One Sunny August Day in Texas

The Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment

How America became awash in guns, mass shootings, and child murders in our schools. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Chapter 18

One Sunny August Day in Texas

I love her dearly. . . . I cannot rationally pinpoint any specific reason for doing this.

—Charles Whitman, in a note he left after murdering his mother on the day of his mass-shooting spree, August 1, 1966

At first, only Charles Whitman knew what was happening. 

Claire James was a freshman at the University of Texas and was one of the first people whom Whitman shot from his perch in the University of Texas clock tower. Fifty years after Whitman shot James in America’s first civilian mass shooting, she told Texas Monthly about how she had become one of America’s first mass-shooting victims: 

We were walking across the South Mall, holding hands, when all of a sudden I felt like I’d stepped on a live wire, like I’d been electrocuted. I was eight months pregnant at the time. Tom said, “Baby—” and reached out for me. And then he was hit.

Tom never said another word. I was lying next to him on the pavement, and I called out to him, but I knew he was dead. The shock was so great that I didn’t feel pain; it felt more like something really heavy was pressing down on me. A conservative-looking guy in a suit walked by, and I yelled at him, “Please, get a doctor! Please!” even though I still didn’t understand what was happening. He looked annoyed and said, “Get up! What do you think you’re doing?” I think he thought it was guerrilla theater, because we had started doing things like that to bring attention to the war in Vietnam.¹

Other bystanders thought the bangs were coming from nearby construction. 

In 1986, William Helmer wrote in Texas Monthly about his experience watching Whitman methodically shoot one person after another: 

Walking from the old journalism building on Twenty-fourth Street to the Union to get a sandwich for lunch, I could hear loud reports that had the boom, snap quality of rifle shots. They were coming from the vicinity of the Main Building, but I didn’t see any unusual activity there and shrugged them off as the sounds of a nail-driving gun, which had been periodically banging away on a construction project there. . . .

I was still operating on the nail-gun theory when some students standing behind a pillar of the Academic Center started shouting something about a guy on the Tower shooting people and how I should get moving. My first response was to resent being yelled at, so I just stood there in the middle of a grassy inner-drive area, squinting up at the Tower’s northwest corner. Sure enough, I could see a gun barrel poke out over the parapet and emit smoke, followed an instant later by the boom I had been hearing. Now the computer was working a lot faster but still coming up with a bad readout: Just look at that! There’s some fool up there with a rifle, trying to get himself in one hell of a lot of trouble! From my angle, it didn’t look like the man was shooting downward, but was trying to create a commotion.² 

Helmer’s response was understandable—there had never been a mass shooting of this scale on American soil, and certainly nowhere as public as a university campus. Soon after, the full gravity of the situation sunk in for Helmer, and he writes about the moments when he was thrown over the line from observer to emergency responder and victim in Whitman’s massacre:

I could see the sniper fairly well; he would lean out over the parapet, bring the rifle to bear on target, fire, tip the weapon up as he worked the action, then walk quickly to another point and do the same thing. It must have been about that time that he hit an electrician next to his truck at Twentieth Street and University Avenue, a quarter of a mile away. It was about that time, too, that the Tower clock started chiming and then, with cold-blooded indifference, tolled the noon hour. And it must have been only moments after those echoes died that the sniper, evidently firing through one of the Tower’s drain spouts, put a shot through the open window where the four of us stood gawking.

The bullet struck the edge of the window opening in front of the girl’s face like an exploding stick of dynamite, filling the stairwell with glass, splinters, bullet fragments, and concrete dust. . . . I started crawling over to her, and my left hand slipped so that I partly fell forward into blood that was rapidly covering the floor of the stairwell. The blood wasn’t hers; the bullet had fragmented, and a large chunk of it had pierced the right forearm of the guy on my side of the window. It had hit an artery that now, as he lay partly on his side, was pumping out blood in rapid squirts about three inches high.

It’s strange what happens to time in situations like this. All motion slowed down and became dreamlike. . . . I could still hear the girl’s sobbing, and I could hear my own voice, squawking for someone to give me a handkerchief. The shooting victim used his good arm to pull one from his back pocket and hand it to me. . . .

[W]hile washing up in the basement men’s room, I found that what looked like a shaving cut in my neck held a piece of the bullet’s copper jacket, not much bigger than a pinhead. Realizing that that could have been the large chunk of bullet made it hard to breathe for a little while.

Whitman was armed to the teeth, with three rifles, four pistols, and more than 700 rounds of ammunition. He had purchased a 12-gauge shotgun and an M1 carbine I the morning after he killed his wife and mother. According to Mass Murderers (Time-Life Books), when Whitman purchased the M1 carbine and eight boxes of ammunition, he told the cashier that he planned to hunt wild hogs.³

The day after the shooting, the Waco News-Tribune published the matter-of-fact headline “Sniper Atop UT Tower Kills 12, Wounds 31; Mother, Wife Found Dead in Their Homes.” Below that headline, the unnamed American Austin reporter described Whitman as “a good son, a top Boy Scout, an excellent Marine, an honor student, a hard worker, a fine scout master, a handsome man, a wonderful friend to all who knew him—and an expert sniper.”⁴ 

But only one of those descriptors (“an expert sniper”) is relevant to Whitman’s role in America’s first civilian mass shooting. And while few knew it at the time, the shooting at the University of Texas set a pattern for many more. 

The pattern goes beyond “a man gets a gun and tries to kill people.” It extends into the factors leading up to such a drastic course of action, and it extends into how the media covers “mass shootings” versus “acts of terrorism.” 

Across many of the deadliest mass shootings in America, there is a similar pattern over the last half century of mass shootings. America’s deadliest civilian mass shootings have all occurred since 1960, and most of them were committed by young white men: the University of Texas shooting (1966); the San Ysidro, California, McDonald’s massacre (1984); the Edmond, Oklahoma, post office shooting (1986); the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas (1991); the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting (2012); the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting (2017); the Las Vegas shooting (2017); and the school shootings at Columbine, Colorado (1999), Sandy Hook, Connecticut (2012), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (2018). 

These shootings happened at different times in different places across the country, but in all of these shootings there are a few consistent patterns:

1. the shooter was white and male, who felt generally betrayed and alienated by society, and empowered by guns; 

2. the shooter didn’t seem to have precise targets and was out to use his guns to kill indiscriminately; and 

3. in the aftermath of the terroristic act, the shooter’s actions were strangely explained away. He was described as a “lone wolf,” probably mentally ill, and in the aftermath of a terroristic act, his biography was probed to find redeeming qualities. (Charles Whitman’s behavior has often been controversially explained away as the result of a brain tumor.⁵) 

Mass shootings don’t occur in a vacuum. Gun advocates and their detractors alike can agree that guns represent a sense of power. It is easy to say that mass shooters are “losers” and they lash out at being “bullied.” From there, it becomes clear why they take up guns: throughout history, guns have represented power and control. 

But there’s something missing from this analysis: why are so many white men feeling like losers who perceive themselves as both alienated and bullied by society? 

What is missed in a discussion limited to mental illness and lone wolves are the exploitatively political and social contexts that make individuals feel like lone wolves in America. Understanding those contexts is key to understanding why most (but not all) people who commit mass shootings in America are white males, and why white males have committed mass shootings more and more frequently over the last half century.