Texas’ Gun Culture and Politics Made Dallas Shooting Inevitable
A little over a year ago, a mentally ill Dallas-area man named James Lance Boulware, angry over losing custody of his son, bought an armored van on eBay, marketed as a “Zombie Apocalypse Assault Vehicle.” The van had gun ports under each of its blacked-out windows. Just after midnight one Saturday morning, with a few homemade pipe bombs and a semi-automatic rifle in-hand, he drove the van to the headquarters of the Dallas Police Department and started firing at squad cars. Many hours later, the cops, with the aid of specialized weaponry, disabled the van and killed Boulware, spending much of the day dealing with the explosive devices he left behind.
One of the strangest things about Boulware’s bizarre and brief reign of terror in Dallas is how little attention it warranted by that Monday. Having happened in the wee hours of the weekend, it fell into a news hole. And Boulware’s failure to successfully shoot any of the police he targeted made it easier for people to shrug it off. Something about the situation, as surreal an event as you could imagine happening in an American city, had become normalized, unworthy of sustained general interest just two days later.
We’ve all become accustomed to mass shootings, but Boulware’s specific anti-police plot wasn’t even particularly unusual in Texas: Some eight months earlier, an anti-government crank named Larry McQuilliam went on a shooting spree in downtown Austin. After firing a hundred rounds into government buildings and the headquarters of the Austin Police Department, and a botched attempt to set the Mexican Consulate on fire, he was dispatched by one cop’s lucky shot before he could hurt anyone.
And in 2010, another loner named Patrick Sharp attempted to set off an ammonium nitrate bomb in front of the headquarters of the McKinney Police Department, north of Dallas. The bomb failed to detonate, but he then fired 163 shots at responding officers before he was killed.
All commentary to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing particularly surprising about Thursday’s attack in Dallas. It was inevitable. Eventually, someone was going to get it “right.” Micah Xavier Johnson, thanks to his military training, knew what he was doing, targeting and dispatching police officers with ruthless efficiency. Footage from the attack showing Johnson weaving in and out of pillars and shooting one officer from behind is a brutal testament to what powerful weaponry in skilled hands can do in the right environment, against even well-trained and armed opponents. It was also, in its own way, a powerful rebuke to the strange logic that governs gun politics, and gun culture, in Texas.
The modern mass shooting was born three hours south of downtown Dallas, at the University of Texas in Austin, in 1966. Another veteran, an ex-Marine sharpshooter named Charles Whitman, climbed the university tower and started picking off students. Whitman, like Johnson, benefited from being a hell of a lot better with a gun than his opponents, and had significant tactical advantages — in Whitman’s case height, and in Johnson’s chaos and the presence of crowds.