50 Years After UT’s Tower Shooting: Students Take Up Arms

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the University of Texas tower shooting by Charles Whitman. August 1st, a Monday, also coincided with the first day that students at the University were allowed to bring their concealed handguns onto the campus.

As you can undoubtedly imagine, this has triggered many on the left to cry about how this will create a massive potential for new tragedies to unfold. I am not unsympathetic to their claims, something as devastating as the tower shooting should never be taken lightly, particularly in a time when attacks on college campuses are on the rise.

However, there are a couple points of strong consideration that need to be made. For starters, it is concealed only, so no one is supposed to be walking around with a gun out and you better believe that the campus police will be out looking for them.  No one will have to worry about the intimidation factor or feeling threatened with the daily confrontation of open carry.

Second, if anyone wants to do great harm to those on the campus then they clearly don’t care about the laws in place to begin with. This crazed shooter will still need to sneak their firearm(s) onto campus (see the point above) and do all the steps that it would require to begin with.

Third, as ISIS has shown us time and time again, those that want to inflict large harm can do so with any number of creative tools at hand. A truck, an axe, a bomb, as even just a knife like we saw in Japan, it is the person that is the threat and I do believe that it is better to have a populous that can easily and readily defend themselves from such attacks.

Finally, one can hope that this will increase the amount of “good guys with guns” that can respond immediately to a situation happening around them. I would never instruct my child to pull their gun and go looking for the shooter, that is exactly how they end up shot by the shooter or the police who mistake them, but I know that if he is trapped in a classroom I would rather he have a weapon on him.

I doubt that anything would have stopped Charles Whitman 50 years ago from carrying out his awful attack, but I do think that concealed carry would have saved lives at V-Tec and other more recent shootings.

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