He was married, served his country in the military and decided to go back to school. In many documentaries Whitman is described as the “All American Boy”, meaning he was a seemingly normal young American man who was just like everyone else. If you’d prefer to read about what happened, you can read this news article that was originally published on August 2nd, 1966 (i.e. We’re also practicing being able to apply psychological research to address problems (i.e. All we can do is theorise and hypothesize. There are no definitive answers and no-one will ever truly know.
Remember though, you’re not going to “crack this case”. As you’re watching, be listening for details that might give you some clues as to why he did this. If you already know the story, watch only the first 15 minutes. You can watch the whole documentary on Charles Whitman below, which goes into details about the course of the shootings and what actually happened. Why is this happening? You can read more about statistics on gun violence in America in this BBC article or in this article from the US newspaper the Washington Post. Here you can see the dramatic rise in mass shootings in the United States over the past century. It’s a valuable case study as well because there are multiple possible explanations for why he did what he did. Whitman’s atrocious acts in 1961 are often used as the chronological starting point for investigations into modern gun crime in the US, so we’ll start here as well. To do so, we will be use the story of Charles Whitman as a case study. We will instead explore possible explanations for the rise in gun violence in the USA. So what other possible explanations are there? This is an exceptionally broad problem and one that is impossible to answer definitely. It’s widely reported that Switzerland has more guns per capita (per person) than any other country, yet they have less than 1/3 of the gun deaths of the US ( source). I myself own five guns (for hunting) and have never once thought about using them on another human being. And there has to be more to the story than just being able to own a gun. There is a lot of merit in this argument, but we want to delve deeper to the potential root causes. One obvious argument is because guns are readily accessible and too easy to get. Why have there been more deaths in the US by domestic gun violence in the past fourty years than in all the wars the country has fought in? The unit covers the biological approach – click the image for more info. I like beginning my Criminology unit with the story of Whitman.
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