Learn from the Very First Mass Shooting

   Within the first one in modern history, might lie the answers in how to solve these mass shootings that have spanned through all the years since.
  Fifty-three years ago, it was. Former Marine Charles Whitman stepped atop a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and started picking off people at random. Aug. 1, 1966.
   What do we learn, in that short description of what happened? Well, he was a man exposed to violence, and one who probably had easy access to guns.
   What else about him, we may not know. A disrupted childhood? Job change? Upheaval in his personal life?  I mention these things because I read of a study by the National Institute of Justice that mentions them. Says a Deseret News editorial"
  "The study found several common threads — early childhood trauma and exposure to violence; recent changes in job status or traumatic changes in relationships that could be identified as crisis points that lead to violence; the desire to study what other mass shooters had done and how they had done it; and access to weapons, either purchasing them, illegally acquiring them or obtaining them from family members."
   We should go back to that first incident, and to see how many of the conditions existed that were found in the National Institute of Justice study.
   All the years of study since Whitman stepped atop the tower, and sprayed that form of death -- the first person to do so in modern times. Some of the answers were wrapped up in that very first shooting, yet we have not learned them since.