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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Somber Read: “Why the Mock Mass Shooting [at UT-Austin] Matters”

Somber Read: “Why the Mock Mass Shooting [at UT-Austin] Matters”

by Anne Laurie|  December 19, 20152:58 pm| 27 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Gun nuts, Decline and Fall

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It’s always fun — and, I would argue, important — to mock ammosexuals as the blowhards and bigots they are. But their buffoonery still has real-world consequences. Christopher Hooks, in Texas Monthly:

… The actual experience of mass murder, of course, is raw horror. It’s too intense for many people to contemplate for long, so we often don’t. When the campus carry bill was first heard in front of the Senate Committee on State Affairs earlier this year, a huge number of people came to testify, but one in particular stood out: Claire James, the first person shot by Charles Whitman, the man who posted up in UT’s clock tower with a rifle he used to kill sixteen people and injure dozens more.

James, née Claire Wilson, was eighteen and eight months pregnant at the time. She walking on the mall with her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, also eighteen. From the Tower’s observation deck, Whitman put a bullet through her stomach, fracturing the skull of her unborn son. Eckman was killed next. Forty-six people were killed or injured that day, some of whom were walking down Guadalupe Street, where Saturday’s protesters marched. James lay bleeding on the ground in the August heat for a full hour while emergency responders struggled to assess the situation. (In 2006, she and other shooting survivors talked to Texas Monthly about their experiences in intense detail.)…

The story of the UT Tower shooting, the first mass shooting on an American university campus, confounds a lot of the narratives in today’s debate over gun violence. To the idea, often repeated on Saturday, that only a “good guy with a gun” can stop a “bad guy with a gun,” there’s the rejoinder that Whitman, an Eagle Scout and Marine who’d won the service’s Good Conduct Medal, was a good guy with a gun. Until he wasn’t. On paper, he looked like the kind of guy lawmakers have said they hope will pack heat next year: A military veteran with exhaustive firearms training.

Whitman benefitted from being better armed than his opponents. If a sniper were to try the same stunt next year, the handguns UT students will be able to carry wouldn’t matter much. Nor might they be much good in many of the other scenarios we’ve seen lately: A well-prepared person, or persons, with assault rifles and body armor, say, or a team of jihadis trained in small-unit tactics, or a deranged individual with improvised explosive devices. In January, a Texas gun group re-enacted the Charlie Hebdo attack twelve times with the goal of proving that a gun in the hands of one of the victims could have saved lives, and found themselves totally unable to do so.

The police didn’t have the right tools to kill Whitman quickly, so civilians grabbed their own hunting rifles and took potshots at where they thought he was. One line about the shooting is that the fire kept Whitman from firing as freely as before, thus saving lives.

James told the Senate committee that the ad-hoc nature of the effort to kill Whitman caused a tremendous amount of confusion and kept her from getting aid. “I just met one of the men who carried me off, and he was kept for at least sixty minutes from coming and helping me because of the friendly fire. Because it put a lot of people in danger.” She said the same thing before another committee in 2013. This time, the bill passed. In a dark coincidence, it goes into effect on August 1, 2016—the fiftieth anniversary of the Tower shooting…

No matter what one thinks of guns, it’s hard not to be a little demoralized by that. That is why it was hard to understand what a spokesman for the organizers, Matthew Short, meant in his rhetorical answer to why his group felt compelled to stage the protest at all: “We love freedom and we’re trying to make more freedom,” he told the Statesman.

We, however, can afford to be a little more cynical about their motives: The organizers are experienced provocateurs. Short showed up with assault rifles at a predominantly black protest against police violence in Dallas last year. If necessary, he said at the time, he and his friends would “put ourselves between the crowd and private property” to prevent crime. The fringe websites in which figures like Short traffic credit his efforts with preventing a riot and discouraging protesters from coming out the night after. Some people want attention more than anything else, and brandishing a gun is a good way to get it…

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Reader Interactions

27Comments

  1. 1.

    The Golux

    December 19, 2015 at 3:14 pm

    Melt ’em all down, and display the resulting block of steel on the Mall in Washington. Call it “The Ingot”.

  2. 2.

    Mike in NC

    December 19, 2015 at 3:22 pm

    On our way to see Rothenburg today (absolutely lovely, by the way), the tour guide said that to get a hunting license in Bavaria, people must attend classes for close to a year and then pass a tough written exam. Imagine that scenario in the USofA!

  3. 3.

    Baud

    December 19, 2015 at 3:28 pm

    @Mike in NC: Now that’s a well regulated militia.

  4. 4.

    Randy P

    December 19, 2015 at 3:32 pm

    @Mike in NC: Hey, I’ve been in Rothenburg!

