If you are only looking at recent history, this might be true, but there’s another that had more casualties than both of these together. In it, over 150 men, women, and children were killed. Unlike the two more recent shootings, it wasn’t the work of one shooter, it was done by the U.S. military and the victims were the Lakota people. It was the Wounded Knee Massacre.

In December of 1890, the 7th Cavalry Unit of the U.S. military went to Lakota reservation to take away the guns from the Lakota people. The Lakota had been bison hunters, but the numbers of those animals had been reduced by the U.S. military in an effort to starve out the people who were dependent upon them as a food source. The reservation land they had been granted had been reduced to a smaller and smaller area by white settlers and gold miners.

One story of the event says that a man named Black Coyote didn’t want to give up his rifle since he had paid a lot for it. His reluctance led to a scuffle, shots were fired, and then the massacre followed. Whether this is true or whether the Lakota just decided that they needed to make a stand, we can’t really know but it’s something to keep in mind when you hear someone say that we would be better off if only the government, and not the people, have guns.

The Turkish government responded to the pope’s comments by recalling its ambassador to the Vatican, and summoned the Vatican’s ambassador in Ankara to express its “great disappointment and sadness.”

It’s okay, Turkey, I get disappointed when people bring up my horrendous crimes against humanity too.

So, what actually happened and when?

In 1915 there were about 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) where their ancestors had lived for 3000 years. They were both an ethnic and religious minority in the Muslim-ruled country. (Armenia, when it was independent, was the first country to make Christianity its official religion.) The Turkish government wanted a solution to the “Armenian problem” so they decided to force them from their homes and send them into the Syrian Desert without food or water.

It began on April 24 of that year. On that day the government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals – many Armenians were well-educated business owners, lawyers, doctors, and craftsmen, in contrast to the majority Turkish peasant farmers – and the rest were given a choice of walking until they dropped dead of exhaustion and exposure or stopping walking and being shot dead on the spot.

The military weren’t the only ones to get to join in the mass murdering fun. Killing squads made up of murders and ex-convicts went about crucifying (literally), drowning, and burning Armenians. They raped the women and kidnapped children, converting them to Islam and giving them to Turkish families. The children were given new Turkish or Arabic names and were beaten if they spoke Armenian.

In May, the Ottoman government began confiscating “abandoned” Armenian property. This resulted in a lot of property seizures since people were not allowed to take anything with them nor were they allowed to sell it before they left.

Ancient cities were leveled and all traces of Armenian culture was destroyed.

The genocide didn’t end until 1922. During those years the Armenian population in Turkey went from a couple million to fewer than 400,000.

The architects of the Armenian Genocide fled to Germany which promised not to prosecute them for their crimes. They were later located and assassinated by Armenian activists.

If you see similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, you’re not imagining it. Hitler saw how little was done by other countries to come to Armenia’s aid and used it as a guideline for his own genocidal plans.

Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s Head Units’ with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians? – Adolf Hitler

Presidential candidate Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946 in Queens, NY.  (This is where Prince Akeem – Eddie Murphy’s character visits in Coming to America.)

Donald Trump was the fourth of five children born to Mary Anne and Fred Trump. His mother was born in Scotland and his father was born in Queens to parents who had immigrated from Germany.

(Side note: His most direct immigrant ancestor was his mother, so why does Hillary Clinton and others concentrate on his German ancestry? That’s a rhetorical question, I know why – It’s to imply some relationship between Trump and Hitler…I guess she doesn’t know that Hitler was Austrian. Or maybe she’s sure her supporters are too ignorant to know.)

Let’s see how many cards he gets from supporters! Send them to:

Mr. Donald Trump
725 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Get it in the mail soon so it gets there by the 14th!

Make a note because next year you’ll need to send it to:

President Donald Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

It was August, 1968, and it had already been a year of mob violence and riots in many American cities. People were angry about our involvement in Vietnam (Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?) And some important political leaders – Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy – had been assassinated, taking away some of the guidance that might have eased the rioting.

President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he would not seek re-election, but his vice-president Hubert Humphrey decided to run. Anti-war activists saw him as someone who would continue the war policies of Johnson so they came to Chicago to protest the war.

The Republican convention that year was being held in Miami and some Democrats tried to get their convention moved there too. There was a phone strike in Chicago and reporters needed phone lines to get their stories in to their networks (this was before satellites and immediate streaming of news reports.)

Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, was a powerful part of the Democratic political machine and he was able to keep the convention from being moved out of his city.

Daley wanted Ted Kennedy to run. (This was before Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car. Not that it would have made any difference to Daley if it had happened earlier.) This challenge, plus the anti-war groups made it unsure that Humphrey would get the nomination.

There was in-fighting among the delegates on what to include in the Party Platform and delegations marched around the convention hall in protest. In spite of the division, Humphrey got a majority of the delegate votes and won the nomination. The convention ended with a tribute to Bobby Kennedy and a sign-carrying demonstration in support of Richard Daley (paid for by Richard Daley.)

Outside the convention hall, about 10,000 protesters met with almost 12,000 police, 7500 army troops, 7500 National Guards troops, and 1000 Secret Service agents. The protesters wanted to get close to the convention site, the armed forces wanted to stop them. The police viewed the protesters as their enemy but they also viewed the press who were reporting on the conflict as an enemy.

Protesters were stopped in their march to the convention hall. The police used their batons to beat protesters. Innocent bystanders and doctors that were trying to come to the aid of the injured were also beaten. Police used teargas on the protesters and sprayed them and other people in the area with mace.

In the end, Chicago police reported 589 arrests and said that 119 police and 100 protesters were injured. (Those numbers don’t sound fake, nope, not at all.)

Eight people were charged with the federal crime of crossing state borders to incite a riot (part of the Civil Rights Act). Mayor Daley later rewarded the police with a pay raise for beating down the dirty hippies their vigilance in keeping the peace.

The Manhattan Project test.

Three weeks later on August 6, 1945 the first atomic bomb used in a war was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. 66,000 people died and 4 1/2 square miles of the city was completely destroyed.

Three days later a second bomb was dropped, this time on Nagasaki, Japan. It killed 36,000 people and destroyed 40% of the city. Neither of these were the deadliest bombing attacks on Japan. Over 100,000 people died as a result of the Operation Meetinghouse bombing on Tokyo on March 9, 1945. The biggest difference is that the Tokyo bombing used 330 B-52s and they used incendiary bombs carrying napalm.

The dates of the first atomic bomb tests by other countries are:

USSR – August 29, 1949
United Kingdom – October 3, 1952
France – February 13, 1960
China – October 16, 1964
India – May 18, 1974
Israel – September 22, 1979…maybe
Pakistan – May 28, 1988
North Korea – October 9, 2006 but that one was a bit weak. They had a for realsies one on February 12, 2013

Time lapse map showing all of the nuclear explosions from 1945 through 1998 – that’s 2053 nuclear explosions.

Here’s the tl;dw version.

How atomic bombs work.

General Sherman

 Under General Sherman’s orders, the army destroyed Atlanta and forced its citizens to leave their homes. Afterwards, he sent a militia officer, William Howard, to assess the damage. Out of 3,600 homes, only 400 were left standing.

While the targets were primarily military, there was no great effort to prevent civilian casualties and destruction of commercial property was considered necessary to winning the war.

The following January General Sherman wrote:

We quietly and deliberately destroyed Atlanta and all the railroad which the enemy had used to carry on war against us; occupied his State capital, and then captured his commercial capital, which had been so strongly fortified from the sea as to defy approach from that quarter.