He said it was the largest civilian mass shooting.
We don't know that yet because I have a strange feeling that more than a few people died during the 'rescue'

It is inappropriate to post something so shocking.

This is a horrid thing to post without a warning.

Just accuracy.
Is it or is it not the "worst" mass shooting in American history?
"Worst" in number of victims?
No.

"Worst" in motive?
Hell, I don't know.
How do you attribute 'worst' to motives?

Gnadenhutten Massacre

Colonial militia slaughtered 96 Lenape Native Americans whose only crime was being the wrong skin color on March 8, 1782.[10] Despite being singled out as a neutral Native American tribe by Colonel Broadhead, they were still rounded up and placed into two killing homes by American miltiamen, who scalped men, women and children. When confronted by their killers and told they would die, the Christian Lenape prayed to Jesus before being killed by their fellow Christians.
(Same link as above)

but that never seems to happen when another group was targeted.

Did anyone point this out after Newtown? After the Charleston church shooting? No.

I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be. That Orlando is not such a big deal in relative terms because another group was also savagely targeted? Perhaps we should talk about the tens of thousands of gay men who were incarcerated, tortured, and killed during the Holocaust. Does their fate make the Indian genocide any less terrible?

No one said "worst mass shooting in America" until this one.

Look, ONE is one too many, OK?
Yes, this is bad. Really bad.
Not much better (relative term) or worse than others, but really bad.

There have been others that were much worse in terms of number of victims.
And what makes my blood run cold is that it wasn't terrorists (unless you were an Indian).
It was the fucking U.S. government.

OK, I'm sorry. I got completely sidetracked here.
My point is that I'd like to see some accuracy in reporting.
There.

There. Happy?

Worst mass shooting by a single person.

other human depravity.

What is diminished is the safety of specific folks in our society; especially those that ideologues scape goat and threaten individuals that have the human right to live as themselves and in safety.

Hate is hate.

I made a post in this thread about another Indian massacre not mentioned by trof but well documented.

Terrible is terrible.

There is no contest except what happened in Orlando is most immediate and one would hope some good can come of the great loss and horror.

The outrage here would have never ended if someone had tried to put Charleston in some bullshit 'context' like this.

Hahahahahaha.

Not much has made me laugh today. That did.

I'm sure someone's upset.

When there's nothing else to do we can all settle in for a nice game of "Who's got it worse."

And most were pretty mean-spirited, imho. Most of the posts I saw were about the mass killings of black people, and the complaints were those mass killings did not get the attention that this mass killing did. Oppression Olympics, indeed.

just show they know nothing about this and haven't bothered to even look at pictures of the victims.

Seems to numb their tiny brains to the fact that most of the Orlando victims were Latino and Black. I had to call a few of them out today, after seeing the same post 50 times. I asked: Aside from the inaccurate description by the media, why do you feel the need to compare this mass murder of people of color to other mass murders of people of color? I got crickets, but it is clear to me that gay erases people of color, in their minds.

Just like when the whiter-net pulled the "Irish Slaves" canard out of their asses when BLM popped up.

I'm so sick of seeing this crap!

with the Indian tribes though?

I'm pretty sure we were the ones who declared war on the indigenous people we found here because we wanted their land.
No?

The native americans were fighting over land long before the Europeans arrived.

by roxanne dunbar-ortiz.

The massacre of unarmed, defenseless men, women and children is always an act of murder, even at war.

but a mass killing done by the military should be different than by civilian. Just arguing the point of the headline is all.

Actually for most of human history that was the norm. When you went to war you slaughtered everyone or took them as slaves. From the bible to the Romans to Genghis Khan to World War 2. It is only recently that we have tried to avoid killing non-combatants.

...and Orlando is one method ISIS chose to take the fight to us.

Goodness knows we've been bombing the crap out of them for a long while now.

Most Americans do not act like we are at war with ISIS. Congress certainly doesn't, as they won't even consider the situation.

This incident doesn't seem to have anything to do with ISIS. Yeah, in the middle of the shooting the guy told the police he was ISIS. Before that, at times he'd told people he liked Hezbollah (who, along with Iran, is fighting ISIS) and AlQ (who is a competitor of ISIS, not a friend). He'd been drinking at the club for years, which doesn't exactly make him a believer in Islam (of any flavor). He wanted to be a badass.

It's the politicians who want this to be about ISIS. That gives them a handle to manipulate you by. And the cops, of course, because if we're at war with ISIS they need more tanks and machine guns.

Are we "at war with ISIS"? Well, we've certainly attacked them, haven't we? My understanding of "war" is that if you're attacked, you get to fight back. But I don't think this terrorism has anything to do with them.

That one person can kill 49 is, at least in my mind, somewhat different than 700 men killing 150. Maybe if "arms" were defined as muskets, we wouldn't be pondering what "mass killing" means today.

they should have said "recent."

