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chapter two Landmark Events This chapter explores important milestones and events in the debate over gun control and gun rights in the United States. It charts the expanding political influence of the National Rifle Association, the growing public concern about school shootings following the tragedies at Columbine and Sandy Hook, and the long legislative impasse over proposed measures to prevent gun violence. It then traces the launch of the Never Again movement by student survivors of the Park- land shooting, culminating in the 2018 March for Our Lives protest. The University of Texas Tower Shooting (1966) Some historians date the beginning of the era of U.S. school shootings to August 1, 1966. On that day—long before the media coined such terms as “mass shooting” and “active shooter”—a gunman climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and opened fire on the campus below. By the time police officers killed the shooter 96 minutes later, the rampage had taken the lives of 13 people and injured 31 others. “It was a seminal event, the first of its kind,” said Gary Lavergne, who chronicled the shooting in his book A Sniper in the Tower (1997). “It kind of defines for us what is a mass murder” (Tolson 2016). The UT shooting led to a revolution in how law enforcement responded to crisis situations, launched a national debate about gun control, and created a new sense of vulnerability to random acts of violence in public spaces. The Incident The perpetrator of the UT tower shooting, 25-year-old Charles Whit- man, had trained as a sharpshooter in the U.S. Marine Corps before