WACO, LUDLOW & OTHER MASSACRES DON'T COUNT, WHILE WAR IS EXEMPTED
By Mark Anderson
Stop the Presses News & Commentary
We’ve heard the phrase, “mind the gap.”
Well, there is a glaring, festering “maturity gap” that has long marred the American mindset.
It needs to be closed. It’s a breach through which harmful propaganda is constantly injected.
This gap is formed in large measure by the average American’s bizarrely worshipful view of the military, and oftentimes of the federal government—and “experts” and “authority” in general.
It’s time to grow up.
Indeed, Americans—despite their belief that they occupy a unique place in the annals of freedom and independence—are, perhaps more than any other people, extremely susceptible to believing and obeying authority.
Someone need only wear a uniform and a badge—or a lab coat with a medical license upon their wall, or a tie with a news corporation’s logo adorning the screen—and they can get Americans to believe virtually anything and everything.
But, given the state of the world, with unexplained shootings happening in the homeland and an endless “war on terror” still simmering overseas, it’s time that we stop mistaking servility for patriotism.
If Americans still have a true freedom instinct and want to prove it, they need to get off their knees, stand up straight and face reality squarely when it comes to the realities of political life. We must collectively move from adolescence to adulthood.
This unapologetic observation dovetails into the shootings that have taken place with increasing frequency, including, of course, the incidents in Sutherland Springs, Texas, in Las Vegas, Nevada and several other places, creating a state of fear and uncertainty.
Yet, nothing is as hazardous to life, limb and liberty than ignorance or shortsightedness. Remember, as bad and mysterious as these events appear, the reaction to them counts the most.
PRIVATE GUNS—BAD . . . STATE GUNS—GOOD
A key media-fed distortion dished out to the often-unsuspecting American population is as follows: “The Most Deadly Mass Shooting(s) in Modern American History,” lo and behold, are only those which involve private shooters taking aim at everyday citizens.
Conspicuously absent in the news analysis of “mass shootings” in the U.S. is another deadly shooting which took place—the one at Waco, Texas.
The nearly 80 Branch Davidians who died April 19, 1993 about 13 miles outside Waco, due to federal rifle fire and the flames that broke out during the FBI-BATF-military siege against the religious sect, included unborn babies, kids and adults.
Some Davidians died when their “compound” caught fire due to the federal siege against them, but while a good number of them were shot, some were reportedly shot dead as they tried to escape the fires after being encircled by armed federal agents in a 51-day standoff.
Yet, they’ve all been written off in the media’s assessment of “mass shootings” in America. Nor will you hear a member of Congress put Waco on the mass-shooting list alongside Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs etc.
Why is this the case?
Because, somehow, government guns are “different” in the distorted view of most “freedom-loving” Americans, pundits and politicians whose “civil faith” in authority is so unshakably strong that government agents and troops mowing down civilians with taxpayer-financed guns cannot possibly be a mass-shooting—even when the body counts are similar or higher, and the tactics are dirtier.
In fact, when government guns run amok, it's not really called a “shooting." It’s “law enforcement.” That’s supposed to shut everyone up. And it does.
At Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, rural resident Randy Weaver saw his teen-age son, Sam, their dog, and his wife Vicki gunned down by federal agents who were sent to execute a warrant for Weaver’s reported “weapons violations.” Not the wrongful use of weapons, but merely having them.
Granted, the Ruby Ridge body count was low, but there’s more to deadly shootings than just the body count. There's the callousness. And there's another angle on the math along with a matter of intent.
When the "federales" lock and load and go after someone, pursuing people whose guilt oftentimes has not been proven in any court, these agents are unlawfully becoming "judge, jury and executioner." It's not as if they have the excuse of a "lone-wolf gunman" who acts violently under the spell of hard drugs, as thin as that excuse may seem.
Rather, the feds decide in terms of willful, advance planning, often in unlawful circumstances, to take up arms against a citizen or citizens, something that far exceeds the proverbial lone gunman in terms of sheer force.
Simply put, the only thing worse than an "outlaw" using armed force is a lawman who is unlawfully or unconstitutionally using armed force.
