AR-15s Are US

On August 1, 2016, Texas Senate Bill 11, the “campus carry law,” went into effect, making it legal for licensed gun owners to carry a concealed handgun on university campuses. Seamus McGraw, who wrote the book on mass murders in the U.S., is convinced Texas lawmakers chose the 50th anniversary of the University of Texas tower shooting, then-the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in United States history, because it reinforced “the myth of the good guy with a gun.”

Sadly, the carnage left in the wake of Marine veteran Charles Whitman’s rampage has since been eclipsed numerous times. Whitman, though,  who stabbed his mother and wife to death the previous night, was the first of this ilk. He brought an arsenal of rifles and other weapons to the observation deck of the Main Building of the University of Texas at Austin on the fatal day of August 1, 1966, and for the next 96 minutes shot and killed 14 people (and wounded 31 others) in an indiscriminate rampage that predated the next mass shooting in America by almost two decades.

As the massacre began, chaos ensued. Police and citizens took up deer rifles and small firearms and began shooting at Whitman from the ground. Two Austin police officers, plus an off-duty officer and an armed civilian advanced to the tower and eventually reached the top, where 26-year-old Officer Houston McCoy shot and killed Whitman.

“The myth is that Texans did what Texans do,” says  McGraw, the journalist and acclaimed author of From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter. The book examines American rage, victimhood, narcissism and religious love of guns—part history lesson, part philosophical and theological treatise, and part procedural on criminology and sociology.

In reality, McGraw says, those would-be heroes on the ground may have impeded the police or even extended the duration of the massacre, with one of them nearly shooting an officer after Whitman was dead. In his book, McGraw relates a deathbed conversation during which University of Texas professor Gary Lavergne asked McCoy, who died in 2012, for his final thoughts on the matter. Rather than casting himself as a savior who had stopped a killer, McCoy replied, “That sonofabitch made me kill a man.”

“We all wanna believe we’re fucking heroes,” says McGraw, 63, in his staccato smoker’s voice. “But there are people who are trained to kill that cannot take a life like that.”

Even a “good guy with a gun,” such as McCoy, is no match for a sociopathic mass shooter, no matter what some Second Amendment zealot with “a big-swinging-dick” automatic rifle might try to claim, McGraw says, audibly pissed off by the recent spate of mass murders that killed more than 35 people in places as disparate as Buffalo, New York, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and, of course, Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School. In each case, the assailants bought automatic rifles just prior to going on their rampages.

Even a “good guy with a gun,” such as McCoy, is no match for a sociopathic mass shooter.

“Right now, as we speak, there’s this raging debate, on the right and the left, about what the officers in Uvalde did and did not do. It is almost a certainty that a number of those kids were slaughtered in the first couple of seconds after the shooter entered the classrooms. The idea that confronting him within seconds would have altered this situation–at all, at all, at all–is pure fantasy.”

McGraw cites the 2019 mass shootings in Gilroy, California, where police on the scene were unable to prevent the killings; and the May 10 racially-motivated massacre in Buffalo, New York, where a retired police officer who was working security fired on the gunman and hit his body armor, to no effect; and Dayton, Ohio, where, in 2019, it took police just 32 seconds to bring down the killer, who still took the lives of nine people and injured 26 others.

Take away the myth of the “good guy with a gun,” McGraw says, and the greatest threat to society is not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or whoever is arguing for stricter gun regulations, or background checks, or banning extended magazines. “The single greatest threat is a fetishized culture enabled by clowns like Greg Fucking Abbott, and Dan Fucking Patrick and Wayne Fucking LaPierre,” he says, referring to the Texas Governor, his Lieutenant Governor and the head of the National Rifle Association, respectively.

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The Texas tower shooting was an anomaly for more than a decade and a half, but in the 1980s, a sharp increase in the sale of semiautomatic weapons with detachable high-capacity ammunition magazines ushered in a new era of mass shootings–a trend of increasingly lethal weapons in direct correlation to increasingly deadly attacks.

Experts point to 40,620 deaths by gunshot per year–an average of 12.2 deaths per 100,000 people–as cause for alarm. But it is a singular weapon–the AR-15–that poses the most chilling threat to society in the age of the Internet, which has turned rage into a cottage industry. It has been the weapon of choice for a decade of mass murders in Aurora, CO (12 dead); Boulder, CO (10); Buffalo, NY (10); Las Vegas, NV (61); Midland-Odessa, TX (8); Orlando, FL (50); Newtown, CT (28); Parkland, FL (17); Poway, CA (1); Sutherland Springs, TX (27); Pittsburgh, PA (11); and Nashville, TN (4).

Yet attempting to regulate the sale and possession of the AR-15 seems to be a fool’s errand, given the looming midterm elections and the intransigence of members of Congress from gerrymandered districts and Senate Republicans who filibuster away any federal legislation even remotely related to gun control.

“The single greatest threat is a fetishized culture enabled by clowns like Greg Fucking Abbott, and Dan Fucking Patrick and Wayne Fucking LaPierre.”

The simplest reason for this is the death grip the NRA has on the GOP caucus. For every politician whose “hopes and prayers” go out to the victims of these shootings and their families, there are two more who rake in contributions from the NRA, its lobbyists and other gun rights groups and refuse to budge.

