During the first mass school shooting, armed students fired back

Now Texas is letting students carry guns on college campuses again in order to defend themselves

By Meagan Day

University of Texas President Gregory Fenves sounded reluctant this week as he announced that the system would comply with a new state law permitting students to bring guns into classrooms.

Supporters of the law say that a freely armed student population will save lives in the event of a school shooting. They even held a mock mass shooting on the UT Austin campus to drive home their point. “Our goal is to instill the importance of everyone to be able to defend themselves in any way they choose,” said the gun rights group that organized the demonstration, in a statement that referred to gun-free campuses as “victim disarmament zones.”

The law is slated to take effect on August 1, the 50th anniversary of the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history, and by many accounts the first in the nation. In 1966, an ex-Marine and engineering student named Charles Whitman ascended to the observation deck of the Austin campus’ 30-floor clock tower. Whitman began shooting at random, hitting 43 people and killing 13 of them.

According to gun rights groups, the new law would prevent such tragedies. But there’s some irony in their choice of the UT shooting as a commemorative occasion. It so happens that many students on the UT campus were armed in 1966, and many of them fired at Whitman, who was ultimately killed by a police officer. Whether civilian gunfire was helpful that day remains a matter of debate.

An oral history of the shooting compiled by Texas journalist Pamela Colloff features several eyewitness accounts of civilians taking up arms.

The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, then a PhD candidate at UT, was on campus that day. “I hadn’t fully comprehended,” he told Colloff, “that lots of people around me in Austin not only owned guns but had them close at hand and regarded themselves as free to use them.”

“It seemed like every other guy had a rifle,” said Ann Major. “There was a sort of cowboy atmosphere, this ‘Let’s get him’ spirit.”

“I don’t know where these vigilantes came from,” said Brenda Bell, “but they took over Parlin Hall and were crashing around, firing guns. There was massive testosterone.”

Another eyewitness described “two guys in white shirts and slacks running across the lawn of the Pi Phi house, hustling up to its porch with rifles at the ready.” Yet another remembered that “students with deer rifles were leaning up against telephone poles, using the pole, which is rather narrow, as their shield. And they were firing like crazy back at the tower.”

Luckily, none of these civilian bullets hit innocent bystanders. But none of them hit Whitman, either. A group of three police officers and one civilian made their way to the observation deck and killed Whitman after 96 minutes of mayhem and bloodshed.

After the shooting spree ended, people amassed at the base of the tower in shock. “There wasn’t a breeze moving in any direction,” said Clif Drummond, “and the crowd was totally quiet. It was so hot that you could almost see the heat. There were lots of rifles — all on safety, barrels pointed up, butts resting on waistbands. You could see the barrels sticking up out of the crowd.”

Texas gun rights advocates insist that the new law will make campuses safer by increasing the likelihood that a school shooter would be shot by a civilian. By beginning to enforce the law on the 50th anniversary of the UT shooting, Texas legislators are implying that the law would somehow prevent another such shooting. But Texas students were freely armed in 1966, and Charles Whitman still managed to kill 14 people.

By some accounts, the civilian gunfire did hinder Whitman and save lives. The officer who killed Whitman, Ramiro Martinez, wrote in his autobiography that “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.”

But one of Whitman’s surviving victims, a woman named Claire Wilson, said that the pandemonium caused by student shooters only made the situation worse. She lay on the ground bleeding next to her dead boyfriend for an hour and a half as bullets whizzed by. Gunfire by well-intentioned civilians, she said, delayed her rescue.

Wilson, who was pregnant at the time and lost the baby, said that she could feel her legs burning on the hot pavement. A nurse who attended to the wounded told Colloff that “some of the kids that had been shot and had to lie out on the cement for a while had first- and second-degree burns.”

Timeline spoke to Gary Lavergne, author of the only nonfiction book about the shooting, who said there was no way of knowing whether the threat armed civilians posed to Whitman outweighed the threat they posed to each other.

“No one really knows the extent to which the return fire from civilians was helpful,” said Lavergne. He added, “But even if you accept that the armed civilians were primarily helpful that day, it doesn’t follow in my opinion that they would be helpful in 2016.”

Lavergne explained that students felt the need to defend themselves because they knew not to expect a robust police response. “The Austin police department didn’t have a SWAT team,” Lavergne said. “They didn’t have appropriate weapons or communication gear. They didn’t even have appropriate shoes. One of the officers who stormed the deck told me that he was wearing penny loafers, and was slipping and sliding on the blood.”

That’s not the case in 2016. “The Austin Police Department, and every police department, is much better able to handle a situation like this than 50 years ago,” Lavergne said. “And because of that, it’s not clear to me that armed civilians would be especially useful in a mass shooting situation today.”

Detractors of the new legislation point out that on days when there is no mass shooter — which is most of them — the guns in students’ pockets will be the biggest dangers on campus. University of Texas Chancellor William McRaven opposed the law because he was concerned about self-inflicted gunshot wounds, impulsive violence arising from interpersonal conflict, and accidental discharges, all of which are far more common than mass shootings.

“I like guns,” said McRaven in an interview with NPR. “I’m a big Second Amendment guy. I’ve probably got nine guns and six swords and two tomahawks, so I’m all about weapons. My concern has just been that … I want to make sure that we make our campuses as safe as possible. And the addition of concealed weapons on campus just didn’t seem like a good idea to me.”

“Having said that,” he added, “now that we have to implement this, I’m going to take every step possible to ensure the maximum safety.” UT plans to do this by designating some areas as gun-free zones, with the permission of the Texas Legislature.

UT President Fenves mirrored McRaven’s tone of begrudging compliance. “I do not believe handguns belong on a university campus,” he said, “so this decision has been the greatest challenge of my presidency to date.”