Yes, Orlando needs
time to (Grieve for its loss)
Florida and the
world needs time to grieve with them.
However, there is
also nothing wrong
with telling the truth,
while we 'Grieve'?
A respected
journalist chided us
for posting this story
stating that
“comparing the
slaughter in a gay bar
carried out by one man with two guns and explosives
to
the massacre of innocents by the U.S. Army
acting under war
orders is ridiculously wrong.”
No,
The Orlando Shooting Wasn’t
We’d like to point
out that both incidents are in fact acts of war,
seeing as the shooter
attributed his violence as part
of Daseh/ISIS’ continuing war on Westerners
and
LGBT people.
Second largest
mass murder!
AND
No,
The Orlando Shooting
Wasn’t
The Worst In U.S. History
Posted on June 13,
2016
Daniel
Villarreal
Editor-In-Chief @
Unicorn Booty
Yesterday,
when we wrote about
the Orlando shooting we mentioned that several news outlets called it the
“deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.” Yeah, well, turns out it’s not. It
could be the worst mass shooting by a single individual, but Unicorn Booty
contributor Devin Bannon commented (via social media) on this horrifying piece
of history:
I learned this
morning that Orlando was not actually the greatest mass shooting in American
history. That unfortunate record has been held for 126 years by the massacre at
Wounded Knee, when 250-300 innocent Native Americans were gunned down by U.S.
military cavalry. Remembering this doesn’t diminish anything about Orlando. It
just gives me a chill to consider that this sick story of guns and
cross-cultural misunderstanding (read: hatred) is woven deeply in our country’s
history and in our blood. One thing the two tragedies have in common: They were
dancing. In both cases, the innocent were killed because they were dancing.
Bannon then posted a
link to a University of Nebraska site detailing the history of the Great Plains
(and the Wounded Knee Massacre specifically). It notes, “These people were
guilty of no crime and were not engaged in combat. A substantial number were women
and children.”
In short, the U.S.
agent assigned to oversee the region where the massacre occurred was
notoriously ignorant and afraid of Native Americans; from the time he arrived,
he began sending nervous dispatches about an impending uprising from Native
Americans on a nearby reservation. A drought had caused the local Lakota Sioux
tribe to despair over the inadequate food rations provided to reservations by
the U.S. government. And in response, some started performing the “Ghost
Dance”.
The University of
Nebraska explains:
the Ghost Dance
blended the messianic account of Christianity with traditional Native beliefs.
This new religion told of the return of the Messiah to relieve the suffering of
Native Americans and promised that if they would live righteous lives and perform
the Ghost Dance in the prescribed manner, the European American invaders would
vanish, the bison would return, and the living and the dead would be reunited
in an Edenic world.
The President of the
U.S. responded to the agent’s increasingly fearful dispatches by sending U.S.
troops along with newspaper reporters to the region; local businesses, eager to
profit off of the new visitors, exaggerated the threat of an uprising and it
became major news nationwide.
Literate Native
Americans read these reports and got increasingly nervous.
Then, for some
reason, the U.S. government recruited a local squatter named John Dunn to tell
the local Native Americans to reduce tensions by safely staying on their
reservation;
instead Dunn told them that the U.S. troops planned to imprison
the men and deport them to an island in the Atlantic.
Naturally
frightened, the Native Americans fled their reservation and the troops
followed, confining them within Wounded Knee Creek.
An American colonel told
the some of the tribesmen that he wanted them to surrender their firearms and
to relocate to another camp, something they might have interpreted to mean
exile in hostile “Indian territory” — they were alarmed by the prospect.
The story goes that
the nervous Native Americans began performing the Ghost Dance, and the ignorant
troops interpreted the ritualistic singing and throwing of dirt into the air as
a incitement to violence. Troops surrounded the dancers and when a serviceman
tried to wrestle away a rifle from one of the Native Americans, the rifle
discharged and the troops began shooting. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Lakota
tribesmen fled and the troops pursued them, shooting and killing escapees as
far as three miles away. Approximately 27 troops died along with 250 Lakota
tribesmen.
It’s sad when you
think that both the Lakota tribesmen and the LGBTQIA people at Pulse were
gathered in places meant to protect them, places where they could commune with
their own and dance in a way they uniquely understood.
In both cases, the
shooters were largely ignorant and prejudiced against the people they killed, a
lack of understanding mixed with negative stereotyping made the victims seem
much more threatening than they actually were.
Firearm deaths in
the U.S. continue to disproportionally kill people of color. You may recall
that the Pulse nightclub was holding a Latinx night the night of the shooting —
most of the people killed were Latinos, Latinas and Latinx. The legacy of gun
violence against indigenous Americans continues, behooving us to remember this
tragic historical tale.
UPDATE:
A respected
journalist chided us for posting this story stating that “comparing the
slaughter in a gay bar carried out by one man with two guns and explosives to
the massacre of innocents by the U.S. Army acting under war orders is
ridiculously wrong.” We’d like to point out that both incidents are in facts
acts of war, seeing as the shooter attributed his violence as part of
Daseh/ISIS’ continuing war on Westerners and LGBT people.