Granted other weapons (axes, knives, and guns) plus guns were used and the murder toll is not precise (80 to 250).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Wiyot_massacre

The Wiyot massacre refers to the incidents on February 26, 1860, at Tuluwat on what is now known as Indian Island, near Eureka in Humboldt County, California. In coordinated attacks beginning at about 6 am, white settlers[1] murdered more than 80 Wiyot people with axes, knives, and guns. The February 26 attacks were followed by similar bloody attacks on other Wiyot villages later that week.

clip

Deaths

Based upon Wiyot Tribe estimates, 80 to 250 Wiyot people were murdered. Another estimate states the number of Indians killed at 150.[4] Because most of the adult able-bodied men were away gathering supplies as part of continuing preparation for the World Renewal Ceremony, nearly all the Wiyot men murdered are believed to have been older men, which is one reason why the Wiyot were largely defenseless. It is untrue to say the Wiyot were killed with ease because they were "exhausted from the annual celebration." The celebration usually lasted seven to 10 days, and the men traditionally left at night for the supplies while the elders, women and children slept. That is why most victims were children, women and older men.

Arcata's local newspaper, the Northern Californian, described the scene as follows:


"Blood stood in pools on all sides; the walls of the huts were stained and the grass colored red. Lying around were dead bodies of both sexes and all ages from the old man to the infant at the breast. Some had their heads split in twain by axes, others beaten into jelly with clubs, others pierced or cut to pieces with bowie knives. Some struck down as they mired; others had almost reached the water when overtaken and butchered."[5]

Survivors

There were few survivors. One woman, Jane Sam, survived by hiding in a trash pile. Two cousins, Matilda and Nancy Spear, hid with their three children on the west side of the island and later found seven other children still alive. A young boy, Jerry James, was found alive in his dead mother's arms. Polly Steve was badly wounded and left for dead, but recovered. One of the few Wiyot men on the island during the attack, Mad River Billy, jumped into the bay and swam to safety in Eureka.[2] Another woman, Kaiquaish (also known as Josephine Beach) and her eleven-month-old son William survived by not being on the island in the first place. Kaiquaish had set out in a canoe with her son to take part in the ceremonies, but became lost in the fog and was forced to return home before the attacks began.[6]

Coordinated attacks

The Tuluwat/Indian Island massacre was part of a coordinated simultaneous attack that targeted other nearby Wiyot sites, including an encampment on the Eel River.[2] The same day the same party was reported to have killed 58 more people at South Beach, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Eureka even though many of the women worked for the white families and many could speak "good English."[1] On 28 February 1860, 40 more Wiyot were killed on the South Fork of the Eel River, and 35 more at Eagle Prairie a few days later.[1] Though the attack was widely condemned in newspapers outside Humboldt County, no one was ever prosecuted for the murders.[1] One writer in nearby Union (now Arcata, California), the then-uncelebrated Bret Harte, wrote against the killers and would soon need to leave the area due to the threats against his life. Several prominent local citizens also wrote letters to the San Francisco papers angrily condemning the attacks and naming suspected conspirators.[7]

----------------------------------------------------

There is a book "Norton, Jack (1979). Genocide in northwestern California : when our worlds cried" that goes into some detail. The book is out of print and my understanding is that there are legal restraints on new editions.

https://www.amazon.com/Genocide-Northwestern-California-Worlds-Cried/dp/B000JWP39W/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465863266&sr=1-1&keywords=Norton%2C+Jack+%281979%29.+Genocide+in+northwestern+California+%3A+when+our+worlds+cried.

edit to add: I am surprised that the Indian Island Massacre is not mentioned on the link in the OP of Native American genocides as it is of kind and size of other genocidal acts. The book mentioned above goes as far as to name perpetuators.

Let's not forget Camp Grant in 1871 where good Christian white people killed 125 surrendered Aravaipa Apache in 30 minutes, kidnapped 25 of their children and sold them into slavery in Mexican. Only six were ever recovered.

On August 1, 1876, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant signed Proclamation 230 admitting Colorado to the Union as the 38th state.

Therefore, in 1864, Colorado was not part of the United States, and the killings you reference were not in the United States. For the sake of accuracy, you may want to follow your own advice and self delete.

therefore it WAS "part of the United States" in 1864--

it just wasn't a "state" yet, but under United States jurisdiction.

History fail.

I will check into a bit more when I get home. "Organized in 1861" doesn't have a very clear definition to me as far a territory goes. Maybe they named it... did it have a governor, legislature, national voting rights as citizens, etc? I dunno, but if you do know please reply and I will kindly self delete.