    That’s the place with the town legend about the mayor saving the town with a drinking bet, right? And a cuckoo clock that repeats the legend every hour?

    I also remember that you could walk into the town dungeon and see torture implements up close. I actually got physically ill and had to sit down to avoid passing out. Museum displays never did that to me, but somehow standing in the actual room did.

  5. 5.

    MattF

    December 19, 2015 at 3:43 pm

    About the last paragraph in that passage… thank you. How come the only place I’ve seen that information is right here? Why didn’t any of the dozens of journalists who covered this story give their readers any of the relevant facts about the ‘enactors’? Seriously, folks. Why?

  6. 6.

    Mike in NC

    December 19, 2015 at 3:44 pm

    @Randy P: I saw the sign for the Medieval Crime & Justice Museum and was curious about seeing some sort of ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff, but instead got dragged through the streets teeming with thousands of tourists from China, Japan, India, Europe and North America, shopping just a few days before Christmas. That was all the punishment I needed.

  7. 7.

    Mike in NC

    December 19, 2015 at 3:48 pm

    @efgoldman: Heard that a bunch of US military bases were here until 5-10 years ago. Empty buildings now being used to house refugees from Syria.

  8. 8.

    Roger Moore

    December 19, 2015 at 3:54 pm

    @The Golux:

    Melt ’em all down, and display the resulting block of steel on the Mall in Washington.

    Not really practical. There are somewhere on the order of 300 million guns in America. Assuming that they’re a mix of handguns and long guns so that they have an average of 1 kg of steel each, that would give you an ingot about 125 feet on a side and weighing about as much as a carrier task force. To put it another way, you could use it to make a steel obelisk larger than the Washington Monument.

  9. 9.

    RSA

    December 19, 2015 at 4:10 pm

    @Mike in NC:

    On our way to see Rothenburg today (absolutely lovely, by the way),

    Nice. I used to live a couple of hours away, and it’s a very pretty town to visit. (When not super-crowded, I guess. :-) My wife and I stayed in a little hotel/Gasthof to one side of a picturesque gate, and whenever I see a postcard of the town I squint and usually can find it. Funny memories we take away.

  10. 10.

    sparrow

    December 19, 2015 at 4:12 pm

    @efgoldman: Well, perhaps not impossible, but terribly, terribly bloody. Which is rather counter to the whole point.

  11. 11.

    Another Holocene Human

    December 19, 2015 at 4:17 pm

    @Mike in NC: I went to the White Tower in London (which was worth the visit) and while touring the Tudor part they had this big sign put up by the British government claiming they never tortured people.

    Well, it’s not technically true, but I’m sure it made the Blairites feel good about themselves.

  12. 12.

    Russ

    December 19, 2015 at 4:29 pm

    When the number of students going to schools that allow guns starts to decline………….we never thought this would happen.

  13. 13.

    Germy

    December 19, 2015 at 4:57 pm

    To the idea, often repeated on Saturday, that only a “good guy with a gun” can stop a “bad guy with a gun,” there’s the rejoinder that Whitman, an Eagle Scout and Marine who’d won the service’s Good Conduct Medal, was a good guy with a gun. Until he wasn’t. On paper, he looked like the kind of guy lawmakers have said they hope will pack heat next year: A military veteran with exhaustive firearms training.

    My local paper used to feature a “gun rights” blog, where an NRA enthusiast would post essays about inner-city violence and the damn liberals trying to take his guns. He had a loyal group of followers who’d leave comments on his blog. They were obsessed with the inner-city youth gangs somehow invading their exurb and rural enclaves.

    A constant theme through his blog and the comments was a hard line: Good Guys and Bad Guys. Of course, there were also The Crazies, but they got lumped in with The Bad Guys. It was as simple as that with them. The world was divided between Good Guys With Guns and Bad Guys With Guns.

    No room in their logic for any gray areas.

  14. 14.

    Schlemazel

    December 19, 2015 at 5:01 pm

    I keep waiting for the gun fight at the dumb shit corral to happen. It stuns me it hasn’t already. Some sunny Saturday someone is going to do something at the local WallyMart that sounds like it might be a gun shot. About a dozen mouth-breathing morons will snap into action. Whipping out their shootin arn they will see plenty of armed suspicious folks they will view as targets. Naturally shooting an armed clown will identify them as a bad guy with a gun & make them the target. I just hope they don’r hit any innocent bystanders but only other cowboys.

  15. 15.

    Hungry Joe

    December 19, 2015 at 5:02 pm

    @Roger Moore: ” … you could use it to make a steel obelisk larger than the Washington Monument.”

    Something a little less phallic might be more appropriate, given the nature of … you know …

  16. 16.

