Word: whitmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Austin, where two of those wounded by Whitman remain in critical condition and three in serious condition, most flags flew at half-staff through the week. This week the flags go back to full staff as the university and the capital attempt to return to normal. That may take a while. The 17 chimes in the tower from which Charlie Whitman shot peal each quarter-hour, resounding over the tree-shaded campus and the mist-mantled hills beyond...
...CHARLES WHITMAN may have been unusual in having a dozen guns at his disposal, but he was by no means unique. Americans have always been a gun-toting people. Guns enabled the first settlers to protect and feed themselves in a hostile land, made later colonists a nation of rifle men capable of winning their freedom in the American Revolution. The West was tamed with guns, and frontier justice became synonymous with them. From the nation's earliest days, the gun has been the delight of collectors and sportsmen. Today, the U.S. has the world's largest civilian...
...sales to out-of-state buyers and anybody under 21; and 4) prohibit longarm sales to persons under 18. Invoking the "shocking tragedy" in Austin, President Johnson urged speedy passage "to help prevent the wrong persons from obtaining firearms." Of course, recognizing the "wrong person" is not always possible; Whitman would probably have qualified for his guns even under strict controls...
Stricter arms licensing could certainly not prevent the sort of crime perpetrated by Whitman, but it would keep guns away from at least some who might misuse them. Since Americans usually need licenses to marry, drive a motor scooter, run a shop or even own a dog, it is difficult to see why a license to keep a lethal weapon would be any abridgment of their freedom...
...murder is horrifying, but the work of such as Charles Whitman or the Chicago nurse-killer produces an almost hysterical quality of shock and dread. Numbers of dead alone cannot entirely account for it. Nor can the unsettling plaint of Austin's police chief that "this kind of thing could have happened anywhere." What is ultimately so disturbing about the 23 lives so taken is that nearly all were snuffed out for no reason and at random. In almost every case, they were unnamed and unknown to their killers, the incidental and impersonal casualties of uncharted battlefields that exist only...