Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Yesterday In History (What Can I Say, I Forgot About Yesterday)

Yesterday, August 1, 2016 was the 50th anniversary of the University of Texas, Austin, Tower Shootings. The gunman, Charles Whitman, shot 49 people and killed 16 of them. He already had also killed his mother and his wife earlier that morning. After his death, an autopsy (that he had requested in his writings) revealed a necrotic tumor in his brain but it was never concluded if the tumor led to rampage. Prior to the shootings, Whitman had suffered from apparent mental health issues for some time and had fits of violent rage. He sought medical and psychiatric help evidently to no avail.


While I remember a lot of the general story from my youth, I was 10 at the time this happened, I did not recall the details. I found an interesting detailed piece on it over at Wikipedia. Read more about him there. There are many interesting points in his story but I found one of the most so to be the amount of preparation he put into carrying out his killing spree. Hasty as were those preparations, they were extensive nonetheless. It is evident that he had plannedto be shooting for a long time if he could. If he had better fortified his position to prevent access to the police, he may have been up there for days before they stopped him. Luckily, he was killed by a shotgun wielding officer after another officer had gotten the jump on him and fired all six shots out of his revolver at Whitman but missed with all of them from about 50 feet away. (I swear my last post was written before I even became aware of this stuff; yet, the officer getting him with the shotgun and the other officer missing with all 6 shots from his revolver, support what I said in that other post regarding a shotgun versus a pistol.)

A hat tip to Dom Di who had a post about the shooting up on his FB page.

All the best,
Glenn B

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