God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  Everyone in the room did exactly the wrong thing: we all hit the deck. An old man near me fell; I saw his head bounce on the marble floor. We were trapped inside a stone box, totally exposed. The library was locked down. Out of nowhere two campus cops appeared with automatic weapons. A private security guard crept behind the ticket booth with his unholstered pistol. People were openly weeping. Roberta was hunched between two evangelical women who whispered urgent prayers into her ears. “I knew this would happen,” Steve’s daughter said, giving voice to the lack of surprise we felt to be caught in yet another tragedy of the sort that we’ve all read about and watched on TV.

  As it turned out, the event in Dallas was “nothing.” A black child had been playing outside with a toy gun, which his parents had purchased earlier at the Texas Ranger museum. Like all toy weapons these days, it had an orange tip to clearly distinguish it from the real thing. The boy needed to go inside to the bathroom, so he gave his toy to his father, who was on a park bench smoking. Suddenly there was a black man with a gun. The cops put him on the ground and handcuffed him, then questioned him for two hours before letting him go. The panic that we experienced that day was unwarranted, but it underscored the fact that the open display of weapons is unnerving, even in Texas, and perhaps especially on college campuses.

  The age of mass shootings in public spaces actually began on a campus in Texas—on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman, a twenty-five-year-old engineering student, Eagle Scout, and former marine, murdered his mother and his wife, then barricaded himself in the top of the landmark tower in the heart of the University of Texas in Austin. He had a duffel bag full of weapons and a clear view of the entire low-slung town. He could see the narrow lake that divides Austin into north and south. To the west was the Balcones Fault, where the Hill Country begins, and to the east the flat coastal plain. When Whitman pulled the trigger and changed America, the giant clock above him showed that it was 11:48 a.m.

  For the next ninety-six minutes, Whitman fired on the campus and the adjacent shops along Guadalupe Street. The first person he shot was Claire Wilson James, a classmate of mine from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas. Claire was in summer school. She was eight months pregnant, and Whitman apparently aimed at her unborn child, who was the first to die. Claire lay on the blistering pavement, her abdomen ripped open, pretending to be dead. Her boyfriend, Thomas Eckman, fell dead beside her, shot through the neck. Whitman would shoot forty-three people from the tower that day, killing fourteen (a fifteenth victim eventually succumbed in 2001 from complications from the injury to his kidney).

  The plaza in front of the tower where Claire lay with her dead boyfriend was about half the size of a football field, totally exposed. You can’t imagine how hot the pavement is in August. As she lay there, believing that this was how her life would end, a redheaded coed named Rita Jones (later, Rita Starpattern, a visual artist) suddenly ran out to her and asked how she might help. Claire told her to run or she’d get shot. Instead, Rita lay beside her on the blistering concrete, peppering Claire with personal questions about what classes she was taking and where she grew up, keeping her from sinking into unconsciousness. Finally, about an hour into the siege, two daring seventeen-year-old boys raced out and dragged Claire to safety behind a statue of Jefferson Davis.

  Within minutes of Whitman’s sniper attack, students and citizens began firing back. There were deer rifles in the dormitories, and pistols in purses and glove compartments. Armed vigilantes crouched behind statues of Confederate heroes or took aim behind the narrow shelter of a telephone pole. “There was a mood of insanity, of wildness, of craziness in the air,” one of the students later recalled.

  There were no SWAT teams back then, although the improvisatory police response to the tower shooting would immediately make the case for them. Nor did the university even have a police force of its own. An Austin cop named Houston McCoy, one of the first responders, had a shotgun, which was useless at a distance, so he drove a student to his apartment to pick up his rifle, and then stopped at a hardware store to buy ammunition. There was practically no direction from police headquarters; this kind of thing was completely new. An innovative police sharpshooter tried to shoot Whitman from a private plane. Meantime, three police officers, and a civilian deputized on the spot, climbed to the top of the tower, stepping over the bodies of people Whitman had slain on his way up.

  AM Texas and FM Texas drew opposing lessons from the UT shooting. Claire James would later testify before the Texas legislature that the return fire impeded her rescue and prevented police from taking effective action. The courageous Austin police officers who ascended to the top of the tower did have to dodge the incoming fusillade, which showered them with dust and bits of limestone as they crept along the observation deck. On the other hand, gun proponents argued that by keeping Whitman pinned down, the vigilantes reduced the number of casualties by forcing him to shoot through rainwater spouts. “Before anybody fired at him, he had the run of the place. He could shoot over the walls and he could find targets,” Ray Martinez, one of the cops who finally shot Whitman to death, recalled. “But of course I was concerned I was going to get killed by friendly fire when we were up there.”

  The law didn’t change after that. It remained illegal for Texans to carry guns outside their home or vehicle. Then, in 1991, George Hennard, who was thirty-five and unemployed, drove his blue Ford pickup through the plate-glass window of the Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen. There were about 150 people having lunch. At first, they thought it was a freakish accident. A veterinarian in the room rushed to assist Hennard, who shot him, and then cried, “It’s payback time, Bell County! I hope y’all enjoy this!”

