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Going Postal, Pre-Pistol How did mass murderers operate before the advent of modern weapons?
slate.com ^ | 26 July, 2012 | Brian Palmer

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 ...


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: banglist; co; massmurder; weapon
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To: SampleMan
Sense 1951 when records were kept

Their has been no mass murders have never happen at a place where guns were allowed. ( Movie Theaters, Schools)

21 posted on 07/28/2012 3:32:19 PM PDT by scooby321 (h tones)
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To: SampleMan
What it isn’t full of are example of weaker individuals successfully defending themselves before firearms.

Exactly. In a world without firearms, the strong rule and the weak are victims.

22 posted on 07/28/2012 3:33:46 PM PDT by marron
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To: marktwain

Mass murders are more common due to increasing, popular immorality. It’s yet another symptom of the bipartisan anti-family, anti-American, debt/robber regime.


23 posted on 07/28/2012 3:33:54 PM PDT by familyop ("Wanna cigarette? You're never too young to start." --Deacon, "Waterworld")
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To: marktwain

For the Romans, the Gladius Hispaniensis. For the Mongols, the recurve bow.


24 posted on 07/28/2012 3:35:36 PM PDT by PzLdr ("The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am" - Darth Vader)
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To: Iron Munro

I was trying to remember the name of it,
TNT set off in the basement I believe.


25 posted on 07/28/2012 3:37:53 PM PDT by tet68 ( " We would not die in that man's company, that fears his fellowship to die with us...." Henry V.)
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To: marktwain

When does murder become mass murder? More than one, five, ten?


26 posted on 07/28/2012 3:40:05 PM PDT by Misterioso (They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it. - Monk)
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To: SampleMan
What it isn’t full of are example of weaker individuals successfully defending themselves before firearms.

See entry at King Alfred I.

27 posted on 07/28/2012 3:41:50 PM PDT by Melas (u)
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To: marktwain

Tripped and fell on the first sentence. The killer in the theater did not have auto weapons.


28 posted on 07/28/2012 3:46:00 PM PDT by lurk
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To: marktwain

They can define mass murder as “Chicago”......but that may be the plan. Somehow, I believe they are using blacks in Chicago to turn people against guns. JMO


29 posted on 07/28/2012 3:49:54 PM PDT by RC2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDMeDmV0ufU)
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To: marron

Must have been an ax free zone.


30 posted on 07/28/2012 3:52:58 PM PDT by metalurgist ( Want your country back? It'll take guns and rope. Marxists won't give up peaceably.)
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To: marktwain
Not pre-modern, but there's always Kool-Aid:


31 posted on 07/28/2012 3:56:57 PM PDT by Hunton Peck (This too, shall pass, unless we're in Harry Reid's Senate and "this" is a budget.)
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To: marktwain

While it was far from murder, I do remember reading somewhere about some guy killing 1,000 men just using the jaw bone of an ass.

Some other asses in Congress have reputedly used their jaw bones to talk to death a fair number of victims, too.


32 posted on 07/28/2012 4:04:19 PM PDT by ApplegateRanch (Love me, love my guns!©)
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To: Misterioso

The normal usage refers to three or more in a single event.

Serial killings are usually, though not always, repeated incidents of killing of a single person.


33 posted on 07/28/2012 4:04:44 PM PDT by Sherman Logan
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To: marktwain

Caligula..now there was one who was really good at it.

Of course the Romans were all good at it. Later, it was the church who became good at it.

Bloody Mary killed some 300 for simply having bibles in English on them-two who were my ancestors. There are first hand accounts of the burnings.


34 posted on 07/28/2012 4:12:28 PM PDT by crz
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To: marktwain

For another..Glen Coe was an event all its own.

Of course the aftermath of Culloden was one huge mass murder, or, for that matter, the Great Highland Clearances.

So many, and these all the result of a monarchy


35 posted on 07/28/2012 4:17:05 PM PDT by crz
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To: Hunton Peck
Not pre-modern, but there's always Kool-Aid:

And now look at all the Ignorant Masses that BO has drinking his Kool Aid

36 posted on 07/28/2012 4:38:18 PM PDT by Nevermore (...just a typical cracker, clinging to my Constitutional rights...)
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To: marktwain
A man wielding "a two-foot ornamental blade" on the Staten Island Ferry hacked 2 persons to death, and wounded 9, back in 1986.

Here is the NYT's story. It must have killed them to have to report that a retired policeman --who happened to be on board and was carrying a gun-- stopped the murderer from killing many more...

MAN WITH SWORD KILLS 2 AND WOUNDS 9 ON S.I. FERRY
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN Published: July 8, 1986

A homeless Cuban refugee, chanting and apparently deranged, went on a rampage with a sword aboard a Staten Island ferryboat yesterday and killed two people and wounded nine others before being subdued by a retired police officer at gunpoint.

Wielding a two-foot ornamental blade apparently purchased in Times Square, the assailant pursued, hacked and stabbed victims on two decks of the rumbling, 310-foot ferry, the Samuel I. Newhouse, at about 8:45 A.M. as the boat passed the Statue of Liberty, bound from Manhattan to Staten Island.

As passengers shrieked and fled in pandemonium that went on for nearly five minutes, the assailant was stabbing another victim on the top deck when the 55-year-old retired officer, Edward del Pino, who lives on Staten Island and carries a gun for a part-time job as a security guard in Manhattan, abruptly confronted him.

''Drop it!'' Mr. del Pino shouted, and fired a warning shot. He then ordered the disarmed man to lie on a bench, pointed his chrome-plated .38-caliber revolver directly at the assailant's face and warned: ''You move and you're dead!''

The suspect - who was seized by the police as the boat drew into St. George Terminal and ambulances rushed victims to two Staten Island hospitals -was identified as Juan J. Gonzalez, 43 years old, a homeless man who came to the United States in the 1977 boatlift of refugees from Mariel*, Cuba, and has sometimes stayed at shelters in New York City... [*emphasis and asterisk mine - the "Mariel boatlift" refers to Jimmah Carter's "humanitarian" acceptance of a boatload of criminal immigrants into the USA - shhrub]

- rest of the article here

37 posted on 07/28/2012 4:41:08 PM PDT by shhrubbery! (NIH!)
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To: marktwain

In late 2005 the city of San Francisco enacted a total ban on the manufacture, sale, transfer or distribution of firearms or ammunition in San Francisco, as well as a ban on the possession of handguns within the city by San Francisco residents. The law was later struck down in court. Can any Freeper guess the name of the law? (Remember: this is San Francisco, LOL!)


38 posted on 07/28/2012 4:45:23 PM PDT by Jeff Chandler (You didn't build that. We built that ... city on rock and roll.)
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To: marron

“The Shootout at the OK Corral” was pretty violent.


39 posted on 07/28/2012 4:50:10 PM PDT by Twinkie (Obama; fundamentally turning America into Sodom & Gomorrah one EO at a time.)
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To: SampleMan

Annie Oakley thought every woman should have a gun beside her bed and one to carry in her parasol.


40 posted on 07/28/2012 4:53:25 PM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism)
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