Blog

Texas, and America, experienced another mass shooting with an assault weapon this past weekend.

The first assault weapon in U.S. was the Gatling gun—a weapon patented in 1862 by Robert Jordan Gatling that would fire more than 200 bullets in a minute. Though used sparingly in the Civil War, the weapon saw greater use in the 1870s and 1880s, not only in America but across Europe.

The Gatling gun was an “assault” weapon used by the Army in battles against Native Americans over that two-decade span.

For example, 3,000 White American soldiers used the weapon against 700 Native American warriors during the Red River War in Texas in 1874. The Army needed the weapon to remove Native American tribes—Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho—from the Southern Plains to reservations during the great theft of Indian land.

This “assault” weapon was used because it was designed to kill people in large numbers in a short period of time.

Two other American “assault” weapons were also created during the Civil War era: The Spencer Repeating Rifle in 1860 and the Winchester Repeating Rifle in 1866.

Both weapons were made to kill people, not animals. They were not made for individual or home protection. Their only purpose was to allow the shooter to kill as many people as desired through a rapid fire procession.

Gun proponents, especially assault weapon owners, say “mass shootings” are a byproduct of mental illness—not the prevalence of guns.

History is not kind to that argument.

The de-institutionalization of mentally people in California in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a series of horrific mass murders (like the John Frazier murders in 1970) and unleashed some serial killers (like Edmund Kemper in 1973).

But there were no mass shootings at shopping centers, schools, places of worship, or work places like the hundreds of assault weapon massing shootings being seen across the country today.

Mass shooters are generally avid gun owners, possessing multiple types of assault weapons. For a host of real or imagined grievances against society in general or certain people in particular, they use their “assault” weapons to kill as many people as possible to settle their grievances.

In other words, they fulfill the original purpose that the assault weapon was created for—to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time as possible.

That is the methodical “assault” intent of such weapons as evidenced by the first real mass shooting in the United States—the Texas Tower Shooting in 1966 that left 14 people dead at the hands of Charles Whitman, an avid gun owner just his father was.

Was Charles Whitman mentally ill? Probably, in some textbook kind of way. But his intent to kill as many people as possible from the Texas Tower was motivated by anger, rage, and grievance.

Probably half of the nation’s population suffers from some sort of “mental illness.” One trip into the dark side of social media where all sorts of conspiracy theories and racial hatred and violent impulses exist reveals American “mental illness” on display.

Many assault weapon owners will now say the Allen, Texas mall shooter was one of those social media “mentally ill” extremist.

Yet many of these assault weapon enthusiasts, like some in Congress, will simultaneously say that the thousands of people who stormed the nation’s capitol of January 6, 2021 shouting “kill Mike Pence” were proud gun-owning “patriots” trying to protect White people from the “Deep State” run by the “let’s go Brandon” mafia.

Hatred is not mental illness. It’s a social plague that allows people to see violence as a natural response in support of their own belief system.

It may be reasonably said that mental illness is an “excuse” for mass shootings but it is the insane prevalence of “assault weapons” that is the cause for such shootings.