The US has long history of mass killings, long way to go to stop them

The massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando is absolutely atrocious, but sadly, it is far from being the deadliest gun massacre in our nation’s history. 

Just ask the Native American people — they can easily give you many. There’s the Gunther Island Massacre of Wiyot Indians carried out on Feb. 26, 1860, by a group of whites who murdered up to 200 men, women and children. Or the Sand Creek Massacre on Nov. 29, 1864, that saw U.S. soldiers kill and mutilate an estimated 70 to 163 Cheyenne and Arapaho, of which two-thirds were women and children. And there’s the Jan. 23, 1870, massacre of 173 Blackfeet, mostly small pox suffering women, children and sick men, carried out by U.S. soldiers. And the Dec. 29, 1890, massacre of 300 Lakota at Wounded Knee. Topping that stunning number, U.S. soldiers massacred more than 490 Shoshone men, women and children at Bear River on Jan. 29, 1863.

{mosads}On April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow, outside of Memphis, Tenn., Gen. Nathan Forrest’s Confederate troops massacred 227 black and white Union troops, most of whom were killed after the fight was over. In Colfax, La., on April 13, 1873, armed white men, members and supporters of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan, massacred 280 blacks. Then there’s the Rock Springs, Wyo., massacre on Sept. 2, 1885, where 28 Chinese miners were killed, 15 were injured and 75 Chinese homes were burned to ashes. And you can add the 1913 Ludlow Massacre to this list, where paid mercenaries of the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp. broke the ongoing strike, killing more than 66 people, including 11 children and two women who were burned alive.

These are but a few of the much larger number of human-rights-violating war and hate crime massacres committed here on U.S. soil. With such a long history of carrying out gun massacres, crazed brutality and hate crimes, why is anyone shocked by the same still being carried out by today’s perpetrators? 

Once again, President Obama has asked us all to do some soul searching after yet another American mass murder incident. Seems to me, we are way behind on doing just that and even further behind the curve on ridding our nation of the hate streak deep down within some of those among us.

From A.J. Castilla, Boston

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Obama needs to come clean to the people about terrorists, Muslims

I have long thought that President Obama’s approach to all manner of Islamist radicals, those organized into “caliphates,” those radicalized as part of an organized jihad here at home and the lone wolfs, disaffected Americans who claim a perverted form of Islam as their guiding belief and the right to wreak murderous mayhem as a religious calling, was puzzling and inadequate.

The president refuses to acknowledge publicly that all violent extremists are not of the same ilk, that what motivated Dylann Roof in his Charleston, S.C., church rampage is fundamentally different from what drove the killers in the San Bernardino, Calif., and Orlando incidents. Obama knows all this, of course, but obfuscates the distinctions because he distrusts the people who elected him. He thinks we are incapable of distinguishing between radical Islamists and normative followers of Islam. He believes that camouflaging truth serves a higher purpose. 

He is very wrong.

From Paul Bloustein, Cincinnati