VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Quick takes
Union Paciic is equal to government
owned. Nothing will happen to them except
a token ine and blaming the oil industry.
— Kevin Watt
And that same train goes right next to my
home. Very sad.
— Thomas Jameson
Finicum memorial removed
There are roadside memorials like this
all over our highways commemorating
lives lost. The state just doesn’t want this
one commemorated publicly to remind
everyone that they were the ones respon-
sible for the death.
— Kevin Sheneield
I actually believe Lavoy was the only
honorable man of that group. Unfortunately
I think he was being played as a pawn.
— Skip Cripe
Millions spent on Eighth
Street Bridge project
They will probably put a statue on top
and a speed bump in the middle.
— David Tricker
They are taking people’s front yards and
paying for it out of money for the streets.
Would they stake their job on the promise?
— Troy Thomas
Mickey Mouse write-in votes
Mickey all the way!
— Teresa Thorpe Long
I told you I voted for Mickey Mouse!
— Cynthia Lynn Rickett
Ross Perot might of won this year.
— Jovanna Centre
One of the great lessons of the Twitter age is
that much can be summed up in just a few words.
Here are some of this week’s takes. Tweet yours
@Tim_Trainor or email editor@eastoregonian.
com, and keep them to 140 characters.
n the wake of the tragedy in Orlando, the
topic of massacres is having (another)
15 minutes of fame. When news outlets
billed the shooting as the worst massacre
in U.S. history, Facebook users went forth
to correct the overstatement, reminding us
of Wounded Knee, where the U.S. army
butchered some 250 Sioux Indians in 1890.
But Wounded Knee, horrendous as
it was, was not the worst massacre in
American history, either. It wasn’t even the
worst massacre of Native Americans.
Media outlets began to add qualiiers
to coverage of Orlando: The murder of 49
unarmed people at a gay nightclub is the
worst mass shooting in modern American
history by a single shooter. Accurate
perhaps, but hardly reassuring.
People might be forgiven for wanting to
change subject: Our blood-bathed history
is hard to look at. But can we really process
Orlando without thinking about the past?
Orlando was horrifying, but even more so if
we allow historical amnesia to take hold.
Here in the Northwest, we have attached
the name of massacre to a number of past
events related to labor unrest (the Everett
Massacre, the Centralia Massacre) and
frontier attacks (the Whitman Massacre),
and savage crimes (Seattle’s Wah Mee
Club Massacre). But the majority of
mass slaughters have been against Native
Americans, including attacks that haven’t
made it into school history texts, but were as
bad as, or worse than, Wounded Knee and
Sand Creek.
In his new history, “An American
Genocide: The United States and the
California Indian Catastrophe,” historian
Benjamin Madley, an assistant professor of
history of UCLA, documents the systematic
extermination of California Indian tribes
between 1846 and 1873, including lists of
every documented fatal encounter. The book
rips the veil off the notion that the killing of
Native Americans does not meet the legal
and scholarly deinitions of genocide.
One massacre detailed in this doomsday
book: Bloody Island, where Northern
California dragoons attacked a Pomo
Indian village on Clear Lake in 1850.
I
They butchered men, women and children.
Many others drowned trying to escape. The
oficial death toll was 60, but two months
after the massacre, a U.S.
Army major visited the
scene and concluded
that the actual count was
around 800.
Closer to home,
in 1856, some 500
Washington Territorial
Volunteers under the
command of Benjamin F.
Shaw went to ind Indians
to kill in Yakama country.
The U.S. Army, already
there, didn’t require their
help, so under order of
Gov. Isaac Stevens, Shaw
was instructed to “bring
to submission the Cayuse
and Palouse” Indians
and told that troublemakers should be
“summarily dealt with.”
Shaw’s orders from Gov. Isaac Stevens
In July of that year — 160 years ago
this summer — Shaw and a detachment of
Washingtonians turned south over the Blue
Mountains and rode into the Grand Ronde
River Valley where he located a peaceful
village of Cayuse at a site near present day
Elgin. Shaw’s men killed at least 60 people,
mostly women and children, captured 300
ponies, and sacked and burned the camp.
In 1863, in what was then Washington
Territory (near Preston, Idaho), the
U.S. Army attacked a winter village of
Northwestern Shoshone at Bear River. The
soldiers, many of them drunk Californian
volunteers, destroyed the winter camp.
Panicked Shoshone women and children
ran into a ravine where soldiers shot at
them from above from both sides, an event
described as a “buffalo hunt.” At least
250-500 people were killed, including least
90 women and children. Archaeologists
have just recently located the actual
massacre site.
Historical accounts of the Bear River
Massacre, as it is called, it a pattern: Such
encounters are often described as “battles,”
the stories sanitized of rape, torture,
mutilation. Body counts are downplayed
— the killers often didn’t stay around long
Go ahead, control my guns
By AMY FRYKMAN
Writers on the Range
ecently, I completed an
all-day ield course for
archery hunting, a necessary
prerequisite to purchasing a
license to hunt elk, deer and other
big game with a bow during the
season in Montana.
To earn the right to acquire a
license to hunt with a bow, I had to
demonstrate suficient knowledge
of the history of archery, safe
bow-handling techniques and
principles of shot selection, all
this to show that I would be able
to avoid hurting myself or my
hunting partners and that I was
capable of a quick, humane kill
of the hunted animal. The ield
course was preceded by an online
course and mandatory exam.