The first was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The second was the 1819 Adams Onis treaty. The third was the Annexation of Texas in 1845. The territory itself was assembled from portions of the Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, and New Mexico territories.

God, do we ever sanitize history.

Read about it in this book.............Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown ...1970....

You will never forget reading about this event....if you have any feelings at all. Impossible to believe what happened..Be warned..it goes beyond what anyone thinks about when they think about the "old west"

But I have yet to read it. I know how much it's going to upset me.

East St. Louis 1917 200-700 deaths

Arkansas 1919 854 deaths

Tulsa 1921 300-3000 deaths.

Rosewood 1923 150 deaths

All ginned up white rage against blacks. Don the con appears to be pushing
a similar playbook against Muslims and Mexicans. Let's make sure he is soundly defeated in November

Thanks for posting........

But that was 'State' violence....which of course gets a pass from the authoritarian crowd.

You are mixing your metaphors here which does a disservice to both the issue of Indian Genocide and the Orlando hate incident.

L-

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown..1971

...and the psychosis, and fetishizing of guns, that brought us here.

It never gets said enough...America's gun-nuttery is an ingrained cultural artifact, much like the oppression of minorities, and will require active combating of that culture to effect change.

Someday, we're going to look back on days like Orlando and say "What the fuck took us so long to rein in gun-nuttery and enforce the 2nd amendment as written; not as the NRA and RKBA activists wish it was written?"

The whole point of the 2nd amendment was not about fighting ht British - it away about fighting Indians with a side of preventing slave rebellions. Easy to understand when you realize the context of the Revolutionary War. It wasn't about "representation" any more than the civil war was about "state's rights" - you could frame both that way, but the specifics? The colonies wanted representatives to overturn laws forbidding expansion into Indian country, just as the "states' rights" in the civil war was the right to own other human beings.

on the gun and wild west heroes for most of our lives.

From the beginning we were a sick, sick people. But the truth is we were a sick, sick world. World history is full of this kind of human behavior. And much of it has been suppressed to protect the perpetrators.

Exactly so.

between what happened in Orlando the other day, and what happened in 1864 in Colorado are qualitatively different things.

The other down side of holding this up as the worst or largest, is that now someone else will be motivated to kill a larger number.

Actually, given the ready availability of guns in this country, it's almost surprising that those who go on killing sprees manage usually to kill so few. At Columbine only 12 students and one teacher (aside from the perpetrators) were killed. In the Aurora, CO movie shooting, again only 12 were killed, although 70 others were injured. I'm not trying to minimize what happened, but it must be a lot harder to shoot and actually kill someone than I had thought.

Violence is nothing new in the US. We're good at it.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?search=1&entryID=1102#

The Elaine Massacre was by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. While its deepest roots lay in the state’s commitment to white supremacy, the events in Elaine stemmed from tense race relations and growing concerns about labor unions. A shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union escalated into mob violence on the part of the white people in Elaine (Phillips County) and surrounding areas. Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African Americans killed by whites range into the hundreds; five white people lost their lives.

The conflict began on the night of September 30, 1919, when approximately 100 African Americans, mostly sharecroppers on the plantations of white landowners, attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Hoop Spur (Phillips County), three miles north of Elaine. The purpose of the meeting, one of several by black sharecroppers in the Elaine area during the previous months, was to obtain better payments for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners who dominated the area during the Jim Crow era. Black sharecroppers were often exploited in their efforts to collect payment for their cotton crops.

In previous months, racial conflict had occurred in numerous cities in America, including Washington DC; Chicago, Illinois; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Indianapolis, Indiana. With labor conflicts escalating throughout the country at the end of World War I, government and business interpreted the demands of labor increasingly as the work of foreign ideologies, such as Bolshevism, that threatened the foundation of the American economy. Thrown into this highly combustible mix was the return to the United States of black soldiers who often exhibited a less submissive attitude within the Jim Crow society around them.

Unions such as the Progressive Farmers represented a threat not only to the tenet of white supremacy but also to the basic concepts of capitalism. Although the United States was on the winning side of World War I, supporters of American capitalism found in communism a new menace to their security. With the success of the Russian Revolution, stopping the spread of international communism was seen as the duty of all loyal Americans. Arkansas governor Charles Hillman Brough told a St. Louis, Missouri, audience during the war that “there existed no twilight zone in American patriotism” and called Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollete, who opposed the war, a Bolshevik leader. The threat of “Bolshevism” seemed to be everywhere: not only in the labor strikes led by the radical Industrial Workers of the World but also in the cotton fields of Arkansas.

. It is the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, with a combined tally of 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing.[10]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antietam

when I hear the phrase "mass shooting". Mass shooting doesn't seem to describe accurately what you're using as an example, IMHO. I don't think you're making any good point.

In no small part due to it barely being taught in schools, and made so dull and boring that most won't read it on their own for its own sake.