  Suzanna Hupp, a chiropractor, was having lunch with her parents. “My father and I got down on the floor and we put the table in front of us,” she later testified before the U.S. Congress. “It took me a good forty-five seconds to realize this man wasn’t there to commit a robbery, he wasn’t there for a ‘hit.’ He was there to shoot as many people as he possibly could.” She reached for her purse, where she kept her pistol, then realized that she had left her gun in her car, fearing that she might lose her chiropractor’s license if she were caught carrying a concealed weapon.

  Her father bravely rushed the shooter, but he was quickly shot down. Hupp told her mother that they needed to make a break for it, and then she raced to the back of the building and jumped out a window. When she looked back, she realized her mother had gone to comfort her dying husband. Hennard put a bullet in her head. “All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers!” he cried. He shot fifty people, killing twenty-three of them, most of them women, before killing himself.

  “I’m not really mad at the guy who did this,” Hupp told lawmakers in Washington. “That’s like being mad at a rabid dog.” She continued: “I’m mad at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect me and my family.” In 1996, Hupp got elected to the Texas House of Representatives, and subsequently passed a law allowing concealed weapons. It was signed by then governor George W. Bush.

  That wasn’t sufficient for the gun lobby, however. They wanted Texans to have the right to openly carry their handguns—as was already legal in forty-four other states. When framed that way, it did seem odd that Texas gun laws were more restrictive than those in most other places, but did we really want gunslingers in our restaurants and theaters? Gun advocates in Texas set people on edge by parading down Congress Avenue in front of the state capitol, carrying their long guns, as was legal, or walking into Target stores, which they selected for symbolic purposes. Polls showed that two-thirds of Texans opposed the measure, as did a large majority of the police chiefs in the state, but their complaints didn’t register. Open carry became legal on January 1, 2016. It’s rare to see anyone in public strapping a sidearm, but everywhere you look on public buildings you see signs in English and Spanish barring weapons, both openly carried and concealed. Punitive l
awmakers required the font of the lengthy texts be an inch high. Scientific measurements were taken, showing that, when stacked on top of each other, the two signs were the height of a pony.

  The statistics on crime and guns are often confounding. Nationally, guns account for 60 percent of all homicides; and yet gun violence has been declining for the last decade. The murder rate in Texas has dropped from 16.9 per 100,000 in 1980 to 4.8 in 2015—an astonishing decline. In California, the most restrictive state in the country for gun ownership, the murder rate is exactly the same as in Texas. The states with the lowest homicide rates are North Dakota and Wyoming, which have very permissive gun laws; and lowest of all, at 1.6 per 100,000, is Vermont, which has “constitutional carry”—i.e., anyone over the age of sixteen can carry a gun. (Vermont is one of thirteen states where permits to carry concealed weapons are not required.) Chicago, which has highly restrictive gun laws, also has one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the country, but it doesn’t compare with the District of Columbia, which tops the charts in both restrictive gun laws and gun homicides. When President Obama said, “States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths,” he was including suicides, which account for nearly two-thirds of gun deaths nationally.

  Still, the rate of murder by gun in the United States is far above that of any other developed Western country, and has been increasing since 2015. The rate of gun murders in the United States is six times higher than in Canada, and more than twenty times higher than in Australia.

  Although I appreciate the efforts of the anti-gun lobby, I doubt there is room for anything other than modest reforms. The NRA has permanently changed America. There are now more than 300 million guns in the country—42 percent of the total of civilian firearms in the whole world. Other countries with a high rate of gun ownership (though nowhere near as high as the United States), such as Switzerland, Sweden, and France, have lower rates of gun deaths, largely because of more stringent licensing rules and an emphasis on gun safety. Universal background checks that keep guns away from violent offenders, people on the terrorist watch list, and the mentally ill are the most important steps we could take to limit the damage that guns do to our society.

  In November 2017, twenty-six people were shot to death at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Another twenty were injured. Eight of those killed were children. It was (at this writing) the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. These days, it seems that the killers are always aiming for the record books. In this case, the killer had once escaped from a psychiatric hospital. He had been court-martialed for domestic abuse by the air force, which then failed to put his name in the FBI’s database, which might have prevented him from buying weapons over the counter. He was flagged again and again for abusive behavior and death threats. It’s hard to imagine a more glaring example of the failure of our national gun laws to prevent a dangerous man from breaking the hearts of so many innocent people.

  However, we now live inside the logic that the NRA has created for us: in a world where so many bad people have guns, good people must arm themselves. When the killer came out of the church, leaving behind a lake of blood, a neighbor, Stephen Willeford, who happened to have been a former firearms instructor for the NRA, ran barefoot out of his house, carrying a similar assault-style weapon. He shot the killer twice, and then pursued him in a high-speed chase that ended with the killer’s suicide.

