San Ysidro McDonald’s incident.
I remembered the Texas Tower as soon as I read your post. The first killing that came to my mind was Richard Speck a few weeks earlier, July 13, 1966. But he did not use a gun.
Dennis
The shooting at an elementary school in Stockton, California, wasn’t the first mass shooting I can recall but it made a huge impression on me. The victims were young children, all of whom were refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam. Their families came to the US presumably in search of safety and security. And a madman murdered them on the school playground.
I’d say the bell tower shooting in Texas is the first one I remember hearing about.
San Ysidro McDonald’s.
I had just graduated San Diego State in '81 (and left the area), but it’s like it had happened in my old “backyard”.
Charles Whitman.
I think it was the Luby’s massacre in Killeen, TX but I’m not sure. I might remember that one only from later coverage since it was mentioned on the news for years each time a mass shooting was covered. It might be that I have simply forgotten earlier mass shootings because they have always been some of the background noise on TV news broadcasts, like weather or traffic jams.
Same for me. I was 14 at the time. It really horrified me.
The 1972 Olympic murders: Munich massacre - Wikipedia
The 1998 Jonesboro middle school shooting. I would have been 9.
Same here.
nitpick: it’s a clocktower with a carillion, never referred to as a bell tower in these parts.
That’s the first one I remember, too. I was only 5, but we were headed to Austin the next week on vacation and I remember being really scared to go up in the capitol dome. In my kindergarten mind, I had the capitol mixed up with the tower.
Kent State I don’t remember hearing about AS it happened, but vividly remember the Time magazine coverage the next week. Munich, I remember watching on the news as it was happening.
Between those things, the Apollo I fire, and the nightly news reports on Viet Nam, I was kind of scared of a lot of stuff back then. No one talked to us about it because they thought we were too young to understand or pay attention to the news.
I snicker to myself when I hear people my age talk about the good old days. Dude. You obviously weren’t paying attention.
Columbine for me. I was at my grandmother’s house. I remember my mom getting pretty distraught.
The McDonald’s shooting. I didn’t remember the exact location, I was going to say San Diego, not San Ysidro. Eh, close enough.
I was going to say Columbine, but I’d forgotten about this. I definitely recall seeing this all over the news and just not comprehending it as a teenager. Or as an adult, for that matter.
Me, too. I was nine years old and vising my grandmother in Wilkes Barre, PA when it happened. That’s NE PA for those who don’t know. I never heard that it was covered more there than anywhere else but, hey, I was nine.
This one for me too. I was not quite twelve when I heard about it. Didn’t they make a TV movie about it, with, I think, Kurt Russell as Whitman.
Probably the Holiday Inn sniper in 1976. He was just denied parole last summer and won’t be eligible again until 2027.
Columbine. I was on a school trip to FIT to visit a national art college fair. I remember hearing about it on the bus.
I vaguely remember Luby’s/Texas from the news. I vividly remember speaking to an officer at school after McDonalds/San Ysidro happened. He looked very grim, told me his fellow officers had no recourse on the scene and that “everything is going to change now”. He meant their equipment of course, but it was foreboding.