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

by Seamus McGraw

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477317181
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	640,729
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Seamus McGraw is a journalist and frequent contributor to the New York Times op-ed page, as well as to the Huffington Post, Playboy, Popular Mechanics, and Fox Latino. He is the author of The End of Country: Dispatches from the Frack Zone, Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change, and A Thirsty Land: The Fight for Water in Texas.

Table of 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

What People are Saying About This

Perri Pelitz

An important and extraordinary book that takes us into the mind of the mass shooter and also explores our own complicity in the numbing tragedies that have become far too routine in America. Still, Seamus McGraw manages to leave us with hope that there's a way out of the despair.

 

Amye Archer

From a Taller Tower is a careful, even cathartic, look at mass shooters­­ and the culture that ushers them forth. McGraw dispels the myths “forged in gunfire” with a riveting examination of the before, during, and after of mass shootings.

Perri Peltz

"An important and extraordinary book that takes us into the mind of the mass shooter and also explores our own complicity in the numbing tragedies that have become far too routine in America. Still, Seamus McGraw manages to leave us with hope that there's a way out of the despair.
"

Patrick Skinner

One of the most important books you can read this or any year. It’s impossible to read this work without nodding or wincing or even crying.

Editorial Reviews

[From a Taller Tower] details how our culture of rage, victimhood, narcissism and love of guns has created an onslaught of violence that’s almost impossible to keep up with…[a] powerful new book.

MEL Magazine

A deeply reported examination of the many mass shootings in the United States...The book attempts to unpack our responses to these crimes and explain what’s missing from our understanding of these events, while also revealing more about who is behind these atrocities.

She Reads

It is a terrible testament to the frequency of [mass shootings] over the last couple of decades that for those of us not directly affected, some of them tend to blur. From a Taller Tower offers a clearheaded and thoughtful analysis of these crimes, and our culture.

The American Conservative

[From a Taller Tower] traces the history of the American mass shooter and the troubling ways we make sense of senseless violence...There’s a tragic timeliness to McGraw’s book.

Inside Hook

From a Taller Tower traces the history of the American mass shooter — at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland — without giving in to the notoriety that so many of them seek. With few exceptions, the murderers are never named. Instead, the book examines the beliefs many Americans hold onto about guns, mass shootings and mental illness, and confronts the circumstances that allow these catastrophes to continue.

NPR

★ 2021-02-24
A meditative history of mass murder by gunfire.

Freelance journalist McGraw begins in 1966, when a former Marine climbed a tower at the University of Texas and began firing. When he was finally brought down after murdering 17 people, he was said to have had a brain tumor—though that did not prevent the shooter from amassing an arsenal and planning his spree. Of all the mass killings since—Columbine, Christchurch, Parkland, the list goes on—there are, notes the author, only a few points in common. Though assaults by gun are fewer than by fists or knives, “when an active shooter—and it is most often a male—does get his hands on a semiautomatic rifle, the results are catastrophic.” The string of catastrophes that McGraw chronicles ends with a shooting from a Las Vegas hotel window “a hundred feet higher than the Texas shooter” in which an astonishing 471 people were hit with bullets and 102 died. That shooter—McGraw is scrupulous, with a couple of willful exceptions, about not naming names, denying killers the publicity they crave—was not, strictly speaking, insane. He may have been evil, but that is an amorphous, fairly useless concept that helps remove agency. What can be said about the killers in general is that they’re psychologically troubled and make their troubles known before they act, oftentimes only to be ignored. One young man who slaughtered 26 people, many of them schoolchildren, was diagnosed with numerous mental health issues, yet his mother, a gun enthusiast, bought him weapon after weapon. She was the first to die. The ease with which such guns can be acquired (2 million have entered the market since the Newtown massacre) is one of many seemingly intractable problems. That, along with a would-be killer’s sense of entitlement, contributes to a legacy of incomprehensible violence, of which McGraw writes, with grim poetry, “There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots.”

A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence.

Kirkus Reviews