dVerse – Prosery:“How many more will it take?

This Prosery is written around a line/sentence from a Facebook poem called, Notes on Uvalde. The dVerse line chosen by Lisa was, “These are the things they don’t tell us.”

To read other prose responses, click HERE.

My First Experience

I was barely 20 years of age and newly married when on August 1st, 1966, Charles Whitman, after killing his mother and wife, packed three rifles, three pistols, a shotgun, 700 rounds of ammunition, food, coffee, vitamins, medicine, earplugs, water, matches, lighter fluid, rope, binoculars, a machete, three knives, a radio, toilet paper, a razor, and deodorant. He went to the observation deck of the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas at Austin.

Whitman killed 14 people and injured 31. He was shot dead. For 18 years, it was the deadliest mass lone gunman shooting in U.S. history. It was unthinkable.

Whitman had sought professional help for “overwhelming, violent impulses;” fantasies about shooting people from the tower. He told them what and where. These are the things they don’t tell us.

“I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Look both ways. To the beginning and to the end (if there is one).
Mind the gaps as you live in this moment of grave concern with sadness or anger. 

To see the Notes from Uvalde poem and Prosery rules, follow this link: https://dversepoets.com/2022/06/06/dverse-prosery-how-many-more-will-it-take/.

18 thoughts on “dVerse – Prosery:“How many more will it take?”

  1. Oh no. Bill I had no idea those details. They make it so much worse. I’m guessing whomever was told “what and where” was haunted for the rest of their life (and charged and/or stripped of any professional license for failure to comply with ‘duty to warn.’) From the sounds of it, he planned on being there for a long while.

    Happy to see you at dVerse 🙂

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      2. I currently live about 30 miles north of where the UT-Austin shootings happened. I also live the same distance south of Killeen, TX, where a mass shooting took place on October 16, 1991 (23 killed and 27 wounded). That is also where Fort Hood shootings happened in 2009, (13 dead, 33 injured) and in 2014 (4 dead and 14 injured). The people who live there believe that New York City is a dangerous place. 🙂

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  2. We were just talking about this the other day. I had NO idea that he had consulted! This is awful to learn. Makes you wonder if today, they would be properly heard. Well done, sir!

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  3. I’ve just read the wikipedia account but hindsight makes it easy to condemn the psychiatrist who only met him on one occasion. I’m sure that many such indicators have been missed over the years, and will continue to be, in future. So sad!

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  5. I, too did not realize how calculated he was in planning the massacre .. that he murdered his wife and Mother as well. When will this end .. how, where? We have to be better than this!!

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  6. As an outsider, it seems that the fact he was a nut job is missing the point and simply giving fuel to the NRA’s position. There are nut jobs the world over, but only in America is it considered normal that even nut jobs can arm themselves with assault rifles, because the right to bear arms is the most unnegociable of civil liberties. It’s also shocking and unfathomable to see how the gun and the Christian (thou shalt not kill) lobbies overlap. Take the f*cking guns away. The rest of us are happy with the result.

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