  President Trump, who was in South Korea at the time, was asked whether the “extreme vetting” he demanded for visa applicants should also be applied to gun purchases. He replied that it would have made “no difference” in the murders in Sutherland Springs, except that stricter laws might have prevented Willeford from having the means to respond. “Instead of having twenty-six dead, he would’ve had hundreds more dead,” the president said. Shortly after the killings, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton said on Fox News that the best solution to future church killings was to arm the parishioners.

  Even if stricter gun laws in Texas were clearly shown to make us safer, Texas politicians are so enchanted by guns that there’s no chance of that happening. There’s a locker-room lust for weaponry that belies the noble-sounding proclamations about self-protection and Second Amendment rights. In 2010, Governor Rick Perry boasted of killing a coyote that was menacing his daughter’s Labrador. Perry was jogging at the time, but naturally he was packing heat—a Ruger .380—and he dispatched the coyote with a single shot. The gun’s manufacturer promptly issued a Coyote Special edition of the gun, which comes in a box labeled For Sale to Texans Only.

  The idea of jogging with a gun may sound uncomfortable and a little bizarre, but in this category Perry is not as goofy as Ted Cruz. In the midst of his presidential campaign, Cruz posted a YouTube video titled Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz. “There are few things I enjoy more than on weekends cooking breakfast with the family,” he informs us, as he stands at a firing range. “Of course, in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most folks.” He wraps a strip of bacon around the muzzle of a semiautomatic AR-15 (not an actual machine gun), and around that, a piece of foil. Then he fires away. Soon, grease is spattering among the shell casings. “Mmmm! Machine-gun bacon!” the senator says, as he snacks on the finished product. The object of the video apparently was to show a jollier and more human side of the candidate.

  With more than a million Texans licensed to carry handguns, the state is actually far behind Florida, with 1.7 million. “I’m EMBARRASSED,” Governor Greg Abbott tweeted in 2015; “Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA.”

  On June 13, 2015, a gunman assaulted police headquarters in Dallas in an armored van that he had purchased on eBay. It was billed as a “Zombie Apocalypse Assault Vehicle,” and came equipped with gun ports and bulletproof windows. Police were finally able to disable the vehicle and kill the shooter with a .50-caliber sniper rifle (also available on the Internet). Governor Abbott discounted the event as an “isolated incident by someone who had serious mental challenges, as well as a possible criminal background,” without remarking that those alarming deficiencies had not prevented the shooter from purchasing powerful weapons. That same day, Governor Abbott went to a gun range in Pflugerville, outside Austin, and signed into law the bill requiring public universities and colleges to allow handguns on campus and in dorms. He did this despite the vehement opposition from the chancellor of the University of Texas system, William McRaven, the former navy admiral who as head of the United States Special Operations Command had overseen the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The bill went into effect on August 1, 2016, exactly fifty years after the Whitman shooting.

  When the students returned for the fall semester, a protest group called Cocks Not Glocks handed out more than 4,500 dildos. Some of them were huge and I think possibly lethal. There was a dildo-juggling contest and T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan Take It and Come. Although there is a policy at the university forbidding the public display of any image that is obscene, the administration sagely chose to let this issue reside in the domain of free speech. Supporters of the protest were tying the sex toys onto their backpacks, and others were planting them in the shade of the campus live oaks, where they looked like a forest of mushrooms after a heavy rain.

  * * *

  AN ECCENTRIC FEATURE of the new gun laws is that people entering the state capitol can skip the long lines of tourists waiting to pass through the metal detectors if they show the guards a license-to-carry permit. In other words, the people most likely to bring weapons into the building aren’t scanned at all. Many of the people who breeze through are lawmakers or staffers who actually do tote concealed weapons into the offices and onto the floor of the legislature. But some lobbyists and reporters have also obtained gun licenses just to skirt the lines.

  I’m one of those people.

  In the spring of 2016, I signed up to take
a class at Central Texas Gun Works that would qualify me to carry a weapon. There were about thirty people in the class, including six women. Most of the day was spent learning the Texas general firearms laws, which are more nuanced and confusing than I expected. One can’t carry a gun in amusement parks, hospitals, sporting events, school buses, bars, a polling place, a court, a correctional facility, or “within 1000 feet of a correctional facility designated as a place of execution on a day of execution if proper notice is posted.” Private businesses, such as supermarkets, can ban guns from their premises; Whole Foods has done so, but Kroger has not.

  One of the surprises is that if you have a handgun in your car and you’re drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re unlicensed; but if you are licensed, you are liable to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which can mean a year in jail and a $4,000 fine. “A lot of my students decide not to get the license because of that,” our instructor, Michael Cargill, told us. He showed some cautionary real-life videos. A convenience-store security camera recorded a customer who happened upon a robbery in progress; the customer frantically pulls out his concealed weapon and plugs the clerk, not the robber. Another video shows a target shooter plunking cans off a log with a rifle; one bullet misfires and the shooter peeks down the barrel to see what’s going on, when suddenly his gimme cap is blown off his head. People do a lot of stupid things with guns, which is one reason I’ve always been wary of owning one.