According to a 2019 study by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, roughly two-dozen Republican senators have received contributions from the NRA. Among those senators, 16 of them have received more than $1 million. That includes Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (more than $13 million); Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (more than $3 million); and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman (more than $3 million).

As a horrified American public grieves and vents, Democrats, whose Senate majority has been rendered all but moot by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, have no choice but to make bipartisan overtures that never go anywhere. Recently, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who as a congressman represented Newtown, where Sandy Hook Elementary School is located, went on Face the Nation and held out hope for “something significant” on gun safety.

Murphy told the moderator he sees more Republicans “coming to the table and talking this time” than at any time since the Sandy Hook shooting more than a decade ago. He suggested that the Florida gun law signed in the wake of the Parkland school shooting that raised the minimum age for obtaining a firearm to 21, and banned bump stocks, was a “signal of what’s possible” on the federal level.

Red-flag laws, expansion of background checks, safe storage regulations—none of what is on that purported table is new or likely to come to fruition any time soon. Not with guns as a Holy Grail for Republicans, and the Democrats’ inability to bring any across the aisle for bipartisan reform.

“Because of how Congress works–or doesn’t work–if you try big and fail, they shut you down for the next 10 years,” says Keith Ashdown, a former investigator on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee now with the watchdog group Moonlight Foundation. “If you try the small, incremental step approach, it becomes harder and harder to go back to the well.”

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States have not fared much better. A culture war that pits the AR-15 as a symbol of patriotism and freedom against a fervent opposition on the left that wants to limit access to the lethal, military-style weapon is heading in a catastrophic direction. Largely, McGraw says, because of governors like Greg Abbott.

Even in the rhetoric of compassion following the Uvalde shooting, Abbott used words that, in a different context, could appeal to a deluded, gun-toting populace consumed with grievance and fear– a legion of supposed warriors steeped in the myth of a “good guy with a gun.”

“We know you feel like you are attacked as human beings,” Abbott said. “We want you to know that we as Texans come shoulder-to-shoulder and side-by-side with you. “You are us; we are you, and we’re gonna be there for you, all the way through.”

But who are Texas officials really there for?

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bi-partisan coalition founded in 2006 by then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then-Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, has grown membership from 15 to 1,000 current and former mayors who are advocating for gun safety reforms at the local, state and federal level.

Texas members include mayors from Arlington, Austin, Beaumont, Brownsville, Houston, Port Arthur and San Antonio. But city officials and state lawmakers from those districts have failed to enact any significant legislation that would impose stricter limits on gun sales, ownership or possession–much less prevent a disturbed 18-year-old from purchasing an AR-15 on his birthday.

In Houston, for instance, Mayor Sylvester Turner formed the Mayor’s Commission Against Gun Violence in 2018. In February 2019, the Commission issued recommendations for the pending Legislative Session, including bills currently stalled in committee that:

• would impose background check requirements on the private transfer of firearms at gun shows;
• restrict ownership of 3-D weapons by making it illegal to manufacture and possess a firearm without registering it with the Texas Department of Public Safety;
• allow for the issuance of “red flag” protective orders.

Even a benign recommendation to enact a bill requiring active shooter building codes and infrastructure improvements has yet to yield any legislative proposals.

Conversely, as Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Patrick offer bromides and non-committal pronouncements, the biggest legislative development in Texas in recent years has been the passage of a GOP bill known as “constitutional carry,” which allows legal gun owners to carry their weapons in public whether concealed or not, without a license or permit.

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McGraw, who published a blistering editorial in the Texas Tribune on Jun 1, is having none of the policy and legislative talk.

America has always been “awash in firearms,” he says, noting that he is a deer hunter who has a rifle by his side every day for months out of the year. AR-15s, however, have become symbols to a dangerous cross-section of society.

“I’m 63-years-old. In my generation we grew up with the idea that these are tools, and we have rights, but we have responsibilities and obligations that go with those rights. To these people, [military-style weapons] have become religious totems, fetish items, a statement of tribe.”

McGraw’s contempt for this toxic culture boils over.

“If I sound angry it’s because I am,” he says, contrasting those who look to the gun as a religious symbol, with those who are repelled by it. “I have four kids aged 17 to 32, and they grew up in a household where they always saw Daddy with a gun. But not one of my kids has ever owned or ever touches a gun. My kids are gonna take over some day, and they’re not gonna have that religious attachment to guns, or the sanctity my generation does.”

That leaves a minority that cannot be swayed, and an industry that has exploited racial and cultural divides with guns, particularly AR-15s. To illustrate how the poison of gun worship has metastasized, McGraw points to the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary Church in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, near where he lives. There, following the Parkland massacre, hundreds of parishioners held services in white robes, wearing crowns of bullets, while clinging to AR-15s. “Clowns in gossamer robes coming out to receive the blessings of the gun. The Rod of God,” spits McGraw.

In the wake of the Uvalde atrocity, bipartisan legislation in the House and the Senate to increase the age limit on the purchase of certain firearms, and to implement a red flag law similar to those in effect in 19 states, is just the latest chance for lawmakers to pierce “the myth of the good guy with a gun.”

Until there’s a sea change in American culture, McGraw is not holding his breath.

For more on Uvalde and its aftermath, see Andrew Gumbel’s After Uvalde.