The 1966 University of Texas Tower shooting remains clouded by myths, including the myth of the “good guy with a gun.” It left too many Americans with only evil to blame — and not our leaders, our policies and ourselves. Essay by SeamusMcGraw:
has noted, that what many of these killers have claimed as victimization is sometimes little more than their own experience of run-of-the-mill disappointments and frustrations.Courtesy Ralph Barrera/The Austin American-Statesman
It is not surprising that, faced with mounting atrocities, we cast about for a silver bullet to explain away all the ones made of lead, a single, simple solution, or, failing that, a myth to make the slaughter more comprehensible. That’s human nature. It’s the “good guy with a gun” myth. It was not fashioned out of whole cloth. Built upon our long and dark obsession with firearms, an indispensable part of the myth of Texas and, by extension, the myth of America, it was finally turned into a catchphrase by the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre and marketed ruthlessly in the aftermath of the slaughter at Sandy Hook. And it had its first test at the University of Texas. The results were, to put it bluntly, inconclusive.
Indeed, out of 277 gun massacres examined by the FBI between 2000 and 2018 in three studies, so-called good guys with guns interrupted mass shootings 3.9% of the time. Unarmed civilians interrupted them almost three times more often . And 27% of the time, it was a bad guy with a gun — the killer himself — who ended the rampage by killing himself.
He is, in every sense of the word, a true hero. And he deserves every honor that has come his way. No one could have done more than he did that day. Few, as we’ve seen over and over again, would even try. But still, despite his rare heroism, despite his steely courage and his instantaneous response, we must never forget that 26 people — ranging from a pregnant woman to a 77-year-old grandfather — were slaughtered in a matter of moments before Willeford could arrive.
Many of them will be long-term casualties of this ongoing slaughter, even if they never spilled a drop of their own blood. As the psychology researcherfrom the University of Central Florida, who has studied the impact these slaughters have on first responders, put it, “There are just some events that are so horrific that no human being should be able to just process that and put it away.