The Texas Tower shooting of 1966
Charles Whitman. None of you numbnuts know who Charles Whitman is?
Ordinary Texans broke out their hunting rifles and returns fire, probably suppressing Whitman. Only 2 people admitted to that since then, but you can tell more than 2 people were doing so from the audio.
Bravos for citizen response?
But PBS claims all these non-po-po shooting caused the police to hand back to avoid getting in the crossfire. Well, those PBS folks would say that no matter what the truth of the matter is
My memory may be faulty, but I thought they hung back initially because they weren't sure of his location (I think the observation deck had a 360 view) at first and there was a pretty wide open kill zone around the tower that made approach extraordinarily dangerous (this was long before SWAT teams). I don't remember how the officers that took Whiteman got in the building.
ReplyDeleteKinky Friedman wrote a satirical song about the shootings.
ReplyDeleteBlack Man with a Gun podcast episode 484 2016-08-05 has a pretty good discussion on it as well.
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