Good guys with guns didn’t stop the UT Tower Shootings

Professors, students and other ordinary folks returned fire on Charles Whitman. It hurt more than it helped.

View of the UT Tower at dusk (Patrick Lu / Flickr / Creative Commons)

They say everything’s bigger in Texas. That’s true whether we’re talking trucks, portion sizes—or death tolls. My home state was the site of four of the 10 worst mass shootings in US history. The anti-immigrant rampage this month at a Walmart in El Paso, only the third-deadliest in the state, narrowly surpassed in body count Charles Whitman’s 1966 killing spree at the University of Texas.

As a student reporter, I was assigned by the Daily Texan to write a retrospective on the Tower Shootings for the 40th anniversary in 2006. I got the chance to interview dozens of witnesses, police, news reporters and survivors of the massacre.

After hearing all these first-hand accounts, I discovered the shootings were somehow more surreal than I had previously imagined. The campus was transformed into a war zone.

Two Remington rifles, an M1 Carbine and a shotgun—these were the main weapons Whitman used to carry out his massacre (Wikimedia Commons)

Ordinary people grabbed hunting rifles off the backs of their pickup trucks and began firing back at Whitman. One former student I…