On August 1, 1966, after killing his wife and mother, Charles Whitman went up to the observation deck of the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas at Austin and killed
14 people over the course of 96 minutes. Whitman had no semi-automatic weapons, which meant that he had to manually reload his rifles and handguns every few rounds. If Whitman had access to the Colt semi-automatic AR-15, newly available to the public at that time, he could fire
as many as 60 to 90 rounds a minute, which would have resulted in a much higher body count by orders of magnitude.
In 2015, the Texas legislature passed the
Campus Carry Law, which allows anyone with a concealed carry permit into university buildings in Texas, including that same Main Building Tower at the University of Texas that Charles Whitman made infamous 49 years previous.
Last year, Texas State Senator Bob Hall pushed for an expansion to the Campus Carry Law that would
allow licensed adults to carry weapons in public and charter schools.
Our collective consciousness has been rocked by the bloodshed that has transpired over the last month, and as seen in the images from Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and now Tulsa, Oklahoma, this horror has spread faster than any pandemic virus ever could. But with each horror that we witness, ammosexuals and spokesmodels for the gun industry see each of these shootings as an opportunity to expand their call for more guns in every aspect of American life.
For most of us, each incident of gun violence is a nightmare — for the ghouls that work for the gun industry, each mass killing is a marketing opportunity.