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The history of public mass shootings by a lone gunman killing or wounding strangers is important to trace, as they parallel the rise of the gun-rights movement and ramped-up militarism. This suggests that it is not only the sheer number of guns in the hands of private citizens or the lack of regulation and licensing, but also a gun culture at work, along with a military culture, matters more difficult to resolve than by imposing regulations on firearms.
The first notable mass shooting, in 1966, is often not counted, because there were no more of that character until 1982, when they began with some regularity. But the University of Texas mass shooting is significant and in retrospect was no anomaly, more like a comet that would return. Former Marine sniper and UT engineering student Charles Whitman shot and killed fourteen people and wounded another thirty-two while perched for ninety minutes on top of the twenty-seven-story Clock Tower on the University of Texas, Austin, campus, before he was killed by police. Early that morning, he had strangled his mother to death and murdered his wife by stabbing her in the heart as she slept. He later explained that he didn’t want them to be ashamed of him and suffer for his actions. Whitman had been in the Marine Corps, but did not serve in combat and completed his service before U.S. troops were deployed to Vietnam. However, he had suffered a head injury from a jeep accident during his service. Whitman kept a detailed journal in the months before the shootings, recording his severe headaches and feelings of rage, his failure to get help from multiple doctors he consulted, and the ineffectiveness of the medications they prescribed. In the autopsy of his body, doctors discovered a pecan-size tumor in his brain that could have caused his derangement. In the wake of the tragedy, rather than taking action to improve preventive health care at the university or the state, authorities created the first S.W.A.T. team, soon to be replicated in nearly every police force in the country.5
In January 2016, a new Texas law went into effect allowing handgun permit holders, who had been required to conceal their weapons, to carry handguns openly, except on public or private university or college campuses; then, on August 1, 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Texas Tower shooting massacre, the legislature included public university campuses among the locales where people have the right to openly carry handguns. Also, the Texas handgun license is equal to a driver’s license as official identification for security checks, voting, or any other request for identification. In an article titled: “America’s Future is Texas,” author Lawrence Wright observes: “An eccentric feature of Texas’s new gun laws is that people entering the state capitol can skip the long lines of tourists waiting to pass through metal detectors if they show guards a license-to-carry permit. In other words, the people most likely to bring weapons into the building aren’t scanned at all. Many of the people who breeze through are lawmakers and staffers who tote concealed weapons into offices or onto the floor of the legislature. But some lobbyists and reporters have also obtained gun licenses, just to skirt the lines. I recently got one myself.”6
Wright, a Texan himself, also writes: “Especially among Texas politicians, there’s a locker-room lust for weaponry that belies noble-sounding proclamations about self-protection and Second Amendment rights. In 2010, Governor Perry boasted of killing with a single shot a coyote that was menacing his daughter’s Labrador. Perry was jogging at the time, but naturally he was packing heat: a .380 Ruger. The gun’s manufacturer promptly issued a Coyote Special edition of the gun, which comes in a box labelled ‘for sale to Texans only.’”7
The University of Texas massacre took place at the height of the war in Southeast Asia, which was televised nationwide daily. Yet the public reaction of horror and shock at the mass shooting was far more intense than reactions to the U.S. soldiers slaughtering villagers in Vietnam on the nightly news. And so the trend continued, when mass shootings resumed sixteen years later during the Reagan administration.
Nearly 30 percent of all mass shootings that have resulted in multiple deaths have occurred in workplaces, usually by an angry former employee. The first workplace shooting with a large death toll took place in Edmond, Oklahoma, a small college town north of Oklahoma City. In August 1986, a forty-four year old former Marine and part-time U.S. Postal Service worker, after receiving a negative work review, stormed into the town’s small, busy post office. Dressed as if for work in his mail carrier’s uniform and carrying three handguns in his mailbag, he killed fourteen and wounded six before shooting himself. In the decade before, there had been five other post office shootings by former or current workers, with one or two fatalities. More followed almost annually, giving rise in the early 1990s to the grim term “going postal.” Dozens of other workplace shootings have taken place—in office buildings, strip malls, factories, night clubs, restaurants, military bases, and universities (employee related, unlike the separate category of “school shootings” targeting students) during the time period of mass shootings from the late 1980s on.
Two mass shootings in restaurants do not conform to the “workplace shooting” rubric, each with the highest body count up to the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. Neither shooter had been employed or knew anyone in the restaurants. Both were likely hate crimes, targeting Mexicans in one case and women in the other.
The mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, in 1984 was the largest up to that time, with twenty-two left dead, including the shooter, and nineteen wounded; one of the victims was pregnant, and another victim was an eight-month-old baby. San Ysidro is inside the United States on the border across from Tijuana, Mexico, but people of Mexican descent comprise 90 percent of its population. Nearly all the shooting victims were of Mexican descent. The shooter, a forty-one-year-old Anglo-American, was armed with a shotgun and an Uzi. After seventy-eight minutes of the gunman’s killing spree, firing at least 245 rounds, a S.W.A.T. team moved in and shot him. James Oliver Huberty, the shooter, was born and lived most of his life in Ohio, a serial failure at starting a business, but moved to Tijuana, then San Ysidro a year before the massacre. Back in Ohio, he had been a dedicated survivalist, apparently not with an organized group; he accumulated an arsenal and also hoarded food and other survival necessities, taking it all along in the move west. He believed government regulations caused his business failures and that international bankers controlled the Federal Reserve, with communist dominance everywhere, economic collapse and nuclear war imminent.8 These were the Reagan years.
The next largest mass shooting after San Ysidro occurred on October 16, 1991, and also took place in a restaurant, Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. The shooter was not tied to the restaurant in any way. Killeen was a town of around 64,000 people in 1991, and also host to the enormous Ft. Hood Army base (named after Confederate general John Bell Hood in 1942). Thirty-five-year-old civilian George Jo Hennard drove his pickup truck into the plate glass window of Luby’s while some 150 patrons were having dinner. Armed with a Glock 17 and a Ruger P89, he then jumped out of his vehicle and into the restaurant yelling, “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers!”9 Then he began shooting, killing twenty-three, fourteen of them women, whom he appeared to be targeting, yelling “Bitch!” as he shot. The violence ended when he shot himself. In the days after, those who had worked or lived with him told reporters that he hated women, as well as gay people, African Americans, and Mexicans. Some days before his rampage, Hennard is reported to have expressed rage in a restaurant while watching television coverage of Anita Hill’s testimony accusing Clarence Thomas, candidate for the Supreme Court, of sexual harassment. The restaurant manager said: “When an interview with Anita Hill came on, he just went off. He started screaming at the television, ‘You dumb bitch! You bastards opened the door for all the women!’”10
Thirteen percent of mass shootings have occurred in schools. Not the first, but the most shocking one up to that time was the 1999 Columbine High School shootings by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that took thirteen lives—twelve students and a teacher. The apparently
normal upper-middle-class families of the two high school students seemed an unlikely background to produce such violence under their parents’ noses without their noticing anything awry about their sons. The shooting rampage inside the school took place over several hours, while most students escaped. Only after the sound of gunfire ceased did police storm the building, where they found the two killers had shot themselves.11
Certainly there had been many shootings in schools from the early 1800s to the 1966 Texas Tower massacre, but none had been mass shootings with multiple victims. There were dozens of school shooting incidents between the 1966 UT tower shooting and 1989, but they began to occur with troubling frequency and more deadly outcomes in the 1990s, culminating in Columbine at the end of the millennium. After 2000, the number of school shootings increased from single digits to double digits by 2005, with three catastrophic ones, none of which fit the alleged “patterns” that had been theorized—mainly about possible reactions to bullying—bringing into question the notion that any of them did.
None was more baffling and tragic than the December 2012 mass shooting at the elementary school in Newton, Connecticut, where twenty-year-old Adam Lanza slaughtered twenty first-graders, along with six adult school personnel, before ending his own life. Children and babies had been killed in past mass shootings,12 but not specifically targeted as at Sandy Hook. Earlier, Lanza had shot and killed his mother while she slept in the home they shared. The mother, Nancy Lanza, was a gun hoarder and avid recreational shooter. Because her son suffered Asperger’s syndrome, he was mostly home-schooled and had little social life, and she found that he enjoyed going with her to the shooting range, which she apparently considered appropriate therapy. She obviously had no fear of possible violence from the son, as she kept her multiple high-powered firearms and ammunition in the house where they both lived.