This is why the 2016 campaign is being called the dirtiest campaign ever, or hate speech is at an all-time high, and so on.

Things are currently very fucked-up indeed, but they've been worse. Sadly, they were going in the right direction for a while but are slipping back into another dip in the progress scale

I'm always amazed at the number of "trials of the century" that we have had.

However, out of deference to a an historically marginalized community that only just suffered an atrocity a few days ago, I don't think that now is the time to be calling on the media to correct the record.

But we should raise awareness and lobby for it in the near future.

The conversation is warranted, but it can wait a week or five.

Our school boards etc insist that it be sanitized to leave out the things that were "mistakes". So our children learn little about the truth of slavery, the treatment of the Natives, our relationship with Mexico and even our robber barons are nice people.

It is no wonder that our youth start telling us that what they are learning is a bunch of bull after they become sophomores. They are right and most of what they learn will never be used again because it is not true.

I assume that TPTB want to keep this stuff under the rug because they think that we might just start to think about what we really are. Like we are now.

I think that news organizations are confusing "in U.S. history" with "in the United States". Because the massacres of Native Americans occurred on reservations, they did not technically take place in the U.S. The media is pretty reliable when it comes to missing important nuance and packaging dramatic (and often inaccurate) soundbites in the interest of sensationalism.

At any rate, I don't think that people noting the degree of carnage that occurred in Orlando on Saturday are intentionally diminishing the horror of other terrible events in our history.

We have a community that just suffered a horrible atrocity. Let's take care of them and each other and correct the record when Saturday's events are less raw.

Even more interesting is that the "PTB" for both assassins sanctioned this kind of slaughter against the targeted minority group.

Thanks trof. Lots to think about

Because there's Iraq, too. U.S. history isn't limited to our borders.

But then again, I'm just playing along. I don't have the details handy, but there was a mass shooting of Black people with @ 270 victims.

And there are a couple of massacres of Black people that trump your numbers. Personally, I think all of these posts are in poor taste. There is no need for a competition of tears. On the other hand, the media needs to get its facts straight

I was going to post this yesterday, but I couldn't word it in a way that was non emotional.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Aho,

sage

it is also historical fact that many so-called race riots in early america were white on black massacres of black people for the alleged crime(s) of offending white people, in some way, in the areas where hundreds were kiled. Black people were shot, hanged, burned for no other reason than being the victims of some lie based on the race of perpetrator. Media accounts of the day WERE NOT accurate or truthful in casualty counts. So I do agree with you, Orlando WAS NOT the worst american massacre in our history.

Native american and african american massacres, historically, have had more shooting casualties.. I also just want to keep the historical record straight.

Sick, twisted, religiously extremist and racist people are the problem historically along with the sale of these type of semi-automatic weapons and automatic weapons to them.

Only for the sake of accuracy in journalism, eh?

Right.

while trying to obtain the right to vote. Multiple angry conservative white people commiteted the murders. I believe that's the worst mass murder in US History

Union troops, including many African American soldiers, surrendered to Confederates led by Nathan Bedford Forrest (who later served as he first Grand Wizardnof the KKK). The surrendered soldiers were then massacred. A total of 350 died in the battle and massacre.

I know there is a difference between deaths in a war and he shooting of civilians, but these people had surrendered and were unarmed.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Pillow

….I heard that phrase I thought I'm probably hearing a very narrow view that's leaving out real history.

Given all the attacks on Native Americans. And all the violent union busting.

A bit of historical perspective is always helpful.

700 Militia is a MILITARY ACTION. 1 person killing 50 people IS the largest mass shooting!

And thank you for attempting to trivialize this incident!

It's as though native Americans never existed.

Someone should post a full-page ad in The Orlando Sentinel to remind them that their suffering isn't new or ground-breaking.

That'll take the sting out of it, no doubt.

If the OP were honestly so concerned about the history of US massacres, perhaps they should have posted it last week, rather than swooping in to shit all over the victims.

Really gross to say the least.

Hell, they are still treated worse than 3rd class citizens. And their big crime? Owning the land we wanted to steal.

An individual did this, so we can, with a clear conscience point our collective finger of disgust. How many groups of innocents has this country killed around the world in just the last 12 months?

This is a bloodthirsty, thieving, selfish country. We use fear to whip up hate and hysteria and call it a sign of strength when our leaders rattle the country's sabers. We turn a blind eye to collateral damage when it suits our purpose. There are, to be sure, countries much worse than we are, but that does not mean we have to win the race to the bottom.

Yeah, I have been told I have a bad attitude.

may have been worse.

The US Government killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans. To try and compare it to what happened in Orlando is beyond obscene. I don't believe that what happened in Orlando was genocide, which is what happened to Native Americans.

Un-recced.