1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910813497403321

Autore

McGraw Seamus

Titolo

From a Taller Tower : The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

Pubbl/distr/stampa

, : University of Texas Press, , 2021

©2021

ISBN

9781477322635

9781477317181

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (139 pages)

Disciplina

364.152340973

Soggetti

Mass shootings - United States

Massacres - United States

School shootings - United States

SOCIAL SCIENCE / General

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Author’s Note -- Prologue. The Deepest Silence There Is -- Chapter 1 The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy -- Chapter 2 Deliver Us from Evil -- Chapter 3 To Kill the Last Killer -- Chapter 4 “’Tis Not Alone My Inky Cloak ” -- Chapter 5 Jokers Wild -- Chapter 6 If You See Something, Say Something -- Chapter 7 A Good Guy with a Gun -- Chapter 8 I Cling to My Gun, You Cling to Yours -- Chapter 9 The Fog of War in Peacetime -- Chapter 10 From a Taller Tower -- Epilogue. The Silence between Gunshots -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

We, as a nation, have become desensitized to the shock and pain in the wake of mass shootings. In the bottomless silence between gunshots, as political stalemate ensures inaction, the killing continues; the dying continues. From a Taller Tower attends to the silence that has left us empty in the aftermath of these atrocities. Veteran journalist Seamus McGraw chronicles the rise of the mass shooter to dismantle the myths we have constructed around the murderers and ourselves. In 1966, America’s first mass shooter, from atop the University of Texas tower, unleashed a new reality: the fear that any of us may be targeted by a killer, and the complicity we bear in granting these murderers the fame



or infamy they crave. Addressing individual cases in the epidemic that began in Austin, From a Taller Tower bluntly confronts our obsession with the shooters—and explores the isolation, narcissism, and sense of victimhood that fan their obsessions. Drawing on the experiences of survivors and first responders as well as the knowledge of mental health experts, McGraw challenges the notion of the “good guy with a gun,” the idolization of guns (including his own), and the reliability of traumatized memory. Yet in this terrible history, McGraw reminds us of the humanity that can stop the killing and the dying.