    FlipYrWhig

    December 19, 2015 at 5:04 pm

    @Roger Moore: that would be the best monument ever.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    December 19, 2015 at 5:04 pm

    @Schlemazel:

    I keep waiting for the gun fight at the dumb shit corral to happen.

    You mean like this.

  18. 18.

    Schlemazel

    December 19, 2015 at 5:08 pm

    @Baud:
    Yeah but they have the whole ‘bad guy motorcycle thugs’ thing. I’m expecting more 4-10 concealed carry clowns capping one another in a family setting. Not that it will slow down the lust of the ammosexuals but it might cause more normal people to think twice about the happy horseshit being peddled.

  19. 19.

    Mandalay

    December 19, 2015 at 5:20 pm

    @Anne Laurie
    Unless you have the permission of Texas Monthly, publishing eight paragraphs of an article lifted from their web site is not fair use – it’s stealing.

  20. 20.

    Adam L Silverman

    December 19, 2015 at 5:34 pm

    @Baud: The problem it is unclear from the forensics materials released how much of that was bikers from different groups/gangs shooting each other and how much was the cops shooting into the group.

  21. 21.

    debbie

    December 19, 2015 at 6:45 pm

    @Schlemazel:

    Like this?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/us/woman-in-michigan-charged-after-shooting-at-fleeing-shoplifters.html

    I can’t find the exact quote, but Duva-Rodriguez said she would never try to help anyone again.

  22. 22.

    debbie

    December 19, 2015 at 6:46 pm

    @Schlemazel:

    I’ll try again. Like this?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/us/woman-in-michigan-charged-after-shooting-at-fleeing-shoplifters.html

    I can’t find the exact quote, but Duva-Rodriguez said she would never try to help anyone again.

  23. 23.

    The Lodger

    December 19, 2015 at 6:56 pm

    I’ve never heard of a real incident where a good guy with a gun has stopped a bad guy with a gun. Any actual examples out there?

  24. 24.

    Schlemazel

    December 19, 2015 at 7:22 pm

    @Mandalay:
    No, it is not.

    @debbie:
    Yeah, this is exactly the sort of thing I expect, people with guns but no idea what is actually happening making assumptions & firing away – without a clue what the background is or where their bullets will ultimately end up. It would have been better if there was another ammosexual that saw her shooting & decided she was the bad guy with a gun & try to stop her. Thats the bigger event I expect to happen.

    It almost happened at the GIfford shooting. The ‘good’ guy drew & was going to shoot the person holding the gun but decided he didn’t know for sure & waited a second. The guy holding the gun had taken it off the shooter. His reward was to almost be shot by the ‘good guy’

  25. 25.

    evodevo

    December 19, 2015 at 7:35 pm

    Was that story about the Paris attacks true? Wherein the drug cartel dudes at the restaurant took out a couple of the shooters? Can’t get anything from Google on it… Bad guy with a gun vs…….?

  26. 26.

    jharp

    December 19, 2015 at 9:27 pm

    Was reading the link to the Texas Monthly piece on the Tower shooting and thought I’d share.

    Yikes

    JOHN PIPKIN: I’d left Scholz’s and was sitting across the street from the Chi Omega house when this Texas Ranger walked up carrying a pair of binoculars and a rifle with a scope on it. For some reason, he picked me out of the group of kids sitting on the curb. He said, “Son, you ever done any hunting?” And I said, “Yes, sir, I’ve been hunting all my life.” He said, “Well, take these binoculars. I need for you to calibrate me.” And I said, “Okay.” Whitman would stick his rifle out through one of these drainpipes on the observation deck every once in a while and shoot at someone. The ranger would shoot back, and I’d say, “You’re an inch too high,” or “Bring it over to the left a couple inches.”

    JOHN PIPKIN: I was looking through the binoculars when all of a sudden I thought to myself, “Gosh, he’s pointing that rifle at me.” It was like I could see up inside the barrel of the rifle, from four hundred yards away. The next thing I knew, I could feel bullets grazing the top of the hair on my head. The ranger said, “Boy, we got his attention now.” I was absolutely terrified. I dropped the binoculars and scrambled around behind a tree, and then a car. I sat there and panted, thinking how close I’d come to being shot. The ranger said, “You okay, son?” I said, “I guess. I’m alive.” He said, “Yeah, that was pretty close.” And I said, “Yes, sir, it was too close. I think I’m done with my spotting.”
    – See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/96-minutes/#sthash.17DYKrfa.dpuf

  27. 27.

    john fremont

    December 19, 2015 at 10:44 pm

    @The Lodger: The only one I can recall is the Pearl High School shooting where the principal, Joel Myrick, stopped the shooter with his Colt 45. The shooter had already murdered a few students and was intending to continue his spree at the Junior High when the principal stopped the shooter at gunpoint. That’s all I can remember.

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