Hundreds killed: American mass shootings in context

Bloody Island Massacre - May 15, 1850: 

Nathaniel Lyonand his U.S. Army detachment of cavalry killed 100 Pomo people on Bo-no-po-ti island near Clear Lake, (Lake Co., California).


Bear River Massacre - January 1863: 

A daybreak raid carried out by U.S. soldiers on a winter village of the Northwest Band of Shoshone, killed as many as 250 men, women and children.


Camp Grant Massacre - April 30, 1871: 

Led by the ex-Mayor of Tucson, William Oury, eight Americans, 48 Mexicans and more than 100 allied Pimaattacked Apache men, women and children at Camp Grant, Arizona Territory killing 144, with 1 survivor at scene and 29 children sold to slavery. All but eight of the dead were Apache women or children.


Battle of the Big Hole - August 8, 1877: 

US troops under Colonel John Gibbonattacked a Nez Percevillage at Big Hole, in Montana Territory. They killed 89 men, women and children before being repulsed by the Indians.


Wounded Knee - December 29, 1890: 

More than 150 Lakota men, women, and children of the Lakota had been killed and 51 were wounded (4 men and 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300.


Mỹ Lai Massacre - March 16, 1968: 

U.S. Army soldiers killed 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in South Vietnam. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated.

Ike

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower / April 16, 1953



"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower / January 20, 1961