Tag: massacre

The Military Tried To Hide Evidence of a Massacre. A Lawsuit Just Exposed It.

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The Haditha massacre was one of the worst U.S. actions during the Iraq War. After a roadside bomb killed a Marine in the town of Haditha in November 2005, the rest of his squad shot dead 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, many of them inside their own homes. The Marine Corps then lied about it, claiming that the victims were all killed by the bomb or by running gun battles with insurgents.

Only dogged reporting by Time Magazine forced the military to open an investigation. No one was ever jailed for the killings or the coverup. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the commander of the squad, pleaded guilty to one count of dereliction of duty and was demoted.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/28/the-military-tried-to-hide-evidence-of-a-massacre-a-lawsuit-just-exposed-it/

‘Gun, gun, gun! Run, run, run!’ Grocery store witnesses describe the deadly rampage in Colorado

Posted on by Lone Candle

“The shooter entered the store the afternoon ofMarch 22, 2021, and opened fire, killing 10 people – including the first Boulder police officer to arrive on the scene.
While families agonized for hours waiting to learn the fate of their missing loved ones, several survivors described the surreal attack.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gun-gun-gun-run-run-123722538.html

What so many high-profile shootings have in common

Posted on by Lone Candle

“We do know that he was 20 years old, and male.
Those two facts — and his role in Saturday’s shocking crimes — put him in a small but frightening group: He’s now among a handful of young American men who, driven by psychological distress, hatred, or something else, commit highly public acts of violence with powerful guns.

He joins a list of young men that includes the two high school seniors who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999; the 24-year-old who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012; the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018; the 18-year-old who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket the same year; and, unfortunately, many more.

“Across the board, young men are responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in this country,” said Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. That’s especially true for public mass shooters, 98 percent of whom are male and a growing number of whom are in their late teens or early 20s.

The reasons young men turn to public violence are many and complicated, but experts say that common factors include access to guns that has grown even easier in recent years and a sense of social isolation deepened by the pandemic. That isolation can lead young men to seek out community in dangerous places, including a growing number of online communities that glorify violence.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/361133/trump-assassination-attempt-rnc-men-guns

Pol Pot’s Atrocities Still Matter, 45 Years After Khmer Rouge’s Fall

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Forty-five years ago last Sunday, Vietnamese troops seized Phnom Penh and ended Cambodia’s 45-month reign of terror known as the “killing fields.” Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge government implemented policies—forced labor, resettlements, torture, starvation—that led to the death of 1.7-to-3 million people, or at least 20 percent of the nation’s population. The regime destroyed the country, caused untold suffering, and left permanent scars.”

…

“The Cambodian revolution wasn’t spontaneous. Its leaders honed their philosophy while studying in Paris. And one usually finds intellectuals behind crazy notions. As the saying goes, “Ideas have consequences”—and they’re often tragic.
Cambodia’s leaders sought to create an idyllic and classless agrarian society, one that harkened to the Angkor Empire from the 800s. “They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers rather than educated city dwellers, who the Khmer Rouge believed had been corrupted by western capitalist ideas,” according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Their philosophy echoed Mao Zedong, whose efforts to remake China led to unimaginable horrors.”

…

“In 1999, the “Black Book of Communism” tried to detail the number of civilian deaths caused by the world’s communist regimes—not deaths caused amid wars and civil strife, but direct massacres from the kind of policies so efficiently carried out in Cambodia. The authors came up with a figure of 100 million. These deaths don’t tell the entire story of fear, slavery, and repression. It’s simply unfathomable that any modern American could have a view of communist regimes that were any more favorable than the views most of us hold of Nazism.

Then again, ideological narratives grab hold of people in ways that are hard to understand. So many young leftists are nurtured in a university hothouse that divvies up humanity into fixed groups of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” They learned to have an endless faith in the government’s ability to reorder humanity. They probably haven’t been taught about what happens when officials are given unlimited powers to launch a “Great Leap Forward,” create “Year Zero” or design a “New Soviet Man.”

That’s too bad because the reason we live such free and prosperous lives is because we live within a system that limits the government’s power to take our property, throw us in prison, depopulate cities, execute us, force us onto long marches and put us in re-education camps. History proves that many people—including those who claim to have the best intentions—would do horrific things if they had such powers at their disposal. We can even point to horrors in the history of our own country, of course.”

https://reason.com/2024/01/12/pol-pots-atrocities-still-matter-45-years-after-khmer-rouges-fall/

Extremist-Related Mass Killings Have Been On The Rise

Posted on by Lone Candle

“despite the total number of mass killings staying static, the number of events with extremist ties has increased, resulting in a higher percentage of extremist-linked mass killings.”

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“reports from the DHS and ADL also indicate far-right extremists make up the plurality of violent attacks with extremist ties.”

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““Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have committed the majority of extremist-related killings in all years but one — 2016, the year of the shooting spree at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, by a person motivated by Islamist extremism,” the report read. “Of the 444 people killed at the hands of extremists over the past 10 years, 335 (or 75%) were killed by right-wing extremists.” The report also found that the majority of deaths caused by these killings are from shootings — over 80 percent of the victims of deadly extremist violence were killed with firearms in each of the last five years.”

3 takeaways from Texas’s investigation of the Uvalde school shooting

Posted on by Lone Candle

“There’s only so much that schools can do to defend against a determined individual with access to guns. Militarizing public schools doesn’t foster a welcoming learning environment, nor is it particularly cost-effective for taxpayers.

“Installing bulletproof glass in all the windows — stuff like this is hideously expensive and not sensible. There’s only so far you can go to harden a public facility,” said Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.

But a simple security upgrade could have made it harder for the shooter to enter the school: ensuring that the doors were locked. There were three exterior doors in the west building where the shooting took place, and all three had been left unlocked, according to the report. The door to one of the classrooms where the shooter took his victims was also known to have a faulty lock, but no one had created a work order to repair it. School staff also frequently propped doors open, especially for substitute teachers who didn’t have their own keys.”