residents. That the St Valentines Day massacre killed 7. And I dont even want to go back to the 1800s where unbelievable bloody killings took place in the the crowded slums of NYC or out West. Stupid MSM just pushing nonsense.
Considering that this piece was written by a liberal American journalist, it is pretty good. He lets both sides of the gun issue state their views.
It is good to hear about potential victims, refusing to be victims, and shooting back at the evildoer. And notice how the bad guy with the gun was stopped by good guys with guns, just like Wayne LaPierre said.
Consider the difficulty of shooting at a target 100 yards up in the air, who can hit targets 500 yards away. I imagine some bullets missed the building entirely, rose as high as they could, then fell to the ground somewhere. Yet, we don’t read of any collateral damage. This horror story had a happy ending. It’s too bad today’s victims rarely shoot back.
the gun control narrative is something of a self fulfilling prophecy
If those folks in Texas back then only did what many liberals are calling for now, and gave the “Tower Sniper” more love and a job, he would not have murdered those numerous innocent pedestrians on the streets.
It’s not too late to spread more love to our misguided Islamic terrorist brothers and sisters, and put HillBilly in absolute power so they can create more jobs for everyone in the global community. If only OBL had a good job and gotten a few more Valentine’s Day cards, the events of 9/11 in NYC, D.C. and the skies over Pennsylvania would have never happened.
One good way to create more jobs, is to hire more federal government stormtroopers to confiscate guns from Americans and pay more junk yards to destroy them. Funeral homes and home repair companies should see a huge increase in business from collateral damages too.
I was a senior in high school in South Texas when this incident occurred. I attended a college in South Texas the following fall (now part of the Texas A&M System) where guns were banned from campus dorms.
Many of the male students would go hunting in the fall in areas nearby as well as driving directly to deer camps on the weekend. Since the students living on campus in the dorms needed somewhere to store their rifles and shotguns during the school week, they were allowed to “check them in” to the Dorm Moms that resided in and managed the dorms. This was a safer option than leaving it in your truck or car trunk where it could get stolen.
If you stood at the door of my Dorm Mom’s suite on the first floor she had rifle racks covering three walls of her living room – double stacked. There must have been more rifles and shotguns in that room than in most gun stores in the area. There could also be a couple dozen revolvers also hanging on pegs. It was just like old Dodge – when you came in you checked ’em in and could pick ’em up when you rode out.
(Sigh) Those were different times back then.
I began college — at UT Austin where this happened — three years after this incident and I have this to say to Dennis: Damn, we’re old. (And still friends.)
Here’s a link to a page dedicated to the heroes.
http://www.garylavergne.com/heroes.htm
One of many noteworthy behaviors about mass shooters is the killing venues they select—those tend to be places (movie theaters, nightclubs, schools, shopping malls) that are unlikely to offer any armed resistance because of restrictive gun laws. In the future Texas colleges may prove to be unattractive sites to cowardly murderous screwballs because of probable armed retaliation.
When the police cannot be there and a legally armed citizen must act, do the gun control folks not get it or do not want to get it?
Mas, Thank you for that link to The Washington Post article. It’s a fascinating and engrossing account of both Whitman and this incident – very informative too.
The tower shooting may have begun the formation of SWAT teams, but as I remember it, the “No guns on campus” movement was a product of the 1970 mass shootings at Jackson State University and Kent State University. Kent State was where National Guard fired on students, and at Jackson State (a black college) sheriff’s deputies fired on students.
The original “No guns on campus” was about getting rid of government guns, and had nothing to do with student or faculty-owned firearms.
Another reason the tower shooting failed to spark a no-guns movement is the other mass campus killing, just two weeks earlier:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-mass-murderer-leaves-eight-women-dead
I’ve seen pictures of that day. One particularly stands out. A Texan taking aim with what is obviously a scope sighted hunting rifle, using a tree for an improvised rest as he zeros in at the top of the tower.
He had a gun handy (in his car, or more likely pickup, on a college campus) and was able to put it to good use.
First rule of any gunfight, bring a gun.
Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.
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