Two LRC readers reminded me that the American Civil War daily shooting deaths to which I earlier referred didn’t go far enough in identifying other groupings; that the number of these additional victims exceeded the Establishment’s effort to set the 50 victims in Orlando as a record. One reader, Dirk, said that the estimated 76 deaths perpetrated by the federal government at the Branch Davidian facility in Waco should be mentioned as an exception to today’s alleged record. [I suspect the government would say that it might be difficult to distinguish Branch Davidians killed by machine-gun fire from those burned to death.] Another reader, Ted, said that the estimated 150-300 men, women, and children of the Lakota Indian tribe killed by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee would also exceed the 50 victims number. [Again, the federal government might exclude the Indians from any list of victims as they had, since the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh – authored by Chief Justice John Marshall – been officially regarded as “fierce savages” (whenever the 7th Cavalry came in to exterminate them, the Indians fought back!) who enjoyed no rights to property that they could convey to whites; that whatever interests the Indians might have possessed had been lost by their “conquest.”]
What all of this boils down to is that human beings killed by the Establishment – be they Indians, Civil War soldiers, or members of a religion not recognized by other churches – would not qualify as victims of “mass shootings.”
12:58 am on June 13, 2016
