History

The term ‘blown away’ has been around for close to 500 years. Blowing from a gun is a method of execution in which the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon and the cannon is fired. George Carter Stent describes the process as follows: The prisoner is generally tied to a gun…

In 1718, James Puckle of London, England, demonstrated his new invention, the “Puckle Gun,” a tripod-mounted, single-barreled flintlock gun fitted with a multishot revolving cylinder. This weapon fired nine shots per minute at a time when the standard soldier’s musket could be loaded and fired but three times per minute. Puckle demonstrated two versions of…

On this day in 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians board three British tea ships moored in Boston Harbor and dump 342 chests of tea into the water.

Wednesday marked 22 years since a mass shooting in Killeen that killed 23 people and wounded 20 others. On October 16, 1991, 34-year-old George Jo Hennard of Belton drove his pick up truck through a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen. He then started shooting and killing over a dozen people. He was eventually cornered by Killeen…