Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [31]
Charles Whitman may have been unusual in having a dozen guns at his disposal, but he was by no means unique. Americans – especially Texans – have always been gun-toting people. Guns had been used by the first settlers to protect and feed themselves and to subdue the hostile land. Later the colonists became a nation of riflemen who used the gun to win their freedom from the British in the War of Independence. Guns tamed the West and became synonymous with frontier justice. And by the 1960s, there was a massive market for guns among collectors and sportsmen. America had the largest cache of civilian handguns in the world with over 100 million in private hands. Sales were running at over a million a year by mail order alone. Another million or so were imported. But, following the assassination of President Kennedy, Americans became very conscious that there were very few legal controls over the possession of firearms. In Texas, gun laws were practically non-existent – some 72 per cent of all murders in 1965 were committed with guns. This compared with 25 per cent in New York City, where New York State’s 55-year-old Sullivan Law required police permits for the possession of handguns. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover said: ‘Those who claim that the availability of firearms is not a factor in the murders in this country are not facing reality.’
American legislators were very conscious that most other countries had much stricter gun-control laws. But given America’s passion for firearms, trying to ban them would be unthinkable – especially as it would curb such legitimate activities as hunting, target shooting and, in some cases, possessing a gun for self-defence. Nevertheless, in the wake of the Austin slaughter, the US Justice Department, the bar association and most American police forces felt that much tighter gun controls were called for. This prompted Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd to propose a federal bill limiting the inter-state shipment of mail-order handguns, curbing the importing of military surplus firearms, banning over-the-counter handgun sales to out-of-state buyers and anyone under 21, and prohibiting long-arm sales to anyone under 18.
Several individual states backed the Dodd bill, as they felt it would help them enforce their own gun laws. Some proposed statutory cooling-off periods, so that buyers would have to wait a few days before they could obtain guns, and prohibiting sales to known criminals and psychotics. Yet opposing even these trivial proposals was the influential National Rifle Association, whose 750,000 members vigorously lobbied against any gun-control legislation. Some right-wingers even claimed that gun control was a Communist plot to disarm Americans. Even ordinary citizens claimed the constitutional right to bear arms – even though, at that time, the Supreme Court denied that there was such a right. True, the Second Amendment to the American constitution mentioned the ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’ but it actually read, in full: ‘A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ What the Founding Fathers had in mind, the Supreme Court argued, was the collective right to bear arms, not the individual right. Since Americans already needed licences to marry, drive, run a shop or, in some states, own a dog, it was difficult to see why making them take out a licence to own a lethal weapon was any particular infringement of their liberty.
But, even under Dodd’s bill, Charles Whitman would still have been able to amass his sizeable arsenal, as none of the bill’s provisions applied