ABSTRACT
On August 1, 1966, a 25-year-old engineering student named Charles Whitman climbed onto an observation deck at the University of Texas-Austin and shot 17 people to death and wounded 31 during a 96-minute rampage. This tragedy became the hallmark of a new category of mass violence, which we now know as “school shootings” (or “rampage school shootings”). To be sure, gun deaths had occurred on school property before. Indeed, the earliest recorded school shooting occurred on July 26, 1764, when three men entered a Pennsylvania schoolhouse and shot and killed the schoolmaster and nine children. However, the University of Texas rampage was different from previous fatalities at schools for two reasons. First, because the perpetrator was a student who targeted a huge number of other students, apparently indiscriminately. Second, because it sparked “copycat violence.” Less than three months later, an 18-year-old student, and alleged admirer of Whitman, shot seven people, killing five of them, at Rose-Mar College of Beauty in Mesa, Arizona (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States).