To whom much is given, much is expected. We expect an outlaw to behave badly; hence the term "outlaw." But when the law enforcers behave just as badly or worse, a public trust has been broken that is not easily repaired.
That being said, to narrow things down in the Ruby Ridge case, it was FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, one among dozens of armed federal agents against a small family, who fired the shot that killed Vicki Weaver when she held a 10-month-old baby in her arms. An official investigations in Washington and later in Idaho pegged Horiuchi for manslaughter charges.
But all charges were dropped. And the federal government, while it showered the victim’s family members with money, never admitted any wrongdoing.
The principle here is highly illustrative: State power asserted with guns cannot be wrong because it’s the state.
This hideous notion is the thing Americans, if they are Americans, can and must conquer.
To deserve its self-directed praises, America must be the one place where the state is not supreme, where the governed are truly in charge of the governors. If that’s not the case, then America is just a dissolved shell of its former self.
AND THEN THERE’S LUDLOW
Also notice that the phrase “modern American history,” repeated nonstop by the big media, is not clearly defined in the context of news reports on the most serious mass shootings. Therefore, events like the Ludlow massacre don’t make the “mass-shooting” grade either.
Ludlow? Glad you asked.
Ludlow also involved state-sanctioned guns, as the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards opened fire on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914.
But that evidently isn’t “modern” enough for big media, even though some two-dozen people, including miners' wives and children, were killed.
The chief owner of the Ludlow mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for an incident that also resulted in widespread tent fires—the “Waco” of its day, if you will.
Ah, but gilded “corporateers” like Rockefeller Jr., the son of the fake-Christian oil tycoon, can’t be held “responsible,” lest their bath water grow tepid.
Justice’s wrath is only laid upon poor chumps. The ultra-wealthy don’t go to jail; they build private for-profit prisons.
And, besides, anyone a guardsman shoots at is automatically fair game, right? Mining lumps of coal is more important than people, as we all know.
WARFARE REDEFINED
Lastly, the principles, or lack thereof, discussed here, lead us to the world of military wars and the notion that the largest-scale murder of human beings by other human beings with guns is in every instance somehow justified—simply because it’s “war.”
This is where servile Americans stumble hard, because, when America goes to war, all criticism is forbidden, even though Gen. Smedley Butler proved over a century ago that wars are fought for sugar trusts, bankers and other mountebanks.
Genuine defensive wars where deadly force is seemingly justified to actually protect oneself and one’s country from a proven, invasive tyranny have almost never occurred. The war of 1812 when the Brits invaded . . . maybe?
FDR jailed some war critics, as did Woodrow Wilson, and even Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln, for God’s sake, oversaw the ACTUAL LARGEST MASS SHOOTINGS ON U.S. SOIL with names like Gettysburg and Bull Run.
Casualties at Gettysburg in early July 1863 totaled 23,049 for the Union (3,155 dead, 14,529 wounded, 5,365 missing). Confederate casualties: 28,063 (3,903 dead, 18,735 injured, 5,425 missing).
In July of 1861, the battle of Bull Run was the largest and bloodiest in U.S. history up to that point. Union casualties: 460 killed, 1,124 wounded, 1,312 missing or captured; Confederate casualties: 387 killed, 1,582 wounded, 13 missing.
This writer saw the Gettysburg battlefield in June. The scale of killing in that mass shooting, brother against brother in some cases, would have been beyond imagination.
And to think that some of us believe the "Un-Civil War" was fought over, and defeated, slavery, when it ushered in the age of the bankers and a universal debt-money slavery that guarantees more wars and bondage beyond anything from the good-ol' days of the 1860s.
AND ANOTHER THING
Later, on December 29, 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre took place. At least 150 Lakota Indians were killed in “the battle,” which actually was a crapshoot against the tribe by far-superior Army forces.
If private citizens, or former soldiers like the case of Sutherland Springs, open fire, they can at least be arrested and charged with something if they don’t conveniently kill themselves first.
Yet, if state guns are brought to bear, whole nations and peoples can disappear. But remember not to call such a thing a mass shooting.
That would be in poor taste.