A little history for David Hogg and the Democrats on Wounded Knee

I saw Miguel’s post about David Hogg claiming that mass shootings today are somehow related to Wounded Knee and some Harvard level deep thinking like that.

David Hogg is part of the chorus of voices calling for civilian disarmament, which has metastasized thought the Democrats and is now part of every Presidential primary candidate’s platform.

From History.com:

On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under Big Foot, a Lakota Sioux chief, near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

From the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

While these discussions proceeded in the Lakota camp, a number of Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs, with some rising to throw handfuls of dirt in the air. The troops who surrounded them perceived the singing and dirt throwing as signals to attack, and at this tense moment the fuse was lit. A man named Black Coyote (sometimes called Black Fox) refused to surrender his rifle to a soldier. The two began wrestling over the gun, and in the struggle it discharged. Immediately the nervous troops began firing, while the Miniconjous retrieved their weapons and returned fire.

The military’s rifle fire was complemented with cannon rounds from Hotchkiss guns, whose accuracy and exploding shells were formidable. The outnumbered and outgunned Lakotas fled, and for several hours intermittent gunfire continued, with the military in pursuit. Bodies were found as far away as three miles from the camp. Firing ceased, and by midafternoon the troops had gathered up their dead and wounded, as well as Lakota wounded, and returned to Pine Ridge Agency. The fear of a reprisal attack kept troops and civilians entrenched at the agency until January 3, 1891, when a military-escorted civilian burial party proceeded to the site of the massacre. There they buried 146 Lakotas in a single mass grave. Other dead were accounted for later, bringing the total to more than 250 Lakotas; the Seventh Cavalry lost twenty-five men.

So the Wounded Knee Massacre was the result of the US Government engaging in civilian disarmament.

This horrible massacre, which is a stain on the history of the United States, was the 1890’s equivalent of what David Hogg has been demanding for over a year and the Democrats are campaigning on.

By Hogg’s current standard, the 7th Calvary are the heroes, taking the rapid-fire, high capacity magazine rifles away from civilians.

This just goes to prove that any disarmament program will be a blood bath, as all it takes for the shooting to start is for one man to refuse to give up his rifle and get into a tussle over it. The idea that several million Americans could be disarmed peacefully is ludicrous if the US Calvary couldn’t peacefully disarm a few hundred Indians.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t go Harvard like David Hogg, but I just can’t follow the logic here.

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