Are the rounds coming from the tower in this clip Charles Whitman- Bell Tower Shooting, Austin 1966 - YouTube incoming or outgoing? It seems like a lot of smoke if its outgoing I wonder if its incoming rounds hitting the masonry and making dust
Outgoing. See Charles Whitman - Wikipedia
Outgoing. It’s pretty obvious if you’ve seen rifles firing.
That’s not actually a ‘lot of smoke’ for a rifle. Black powder rifles and muskets would have produced a lot more.
I’ve had some dirty ammunition create almost as much out of my handgun. And dust coming off of struck masonry wouldn’t billow out like that.
I have fired many guns before and they produced almost no smoke, certainly nothing like in that video. Yes handguns produce more smoke because of the shorter barrel.
He didn’t use any handguns though.
This video Remington 6mm - YouTube shows the same bullet type (6mm Remington) used by Charles Whitman being fired and it makes almost no smoke.
The Whitman shooting took place 47 years ago. Firearms technology has improved since then.
Not really, a 6mm Remington shoots the same now as it did back then.
Your personal experience notwithstanding, it’s absolutely common for rifles to also emit smoke. A single video isn’t exactly proof they don’t, especially when there’s plenty other evidence to the contrary.
Also, there is a small germ of truth to the change in technology. The amount of smoke discharged can depend somewhat on the gunpowder and the company that produced the ammunition (mostly due to their tolerances in manufacture). I have no idea where Charles Whitman got his ammunition or if he even maybe made his own, but I have no doubts the smoke in the video came from his rifle.
Articles about him said many civilians got their rifles and started shooting at the clock tower. I have seen people shoot at cinder blocks and they made a dust puff that looks similar to what is seen in that video.
It appears to me the white puffs are from incoming rounds. It is dust from bullets hitting the stone facade of the building.
Civilians and law enforcement did return fire on Whitman, I would have guessed that some of the puffs that appear to be coming from the wall up behind the stone railing are from return fire, but I can’t see clearly. Whitman used the waterspouts as gunports, so the smoke coming from them is likely him.
On review, I do note some shots that are hitting the masonry.
The smoke puffs blowing away from the building along with the sound of gunshots are his. The ones that are more or less puffing straight up are shots hitting the building.
That might have been Whitman firing through the waterspout, most of the other stuff is being fired by law enforcement. Worked at the UT Library in the early 70’s when the Tower was part of the library system, the deck was closed to the public but we used to go up there and smoke Mexican dope on break. The deck is 14 floors up (as Gunny Gerheim said, that was some fine shootin, Whitman could have hit Kennedy 50 rounds out of 50 from the 6th floor, I’ve looked out that window, too) and that camera shot was from ground level about a quarter mile away, so most of the reports are too loud to have been Whitman. You could see where rounds had gouged the limestone. Incidentally they didn’t close the deck because of Whitman, it was on account of all the students who kept jumping off of it. Go figure.
That doesn’t really make sense, if the wind was blowing the gunshot smoke to the left it would blow the masonry powder dust to the left too.
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I have to link to Kinky Friedman’s The Ballad of Charles Whitman