At the height of the U.S. military and mercenary killing in Iraq, in March 2005, conjuring memories of nineteenth-century wars against Native peoples, a sixteen-year old Anishinaabe citizen created his own war in the Red Lake Nation, located in the far north of what is today the state of Minnesota. Jeffrey Weise killed his beloved grandfather (a tribal police officer) and his grandfather’s girlfriend at their home. After taking his grandfather’s police weapons and bulletproof vest, Weise drove his grandfather’s police vehicle to Red Lake Senior High School, where he had dropped out of school some months before. Weise shot and killed seven people at the school and wounded five others. The dead included an unarmed security guard at the entrance of the school, a teacher, and five students. After the police arrived, Weise exchanged gunfire with them. He was wounded and then committed suicide in a vacant classroom. Young Jeffrey had been interacting online with various neo-Nazi and other violent right-wing groups.13
On April 16, 2007, a new record was set for mass shootings, with thirty-two dead and twenty-three wounded on the Virginia Tech University campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. The shooter was twenty-three-year-old senior Seung-Hui Cho, using Glock 19 and Walther P22 pistols and stocked with four hundred rounds of ammunition. The other national news coming from Virginia that spring was eclipsed by the shooting—an eighteen-month celebration of the founding of the first British colony of the thirteen that would be formed over the next 125 years. During the month of April 2007, leading up to the May 3 visit of Queen Elizabeth to Jamestown for the celebrations, there was daily news coverage locally and nationally of the plans and special programming on the history of Jamestown. Some descendants of the Powhatan people whose land was taken for the settlement were on hand to provide entertainment, but there was no mention, much less apologies, for the murder of Powhatan farmers and the destruction of their homes and fields that accompanied British “settlement.” And in the days after the Virginia Tech shootings, no mention was made of what had happened at Jamestown four centuries earlier. One could speculate that the shooter, Cho, may have taken note. Jamestown was famously the first permanent settlement that gave birth to the Commonwealth of Virginia, the colonial epicenter of what became the United States of America nearly two centuries later, the colony out of which was carved the U.S. capital, Washington, on the river that met the sea up the coast. A few years after Jamestown was established, the more familiar and revered colony of Plymouth was implanted by English religious dissidents, under the auspices of private investors with royal approval, as with Jamestown, and engaging in the same mercenary activities personified by Captain John Smith. This was the beginning of British overseas colonialism, after the conquest and colonization of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland turned England into Great Britain.
The Virginia Tech shootings were described in 2007 as the “worst mass killing,” the “worst massacre,” in U.S. history. Descendants of massacred Indigenous ancestors took exception to that designation. Lakota Joan Redfern expressed the reaction of many, saying, “To say the Virginia shooting is the worst in all of U.S. history is to pour salt on old wounds. It means erasing and forgetting all of our ancestors who were killed in the past.”14
It was curious with the media circus surrounding the Jamestown celebration, and with Queen Elizabeth and President George W. Bush presiding, that journalists failed to compare the colonial massacres of Powhatans four centuries earlier and the single, disturbed individual’s shootings of his classmates. The shooter himself, born in South Korea and brought to the United States by his parents at age eight, was a child of colonial war, the U.S. war in Korea and continued presence of tens of thousands of heavily armed U.S. troops. He had been diagnosed as depressed but was likely bipolar. He appeared to be overwhelmed by wealthy, white students, who made up 75 percent of the undergraduate student body. In the videotaped manifesto Cho made and sent to the press before his rampage, he called his fellow students “sadistic snobs,” and said further: “You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can? You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your Vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.”15
Then there was Orlando. Outdoing all the mass shootings of this type that had preceded it: forty-nine dead and fifty-three wounded. The shooter, Omar Mateen, a twenty-nine-year-old U.S. citizen of Afghani Pashtun descent, used a SIG MCX semiautomatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17. Like Cho, he was at war with his peers. His victims were from the GLBTQ community, and most of the fatalities that night were of Puerto Rican descent; it was Latino night at the Pulse gay nightclub on June 12, 2016. Mateen had frequented the club. This was the second mass shooting of civilians directly associated with ongoing U.S. wars. Mateen, a Sunni Muslim, had sworn loyalty to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS), the most recent terrorist jihadist group to rise out of U.S. wars in the Middle East. Six months earlier, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple who were legal immigrants from Pakistan, interrupted a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, where Mr. Farook was an employee. They pulled out automatic weapons, firing randomly it appeared, killing fourteen and injuring twenty-two. Quickly, the FBI traced the terror attack back to before their immigration to the United States and their allegiance to the Islamic State terror organization that the United States is at war with in Iraq.
On Sunday evening, October 1, 2017, records were temporarily broken for the number of people killed during a mass shooting perpetrated by a single gunman. On that occasion, sixty-four-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock shot to death fifty-nine people, including himself, with nearly five hundred hospitalized with injuries resulting from the incident. Paddock was born in Iowa and had lived in Florida, Texas, and an upscale retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, near the Arizona and Utah borders. Four days prior to his massacre-suicide, Paddock checked into a 32nd-floor suite at the luxury casino-hotel Mandalay in Las Vegas. Having be
en a high-rolling professional gambler at the hotel for some time, Paddock was familiar to the staff, who comped him the expensive suite as a perk for gambling on their premises.
Under the lax scrutiny of “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” Paddock managed to stockpile his room with twenty-two high-powered scoped rifles ranging in size from .308 to .223 caliber, two tripods, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Just after 10:00 p.m. that Sunday night, Paddock broke two windows in the suite and began firing semiautomatic weapons that had been fitted with a “bump stock” device that allowed him to increase the speed he could fire bullets into the crowd. His target was a packed, shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of 22,000 people enjoying the final set of a country music festival taking place in the open air across from his hotel. Paddock attacked the audience with ten long minutes of non-stop shooting.