From 2013 but just as valid five years later.
The UT Tower sniping has pretty much faded from local memory, but one aspect of it should be remembered for how things worked in 1966.
“After the first fifteen minutes, the sniper was pinned down by students and other civilians who’d spontaneously flocked to the university area with deer rifles.”
People were trusted, then, to do the right thing. Some didn’t, of course, but many did. Nowadays we’re all lumped in with the creeps who don’t. And we “shelter in place” like cowards while waiting for the police to arrive. Only to find out that their first priority is to go home safe at the end of their shift.
A similar Austin incident now would probably have a bigger toll than 1966’s seventeen dead and thirty-two wounded, all in those first fifteen minutes before the deer rifles spoke.
UPDATE: The cowardly Broward County Florida sheriff’s deputies who congregated outside the Parkland high school last month while the massacre went on inside are a case on point: You can’t trust the government to do its job.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 