Texas tower sniper’s rifle from ’66 to be shown at Crime Museum

DALLAS – A Washington, D.C., museum announced Friday that it will display the rifle that sniper Charles Whitman used to kill 16 people and wound 32 others from atop the University of Texas clock tower in 1966.

The Crime Museum will display the 6 mm Remington Model 700 rifle, still bearing Whitman’s handwritten scope sightings on a piece of tape.

The museum acquired the gun recently from a private collector, said spokeswoman Kira Bates. She said she had no other details.

The crime was among those that led to the creation of special police tactical units. Also, the ease with which Whitman purchased his weapons prompted Congress to pass the Gun Control Act of 1968, which requires the licensing of firearms dealers, said Janine Vaccarello, the museum’s chief operating officer.

“With the University of Texas shooting being the first of its kind, we wanted to pay tribute to all the victims who lost their lives that day, while also recognizing all the police officers who continue to risk their lives on a daily basis,” Vaccarello said in a statement from the museum.

But some victims and a university official questioned the taste of the exhibit.

“What kind of person wants to go and look at it? Why does somebody want to go look at something that did so much evil?” Claire Wilson James asked the Dallas Morning News. James, now a retired schoolteacher in Texarkana, Texas, was 18 and eight months pregnant when she was wounded in the stomach, killing her unborn child.