Such a poignant quote now in light of recent developments. I wonder if all those people who were screaming “Radical Islamist!” will care to comment.
There is only one Dog … uh oh … cats aren’t gonna like this
They’ll love it. After all, the Lord is thy leopard.
He’ll make you go lie down in Stillwater.
Oh, people were claiming that right off. Out of curiosity as soon as I heard about the shooting I googled and the gun nuts were already ranting about how it was a false flag.
They do that regularly, including accusing parents to their face of taking money from the government to have their children killed.
Well…OK.
Its a Minnesota thing. That joke kills in Hibbing.
There’s some good B&Bs in Stillwater, so that’s nice.
There Can Be Only One.
I see:
50 white people get gunned down and it’s “The Worsest Terrorist Shooting in all of American History”.
40 to 200 black people get beat to death in East St Louis (1917) and it doesn’t count.
Sure, here on the StraightWhiteDope, black lives don’t matter.
Your premise is faulty, your reasoning is worse, and your conclusion is absurd.
This is ridiculous. Facebook and Twitter did not exist back then. How would anybody find out about such a thing?
I’ve highlighted two parts of your post for you.
I actually read through your link, since it’s not an event I’d heard of before personally, and it seems like there WERE shooting deaths, but it doesn’t seem to give a death count separated out by method.
How very white of you folks to point that out … I stand corrected …
Again, a quick look through your cite lists a good number of shooting deaths (I counted at least 20 individual shooting deaths, but there’s also a good many times when it just says something like “shot at and many were killed” with no certain number. The total death toll looks to have been anywhere from a little fewer to many, many times higher than that in Orlando, depending on the sources you go with. Given the extensive property damage and fires, as well as the calls for lynching noted, it seems (from that page alone, at least) there were plenty of other options for cause of death rather than shooting.
If you’re looking specifically for terrorist shooting murders numerically comparable with the Orlando attack, try the 1887 Thibodeaux massacre in which between 20 and 200 African-American participants in a strike at Louisiana sugar plantations, and members of their families, were massacred by white vigilantes. It was estimated by people close to the perpetrators (none of whom were ever indicted for their crimes, natch) that at least fifty unresisting black people were murdered.
Again, the parallels with the Orlando attacks aren’t 100% precise: there wasn’t a single shooter, and the violence wasn’t a single unexpected surprise attack. There had been tensions between the evicted black strikers and the white vigilantes who attempted to confine them under martial law in Thibodaux, and two of the white “patrollers” were (non-fatally) shot by an unidentified assailant in their lockdown of the town. But it is undisputed that at least dozens (and likely more than fifty) of unarmed and nonbelligerent black people, including children and elderly, were deliberately murdered by white people to whom they posed no threat of harm, to punish and intimidate them for having dared to stand up to their white bosses.
By any reasonable metric, the Thibodaux massacre counts as an incident of domestic terrorism, with a probable shooting-death body count on the order of fifty or more.
Oh, and Wilmington (NC) 1898, anybody?
And what happened to the Wilmington terrorists, you ask? Why, they were re-elected to the offices they had illegally usurped, of course.
Sure, no one thought to actually count the dead black people … once the “Black-Only” hospitals were burnt down there wasn’t any point to.
Besides, these events were just race riots, not terrorism … how could I have made such a silly mistake.
To be clear, I’m not actually denying the existence of higher-death-toll-by-shooting attacks. I read the links because they weren’t events I’d heard of before, and discovered that watchwolf49 seems to be bad at picking his/her examples.
None of which analogies, of course, in any way diminish or trivialize the atrocious evil and suffering of the Orlando attacks. But I think it’s worth remembering, when the media starts playing “Unprecedented Worst Ever” rhetoric games with terrorist attacks, the extent to which horrific and terroristic—and large-scale and habitual—mob violence against blacks in America has largely been erased from our mainstream narratives.
Thank you … and I desist … a true wordsmith you are Kimstu.
Apparently we’ve also chosen to forget that just a few years ago, a white guy chased down a black kid and shot and killed the kid in cold blood, then successfully claimed self-defense. So, we have a culture of tolerance for this kind of behavior in the greater Orlando area. That’s the only place in the whole world I’ve been where I worried about leaving Brenda back home with her playmates in the neighborhood Neo-Nazi’s gun safe.
“I walked into the nightclub with my AR-15, then I felt my life was threatened … so I defended myself.”