The 24 Luby’s deaths were 6 more than were recorded 25 years earlier on the day of the University of Texas tower attack, which was the country’s deadliest shooting until a gunman murdered 21 people at a California McDonald’s in 1984. Both events shocked a nation that was unaccustomed to such slaughter. But by the time the Luby’s massacre outstripped them, a certain narrative had begun to take hold. In the 33 years from 1949 to 1981, three mass shootings of ten or more people took place in the United States. In the nine years from 1982 to 1990, six occurred. The bloodletting had become so familiar that hours after the Luby’s massacre, Peter Jennings opened his World News Tonight broadcast by saying, “It has happened again.”
Americans asked themselves difficult questions in the weeks that followed: Why did he do it? How could this happen? And, perhaps most prominently, how many lives could have been spared if someone else in the restaurant had been armed?
Suzanna Gratia Hupp had a clear answer to that last question. The 32-year-old chiropractor had been eating lunch with her parents when the gunman opened fire. “I was fully, totally prepared to blow this guy away,” Hupp would later testify before the Texas Senate. “I had good position with the table to prop my arm on, and he was standing up with his back turned three-quarters in my direction. I reached back for my purse, and that’s when I realized I’d taken the gun out and left it in the car.” Hupp didn’t have her .38 Smith & Wesson on her because in Texas it was illegal to carry a gun in public—as it had been since Reconstruction.
Reeling from the attack that left both of her parents dead, Hupp began sharing her frustration publicly. “I know some of this sounds a little funny now, but I wasn’t especially angry at the guy who did it. That’s like being mad at a rabid dog,” Hupp says today. “I was very angry at my legislators for legislating me out of the right to protect myself and my family. And I was angry at myself for having obeyed a stupid law that I think got a lot of people killed.”