The Deadly Tower

This is a 1976 made-for-TV movie concerning the 1966 shooting in Austin, Texas, by Charles Whitman.   I had little interest in this topic until I learned that Kurt Russell, one of my favorite actors, played Whitman himself.  Ned Beatty is the only other well known actor in this film, playing APD Officer Houston McCoy.

Background.   By now the shooting is well established in American culture, as one of the first mass shootings.  Obviously they would be rare in the days of muzzle loading rifles (up to the Civil War).  But even after the advent of bolt action rifles, the main weapon Whitman used, in the late nineteenth century, I’m not aware of any mass shootings of this nature before this one.  I wouldn’t count gangland massacres with Thompson submachineguns (St. Valentine’s Day Massacre 2/14/29), in which case the victims were Irish gangsters in a rival gang and not random strangers.

Charles Whitman was a former Marine and a student at the University of Texas in Austin.  Whitman was court-martialed for gambling, usury, and other offenses, demoted from corporal to private, and honorably discharged in 1964.  He started having major psychological problems, reaching the point where this shooting spree occurred. 

On August 1, 1966, he killed his mother, then his wife, and wrote a suicide note confessing to the crime ex ante.  In the note Whitman acknowledged having mental problems and urged doctors to autopsy him after it was all over, assuming therefore that eventually he would be killed.  Then he took an array of weapons to the tower at UT-Austin, barricaded himself on the top deck (28eme etage), and began firing.  In addition to his long-range weapons, he also brought short-range weapons to defend himself from the inevitable (and curiously delayed) police response.  The entire spree took 95 minutes, leaving 14 dead and 31 wounded, until he was finally shot by two Austin PD police officers, Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy.  Many civilians shot at Whitman from the ground, but no one hit him, and none of those “heroes” dared to enter the building and challenge him directly.  To the contrary, those “heroes” almost killed the cops who did go up and challenge him.

Weapon array:  includes, but not limited to, a Remington 700 with scope – a popular sniper rifle and commonly used in the US military as such; M1 Carbine, now considered unsuitable for such work but a cheap and popular gun at that time; a Sears 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun; a .357 magnum revolver; and a P08 Luger, 9mm. 

There have been too many references in popular culture to name them all – I’m not particularly amused, impressed or offended by Kinky Friedman’s “Ballad of Charles Whitman” - but the one that sticks in my mind is “Full Metal Jacket”, in which Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann (R. Lee Ermey, himself a former USMC drill sergeant in real life) reminds the USMC trainees of what Whitman accomplished with a sniper rifle – and that he was a former Marine.  Given that the movie takes place before January 1968 (Tet Offensive in Vietnam) that event would have been fairly recent to the trainee characters.

The movie does a mediocre job of showing what happened: an extended, unnecessary, and inaccurate human interest story of Officer Martinez (his wife was a blond, blue-eyed German, not Mexican); and although McCoy was the one who killed Whitman point blank with a shotgun, the movie credited Martinez with taking down Whitman, portraying McCoy as frightened and trembling.  Stupid changes which really don’t help…stick to the facts, please.   

Mass killings.  This was one of the first.  Whitman was homicidal suicidal and knew, at the outset, that this project would result in his death.  Instead of killing himself first and letting his mother, wife, and 14 other innocent people live, he went ahead and pulled this crap.  He was NOT Muslim.  Nor, for that matter, were the Columbine kids, the Sandy Hook bastard, the Batman asshole in Colorado, the German pilot who flew his plane full of passengers into the side of a mountain, and countless other mass killers who expected to die in the whole thing.  As for Muslim killers, obviously the 19 hijackers on 9/11 knew they would die.  But the two clowns in Boston ran away, and the Fort Hood shooter also survived. 

My impression of most of these is this.  The person in question is suicidal.  He knows that if he simply kills himself in the privacy of his own home – by whatever means, ideally OD on painkillers & alcohol – no one will give a damn.  He lacks the ability to establish his portmortem legacy by some sort of positive act like curing cancer.  So the way to snuff it AND have people notice is to kill a whole bunch of innocent people.  And our beloved press happily indulges him because it suits their own interests to do so.  Not any political agenda to ban weapons or focus attention on other political issues, but purely because “shit happens” is good for their own business.   By cluelessly encouraging this behavior for their own reasons, the press is complicit in these tragedies.  There’s plenty of blame to go around.