Now this is a right wing message after my left wing heart!

Only it misses.

Badly.

It’s a reference to Wounded Knee Massacre. which did in fact occur on December 29th, 1890. The rest of the account comes close to the truth.

Close.

Yet, the details of the story have been altered to suit the purposes of the gun rights lobby.

How?

Well…

1: Referring to this as “the largest mass shooting in U.S. history” puts an odd spin on it. It is of course a mass shooting, in much the same sense that any other military operation (Whether it be a legitimate battle or an outright massacre) could be described as a “mass shooting.” Still, we don’t normally describe battles or even massacres carried out by the military as “mass shootings.” We use that phrase to describe the actions of people (usually civilians) acting on their own accord. Use of this phrasing is designed to bring this story in alignment with questions about civilian gun ownership rather than questions about military actions or the history of Indian-white relations. In effect, the author is inviting us to set aside the larger context of violence made possible, not only by government policy, but also a political economy hell-bent on predatory expansion and a U.S. population fully expecting to get everything Native Americans have in the end. Wounded Knee may be one of the worst of such stories, but none of these stories can be accurately compared to a seemingly random “mass shooting” carried out by civilians acting on their own.

I’m going to give the question as to whether or not this was “the largest” mass shooting a pass.

2: The timeline is over-simplified. The army did not first disarm the Lakota camp and then begin shooting, as this meme describes. The shooting broke out during the process of disarming the warriors. Certainly, a lot of the weapons had already been confiscated, but some Lakota still had weapons, and others may have been able to retrieve confiscated weapons in the early moments of the battle. By some accounts, Wounded Knee actually consists of a close quarter battle at the site of disarmament even as the army opened up with Hotchkiss guns on the women and children in the larger camp. Soldiers then proceeded to hunt down fleeing Lakota (men, and women, and children) long after any semblance of fighting wasover. (It also appears that some of the army’s own casualties were likely due to friendly fire. Seriously, …this was a clusterfuck!) Wounded Knee was certainly an atrocity, but it was not an atrocity that begins clearly AFTER the Lakota have been disarmed.

This is of course the central distortion of the narrative. It makes it possible to treat the massacre as a story of armed shooters and unarmed targets (thus conjuring the image of a “mass shooting” in the sense we see so often today). The resulting account not only ignores the weapons still in possession of Lakota; it also ignores the larger military context which made refusal to give up the weapons implausible. Once again, this was a military operation. The notion that Lakota could have simply refused to turn over their guns (as the author urges Americans to refuse themselves) is highly unrealistic.

Hell, it’s outright stupid!

3: The author tells us that America’s founding fathers saw fit to ensure that American citizens would be armed so as to prevent this sort of thing belies the relevance of this example to private gun ownership. Lakota were not U.S. Citizens at the time, and actual U.S. citizens (gun owners or not) were not exactly interested in helping them. There is nothing about the private gun ownership of American citizens which was ever going to stop this massacre from happening, and given the dynamics of actual war, it is highly unlikely that the private ownership of guns will make a difference in the event that officials in the U.S. government decides to attack a segment of its own citizenry will make any difference. You might get to shoot back. Those you shoot back at will be better armed than you.

This really is just one of many memes distorting history on behalf of the gun rights agenda. What’s particularly irritating about this one is the use of an atrocity carried out against Native Americans by a political lobby not known for supporting Native American rights. It’s cynical. It’s deceitful. And it’s pathetic.

If there is a case to be made for the right to own a gun, this is not it.