Charles Whitman’s 1966 Rampage 5The UT rampage was not the first mass murder in American history, but it was the first televised shooting of its kind, and the sensational scale of Whitman’s crimes generated media headlines across the country. Newly available primary documents finally make it possible to consider the perspective of his wife as well as her family. Whitman’s actions and personal writings must be understood within this context. I will argue that this repeating dynamic reflects something all too ordinary and self-implicating: fear and suspicion of women. 4It is important to examine how the UT Austin narrative-like so many others-diminishes, romanticizes, or sequesters domestic murder. And like many men who commit similar attacks, Whitman viewed women as objects both to desire and control. But like many others, he murdered women at home-his mother, Margaret, and his wife, Kathleen-before shooting anyone else. Unlike most mass killers, he was married rather than single. Since 1966, writers, artists, and documentarians have retold the story of Charles Whitman’s clock tower rampage at the University of Texas at Austin, which left nearly fifty people dead or wounded, including Whitman himself. 3One enduring example shows how ingrained our current script and its gendered erasures can be. Furthermore, Maher’s commentary unwittingly replicated the entitled misogynist “reasoning” often broadcast by the killers themselves (Schonfeld)-as in the cases of Marc Lepine (1989), George Hennard (1991), George Sodini (2009), and Elliot Rodger (2014). Maher didn’t mention to his applauding audience that a significant percentage of these same men stalk, abuse, or kill women as a prelude to attacking strangers (Everytown 2–5). In 2015, Bill Maher argued on his show Real Time that young males commit mass killings because they simply can’t “get laid,” even though commercials depict women as ready and willing sexual objects (n. 2As a result, those terrorized in private do not fully register on the compass of collective outrage, except as targets of direct or indirect blame for the public outcome. An accumulation of such stories-from Sandy Hook to Orlando, from Casper College to UCLA-still treats domestic death or wounding as an afterthought to more serious or offensive crimes. 1 Four years ago, in an essay titled “Shooting Sprees Start with Women,” I explored how the private brutality that precedes violent spectacle is often buried by coverage of the public event.
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