Posted on 07/28/2012 2:49:36 PM PDT by marktwain
The shooting spree that killed 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater on Friday has sparked a public debate about the availability of automatic weapons. Gun control advocates argue that mass murder is exceedingly difficult without them. One source told the Washington Post, “It’s kind of hard to be a pseudo-commando with a musket in the 18th century.” How did people commit mass murder before the advent of automatic weapons?
Often with fire. Revolutionary War veteran Barnett Davenport is widely considered the first mass murderer in U.S. history. On the evening of Feb. 3, 1780, Davenport burst into the bedroom of his employer, Caleb Mallory, and began to bludgeon Mallory and his wife with a club. When the club broke in two, Davenport beat the couple to death with Mallory’s gun. If Davenport had stopped there, he would be remembered as just an ordinary killer; most criminologists define mass murder as the killing of at least three people in a single incident. After beating the Mallorys to death, however, Davenport burned the house down, killing their three grandchildren.
Hundreds of other mass murderers have perpetrated their crimes without automatic firearms. Frenchman Pierre Riviere killed his mother, sister, and brother with a bill hook in 1835. In 1932, Julian Marcelino, a Filipino immigrant of relatively small stature, managed to kill six and wound 15 on a Seattle street using only a pair of blades. In 1915, Monroe Phillips shot seven dead and wounded 32 with a shotgun in Georgia.
Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
From Wikipedia - “The Poe Elementary School bombing was a school bombing that occurred in Houston, Texas, United States on September 15, 1959. Six people, including the perpetrator, were killed.”
This was my elementary school.
You can’t fix crazy. Stuff like this has always happened....always will. Taking away guns isn’t the answer.
Jack Gilbert Graham blew up a passenger train in 1955 so he could collect the life insurance on his mother. He caused the death of 45 people. He used 25 sticks of dynamite, that was wrapped up in a gift package that he had put in his mothers luggage. When asked didn’t it bother him that he killed all those people, he said, no when it’s your time to go, it’s time. He was executed in 1957.
Plane not train.
ping
ping
Just a couple of years ago someone in Europe attacked school children with a knife and stabbed more than a dozen.
This was on Slate?
There must be something in my water.
Wasn’t there a killer in the 20’s or 30’s who killed, like, 50 with dynamite? Seems to me he attacked a school or something similar.
Let us not forget that in the end of Homer’s epic poem
when Odysseus finally returns home after ten years, he
finds his house filled with suitors for his wife’s hand
who have been eating and drinking the fruits of his
estate, he proceeds to draw and string his bow,
shoot through many axeheads then to slaughter them
all with the help of his son.
Poetic definitely.
Jetliners work even better.
and you don’t even need one... you can just borrow ours.
I don’t think Ivan the terrible or Vlad the Impaler had any trouble.
It was forty whacks from Crazy Lizzie, not fifty. I remember jumping rope to that old rhyme. Besides the lines flow better with the words Borden and forty. Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks.
I have that book, it is a heck of a read.
Yes, I couldn't put that book down. Another good book about the Holmes crimes is The Devil in the White City. It goes back and forth between the murders and the city of Chicago's preparation for the 1893 World's Fair.
I’m pretty sure women of that era carried their gun in a hidden internal skirt pocket or handbag, not their parasol.
Anyone seeing our posts should know that this is a fascinating story, not a simple serial killer story but history of the second half of the 1800s, he was a doctor, a complicated man, became wealthy and built his own special killing hotel close to the World’s Fair which helped him supply his building of horrors with tourist women and helped cover his tracks.
My copy is laying around somewhere so I am going off memory, if you want to correct me or add something, please do.
I looked it up on wiki. “”In Chicago at the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind, and which was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which four were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 200.[3] He took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which was less than two miles away, in his “World’s Fair” hotel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes
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