海角大神

When the death toll in the massacre at Orlando鈥檚 Pulse nightclub became known, media organizations were swift to paint the dimensions of its brutality as unprecedented. 聽With 50 people dead and 53 others wounded, it was consistently characterized as the 鈥渨orst mass shooting in US history鈥�.聽

But some observers聽balked at the description, insisting that a longer view of gun violence would turn up bloodier episodes 鈥� and in doing so, trace a national problem back to the nation鈥檚 colonial roots.聽

One persistent point of reference has been the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, when members of a US Army cavalry unit opened fire on an encampment of Lakota Sioux.聽 An estimated 150 people were killed (although some estimates are as high as 300), and some 51 wounded. Twenty-five US soldiers were among the fatalities.聽

In the 1921 Tulsa, Okla., race riots, a mob was incited by rumors that a black man had assaulted a white woman. The crowd attacked black Tulsans and destroyed their businesses.聽 Nearly 80 years later, an Oklahoma truth commission concluded that 鈥渋t would not be unreasonable to estimate 150 to 300 deaths鈥� resulted from the riot.聽

In one list of the deadliest mass shootings across the globe, The New York Times addressed the question obliquely.聽 In an editor鈥檚 note clarifying their use of the term, it wrote, 鈥淭he list of deadliest mass shootings worldwide includes attacks by public mass shooters, not organizational acts of terrorism or genocide.鈥澛�

But criticism prompted review from some corners of the press, including The Los Angeles Times, The Independent in Britain, and Big Think.聽

No consensus exists on what kind of violence is encompassed by the term 鈥渕ass shooting.鈥� 聽Most official definitions have focused on what constitutes a 鈥渕ass murder,鈥� which refers to the number of dead without specifying the way they were killed.聽 The FBI, for instance, used to define that term as 鈥渁 number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders鈥� and usually in the same location.

Starting in 2013,聽federal statutes聽defined "mass killing" as聽three聽or more people killed, regardless of weapons.聽

Either definition would seem to included incidents such as the Tulsa riots or the massacre at Wounded Knee. But in the case of the Tulsa riots, especially, it鈥檚 unclear how all the people were killed.

In an NPR article considering the network鈥檚 own use of the term to describe the events in Orlando, a historian on mass murder and director of research for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, Grant Duwe, drew a distinction between mass murders before and after the 20^th century.聽 Before 1900, he told the network, mass murders tended to be committed by the 鈥渉aves鈥� against the 鈥渉ave nots鈥�, whereas post-1900, the trend was turned on its head. The term 鈥渕ass shooting,鈥� Mr. Duwe added, tends not to include those involving what NPR called 鈥渕ilitary or quasi-military actors鈥�.聽

But in an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal a few days later, USC law professor Ariela Gross argued that it was a mistake to disassociate gun violence from state violence against minority groups.聽

鈥淚t鈥檚 important to put the Pulse shooting in historical context not to minimize the terror wreaked by a disturbed and bigoted individual鈥檚 easy access to military-grade weapons,鈥� Prof. Gross wrote, 鈥渂ut to recognize that gun culture in the U.S. has gone hand in hand with violent hatred for a long time.鈥