Wooo! Deja vu!

I had this weird feeling this morning that I should check the news. Turned on our local ABC affiliate and got this:

http://www.ksat.com/education/25191483/detail.html

Quote :

AUSTIN, Texas -- A gunman opened fire Tuesday inside a University of Texas campus library then fatally shot himself, and police are searching for a possible second suspect, university police said. A man fired an automatic weapon on the sixth floor of the Perry-Castaneda Library early Tuesday, UT police spokeswoman Rhonda Weldon said."He subsequently shot himself. He is deceased," she said, adding that no one else was reported injured.

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told a news conference that police also are investigating what he described as a second crime scene outside the library where shots also were fired.Randall Wilhite, an adjunct law professor at the university, said he was driving to class when he saw "students start scrambling behind wastebaskets, trees and monuments," and then a young man carrying an assault rifle sprinting along the street."He was running right in front of me ... and he shot what I thought were three more shots ... not at me. In my direction, but not at me, clearly not at me," Wilhite said.The professor said the gunman had the opportunity to shoot several students and Wilhite, but he did not.

There may be some who would think the reaction of area police was a bit paranoid:

Quote :

Law enforcement from campus police, Austin police and the state Department of Public Safety rushed onto campus at the first reports of the shooting. Tank-like armored vehicles were positioned near the library. A DPS helicopter circled the campus overhead.Jennifer Scalora, who works in admissions, was in her office about 100 yards from the library. She said police, SWAT teams and helicopters are still teeming around campus, but that they are really the only ones around.

But I, and apparently many others, remember another "incident,' briefly mentioned at the end of the KSAT article:

Quote :

Tuesday's shooting is not the first at the school.On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went to the 28th floor observation deck at the UT clock tower in the middle of campus and began shooting at people below. He killed 16 people and wounded nearly three dozen before police killed him about 90 minutes after the siege began.

A very brief reference to a shocking moment in Texas time. I never attended classes at UT, but was a frequent visitor during the early '60's, and had been to the top of that tower, as well as a pedestrian walking beneath it, and spent more than one weekend doing research in that same library, only a year or so earlier.

This article recalls the day in more detail:

http://www.memoryarchive.org/en/UT_Tower_Shooting,_1966,_by_Forrest_Preece

Quote :

Later, we found out that this was the worst mass killing in American history. Because of it, the whole concept of SWAT teams was devised. My marketing professor, who was a young guy barely older than the rest of us, told us the next time we had class that there was a campuswide loudspeaker system that could have been used to tell everyone to stay the hell indoors. But in the panic that ensued, nobody thought to use it. I'll bet they would now.

They did. That was one of the bits that came out in the news report I was watching this morning. They also had a system that sent text messages to just about everyone on the campus.
Ann