1. Weâre poorer than our parents were at our age. Few people have been through as many economic ups and downs as the members of Generation X. Born between 1965 and 1980, any entered the workforce during the boom years of the Clinton administrationâbut then along came 9/11 and, a few years later, the Great Recession.
The shooter, Charles Whitman, was a student at the University of Texas. A former Marine who grew up with an abusive father, he admitted to killing his mother and his wife in a suicide note. The next day, Whitman began shooting people from the top of the Texas Tower with a sniper rifle.
There is no universally accepted definition of a mass shooting, and different organizations use different criteria. In this piece we use a narrow definition and look only at the deadliest mass shootings, beginning Aug. 1, 1966, when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother, then climbed a 27-story tower at the University of Texas and killed 14 more people before police shot him to death.