I don’t check on them regularly and they go hypocritically stupid:
And they even changed their cover photo:
Even back then, The Narrative was set to ignore the fact that it was armed civilians who stepped up and kept Charles Whitman’s head down with their own personal rifles. It was this gunfire what allowed the killings to stop, rescue of the wounded to begin and police to reach the top of the tower and take care of Whitman:
I will quote from Massad Ayoob:
He never comes right out and says it, but McNab seems to show some sympathy for armed citizens. Analyzing the Texas Tower massacre by Charles Whitman in 1966, he writes, “The body count was soon stacking up on the streets of Austin. Such was the frustration felt by police that they permitted armed civilians to join them in directing fire against the tower. Their role became invaluable, as was acknowledged by Texas Ranger Ramiro ‘Ray’ Martinez, in his later autobiography ‘They Call Me Ranger Ray.’” It was Martinez who, along with brother Austin officer Houston McCoy, killed Whitman atop the tower. McNab quotes Martinez, “I was and am still upset that more recognition has not been given to the citizens who pulled out their hunting rifles and returned the sniper’s fire. The City of Austin and the State of Texas should be forever thankful and grateful to them because of the many lives they saved that day. The sniper did a lot of damage when he could fire freely, but when the armed citizens began to return fire the sniper had to take cover.”
Source: Massad Ayoob » 2010 » November » 13
But the lessons keep being ignored at the peril of the population. Politics trump common sense.
This was brought up in one of the writing classes I took in college back in 2010. The proff. was terrified at the idea of civilians returning fire against a relentless killer.
So he was OK with innocents being shot but not people stopping a bad guy?
Oy!
I always heard that there were 3 guys who finally got him, one of which was a civilian that the responding officers assumed was an off-duty at first.
Three police officers and one “civilian” were first into the tower, according to Wikipedia. They split and approached from two sides; one pair drew Whitman’s attention, which gave the other two officers the chance to come up on him unobserved.
The police department issued revolvers and shotguns. Rifles were needed to keep Whitman’s head down so the four men could make it to the tower. Some officers went home and got their own rifles, but (although Wiki won’t admit this) most of the riflemen were either civilians or cops that borrowed rifles from civilians. If guns had been banned from the campus, it wouldn’t have stopped Whitman from coming in with a concealed pistol and several more long guns and handguns in a footlocker on a dolly – no one questioned that until he was in the tower and close enough to shoot his way to his selected sniper post. But a ban would have greatly delayed an effective response.