Charles Whitman / U of Texas shooter

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The tone of references to Whitman in this thread is interesting - "Whack job", "crazy man", comparisons to the LA bank robbers.
Whitman had an undiagnosed brain tumor, and had been seeing a shrink because the medical doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him physically. Back then people wondered how someone could do something like this, yet today we seem to accept that this is "normal abnormal" behavior. A good CAT scan could have prevented the Tower shooting, yet today we really have no way to prevent these tradgedies from happening.
 
[blockquote]Whitman had an undiagnosed brain tumor, and had been seeing a shrink because the medical doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him physically.[/blockquote]
But there's disagreement about whether the brain tumor "made" him do it.
 
ET, it was good shooting, period. My point was more that a lot of folks didn't realize what was going on after things started and he managed to ping them fairly easily. It is sort of amazing the folks that thought they were safe or were unlikely to get hit and managed to get hit, such as the electrician and people peering around corners.

Whitman didn't need a Garand. He did fine with a 6 mm.

tyme is right about the disagreement on whether the brain tumor had anything to do with Whitman's issues. I am surprised there was much left after he was shot in the head at close range. The tumor could have affected his behavior. Then again, there are lots of people who do this sort of thing who don't have problems such as tumors and bunches of people who get tumors who don't become murders. The tumor could have been a problem. Then again, he could have had any other of a number of neurochemical embalances that could have adversely affected his behavior as well as having a tumor.
 
Whitman's first shooting was toward the south mall of the tower. He used the M1 Carbine to shoot into the fairly large number of students there during the change of class. After the relatively easy targets had gotten out of sight, he shifted to the 6mm and started in on the longer-range people.

People heard about it on their radios and drove over to campus to look. Some got shot.

Evolution works.

Art
 
My dad was his corpsman when they were in the Marines. According to my dad, Whitman was an okay guy, kinda quiet, got into a lot of fights.

One story he told me:

Dad was asleep in his rack one Friday night, and about 0230 or so, Whitman comes in and wakes him up complaining of stomach pain. Dad asks Whitman to move his hands away from his stomacn so that he could get a better look, and as Whitman did, his guts started falling out. Whitman had been in a bar fight and someone cut him pretty bad.

Another interesting thing: Dad sent him to the base hospital several times for severe headaches. Dad always thought that the Bell Tower incident would never had happened if the MDs at the hospital would have found the tumor....
 
Dredging out of memory of news articles about Whitman and the UT student medical center:

The doctor there was elderly. Whitman had gone there more than once, complaining of headaches. All he ever got was sympathy and aspirin. No suggestion of further diagnosis at some specialty clinic...

Art
 
People get headaches. Whitman got headaches. There is nothing remarkable about that. Some people get lots of headaches and don't have tumors or extreme mental stability issues. Headaches could be a relevant issue or simply a red herring, sort of like the white box truck with the DC sniper case. Sure enough, white box trucks were seen at and around shooting incidents. Come to find out, there were thousands of white box trucks in the DC area. The associations with the shootings was completely coincidence.

While some people did show up to campus when they heard there was a shooting and so did get shot, that is hardly a case for evolution working. Evolution will have only worked if those folks had NOT passed on genetic material yet. Correction, evolution does not work on the individual level, but population level. One or a few individuals failing to pass on their genetic material will have virtually no impact on a large population like humans.
 
Another factor in the medical side of this is that 40 years ago, there was a different ethic involving doctors. Unlike today, where doctors are so afraid of lawsuits and they order every conceivable test for even the most minor complaint just to avoid a lawsuit or spread the guilt around, back in the 60s, doctors diagnosed problems based on their knowledge alone. It could take many years to narrow down and identify a specific chronic problem.

Not necessarily better or worse, just the way things were back then.
 
We've learned a lot since the sixties. In fact I can't remember the last time they closed all the pools during a Polio Epidemic.
 
I started to quip lightly about that being the UT Student Health Center (AKA: "The Quack Shack") that I remember so well, and almost posted a couple of egregious anecdotes about the quality of care I recall them giving in '90-'91. But Hkmp5sd and jar raise some excellent points:
A: Those were different times, both socially, legally, and medically.
B: More often than not, a headache is just a headache.

Whatever the cause of his actions, Whitman's actions were manifested in a most pure form of evil, especially when you consider his actions prior to the tower shooting.
 
Cannon in an urban area: that's what shrapnel ammo is for. Set it to burst right in front of the target, doesn't go far afterward.
 
Oh, Oleg, that's just your Russian patrimony talking:

We enlightened (cough, cough) Westerners quit firing Shrapnel shells in , oh, 1917 or 1918. Those benighted Soviet Russkis used them as late as 1945.

To get serious: I saw the movie, with the attempt to shoot at the guy from an airplane. These days, I'm afraid the Govt. has gone from ineffectual to overkill. It wouldn't be an old biplane carrying a guy with a rifle, it'd be a fairly nasty heavily armed and armored helicopter. No doubt that would be the right solution, saving the lives of many innocents, but that kind of deadly power has been known to go to people's heads.


I'm glad the thing was stopped in the right way, by a local cop and a citizen volunteer, but I'm also very sad that so many people were killed and hurt before the end.
 
Orthonym, a couple of guys did go up in a light plane to check out the UT tower. They left the scene when they realized he was taking shots at them.

I wouldn't have hung around, either.

:), Art
 
Getting in kind of late, but I thought that I'd add that my boss was there, looking out the windows of Batts Hall, watching the whole thing.:( And that, for those of you planning a trip here sometime soon, they recently re-opened the tower observation deck, and tours are available.

http://www.utexas.edu/tower/schedule.html/


Also, about the ROTC, yes, they have it here, and in point of fact, right next to the ROTC Building is the UT Rifle Range, home of the UT Rifle and Pistol Club, which I am Vice-President of.

http://www.txis.com/~brad/utrpc/
 
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