The Delicate Art of the Rifle is an independent film of 1997 that was released to the general public in Los Angeles during spring 1999. Directed by D.W. Harper, the movie portrays the ninety-six minutes in which a student, Charles Whitman, methodically gunned down forty-five strangers, killing fourteen, from the tallest building on the campus of the University of Texas in 1966 (filmed at North Carolina State University in Raleigh). Who was responsible and why? Known in the film as “Walt,” Whitman (played byStephen Grant) admits, atop the building, that he came from a long line of snipers, and we know from news sources that he was an Eagle Scout and Marine hero of Vietnam. Whitman’s father wanted him to go to college, the film tell us, and he indeed had the brains to do so, majoring in history with the ambition of writing a family history about many generations of snipers in a book to be entitled “The Delicate Art of the Rifle.” But Whitman’s emotions lay elsewhere. As a misfit, that is, a college student with the temperament of a working class handyman, the pressure become too great. His roommate in the film Jay (played by David Grant) tries to stop him, but to no avail. A student theater technician, Jay is instead nonplused as Whitman continues to snipe, tempting fate (an inevitable SWAT team). After the massacre, Jay returns to lead a normal life, and he reports that nobody at school talks about the shooting, as if there were no social or psychological reason imbedded in the violence-prone American culture that sends young men to their death in Vietnam and similar occasions when the government approves serial killing. When the credits roll, we hear the familiar “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and wonder when Americans will stop glorifying violence. MH