If there are no current killings with guns, just report 40 year old attacks

[Questor]

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/08/the_tower_snipe.html

[DWTim]

Yeah, but these "journalists" don't do anything without an agenda.

God only knows why we would want to celebrate or even acknowledge the 40th anniversary of multiple homicides. The guy had a physiological condition that likely made him mentally ill. Anyway, I'm wetting my finger and putting it in the wind. Perhaps the GCA of '68 is in danger?

[Heavy C]

Living in the Austin area one of the local news stations did a story on this too.  However they focused on the two officers that took out the sniper and some of the other students that risked their lives trying to save some of the victims.  It's all in the spin.

[rockbilly]

Sounds like ole "Ranger Ray" stirring up stuff to promote his book.  By the way, it was Officer Ramon Martinez and a civiliam armed with a rifle that took the sniper out.  Ray takes credit for the killing, and is said to have fired the fatal shot.  He recently spoke to a civic group I bewlong to, he does a great job of tooting his own horn about how this incident moved him from an Austin policeman, through the Department of Public Safey, and eventually to a Texas Ranger.

I don't think the incident deserved the attention it got, it would have been enough just to mention that it happened on this day 40 years ago without all the fanfare.

[tscott]

I was in Austin this day. A kid in the Army, drafted from rural NY. When I first got to Texas, I was kidded all the time as coming from a murdering cesspool NY.
The last thing Texas needed, after the Kennedy assissination was the Texas Tower. Us Army guys were in Austin looking for girls. We ended up watching guys in pickups riding around with guns out the window. What a wierd day! Highlighted by news coverage, and cameramen risking themselves to get the whole thing on TV.
To me it was another event in the lost innocence of America, after the baby boom, and only about 50 years after becoming a world power.
This was a faded memory for me.. Yeah, this was big for a kid who was used to crime in the Hudson Valley consisting of things like stolen fertilizer, left out overnight in front of the hardware store...!