When all was said and done, I
easily spent 18 or so hours getting
certiied, and I was happy to do
so because a bow and arrow is a
deadly weapon, and hunting is a
privilege.
Then came the news of the
mass murder in Orlando, Florida,
and I was left contemplating a
bitter irony. While it took me days
to prove I was capable of hunting
wild animals in Montana, I could
— without a minute of training or
background check — enter any
number of stores across America
and walk out minutes later with
a fully loaded, high-capacity,
semi-automatic rile that could
mow down humans.
This experience has put
the question of rights and
responsibilities at the forefront
of my mind. When people talk
about gun control, they talk a lot
about gun rights. But if owning
guns is a right, it also comes
with responsibilities. It boggles
my mind that this is a contested
principle.
R
Page 5A
Shootings part of a dark American tradition
BY KNUTE BERGER
Crosscut
Union Paciic at fault
for oil train crash
East Oregonian
The premise of the archery
course that I took is that there’s a
broad public interest in ensuring
safe, ethical bow hunting. No one
wants people wounding wildlife
or slicing open their ingers on
sharp, broad-head arrows. So we
make hunters take a course to
get certiied, demonstrating that
they’ve learned how to stay safe in
the wild.
The same principle is involved
in driving a car. There’s a broad
societal interest in ensuring safety
on the road, and so we all have to
take a written test plus a driving
test to get a license to drive.
Why is it so hard to accept
the idea that society has the right
to erect parameters around gun
ownership, especially in light
of the broad public interest in
preventing the death and injury
of innocent people? Gun violence
last year killed over 12,000 people
in the United States. That number
is breathtaking. Compared to any
other developed country in the
world, U.S. gun-related murder
rates are orders of magnitude
higher.
I don’t for a second think
that gun laws alone will prevent
malicious or mentally unstable
people from doing horrible
things. But suggesting that the
easy availability of irearms in
the United States — including
semi-automatic weapons designed
to kill anything moving — is not a
factor, is delusional.
The game warden who taught
my course explained that the
certiication requirements and laws
designed to keep bow hunting
ethical in Montana came from
the bow-hunting community
itself. The bow hunters wanted to
protect their experience, and so
they worked with Montana Fish,
Wildlife and Parks to come up
with intelligent regulations.
Compare that to the
controversy over any proposed
gun control laws, and the way
that gun manufacturers and
the National Rile Association
instantly act to obstruct any and
all reasonable requirements for
gun ownership. It’s long past time
for the gun community to devise
solutions to help keep dangerous
weapons out of the hands of
criminals, terrorists and anyone
else intent on committing violence.
Until they step up, I ind the
NRA’s stance unconscionable and
the whole debate about gun rights
ridiculous. If you really believe
that the government is out to
take away all guns from average
Americans, or that freedom means
that individuals have the right to
stockpile military-grade weapons
for Armageddon, then I say you’ve
been hoodwinked. You’ve been
fooled by an industry that, much
like the tobacco industry, has
everything to gain by selling more
and more of its lethal products.
If tougher gun control laws
require people to jump through
more hoops to get a gun, is
this really a problem? The
inconvenience that legitimate
gun owners might face when
they want to buy weapons pales
in comparison to the hardships
endured by families that suffer the
horror of losing someone to an
armed attacker.
The Second Amendment talks
about a “well-regulated” militia
alongside the “right to bear arms.”
We have erred on the “right to
bear arms” side of the equation
for decades. It’s high time we paid
attention to the well-regulated part.
■
Amy Frykman is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, an
opinion service of High Country
News. She is a clean-energy
consultant in Bozeman, Montana.
enough to count let alone bury the dead.
Native American versions of events have
been routinely minimized or dismissed.
In some respects,
these old massacres
are scarier than today’s
shootings. What’s worse,
a crazy lone gunman or
what the Indians faced,
legally sanctioned well-
armed death squads?
But these historical
massacres have some
things in common with
Orlando: they take
place against vulnerable
populations —
marginalized or targeted
by age, race or social
conditions. Also, like
recent mass shootings,
we tend to be horriied
briely, then move on. The sheer number
of Bear Rivers or Wounded Knees helps
us gloss over them. There are too many to
count, too many to reconcile.
In America, moving on is a virtue,
remembering mere baggage.
It is notable, too, that modern mass-
killings tend to be executed by well-armed
white men. Perhaps it should come as no
surprise that the people most determined to
hang onto their assault weapons are not the
descendants of the victims of these cruelties,
but the descendants of the perpetrators.
A big difference today is that modern
weaponry allows a single person to have the
irepower of a company of cavalry.
Many want to believe that modern
massacres are singular events carried
out by deranged individuals. But beyond
present-day pathologies and ideologies,
these incidents are connected to an
American shadow — the dark place
we’d like so much to suppress, that keeps
bubbling up in a hail of bullets.
That shadow can only be reckoned with
if we acknowledge it.
■
Knute Burger is Crosscut’s chief
Northwest native. He also writes the
monthly Grey Matters column for Seattle
magazine and is a weekly Friday guest on
Weekday on KUOW-FM (94.9).
In July 1856,
the U.S. Army
killed at least
60 American
Indians —
mostly women
and children —
near present-day
Elgin.
We can be armed,
polite and still do this
Corpus Christi (Tex.) Caller-Times
un restriction isn’t a popular
topic in South Texas.
Only a year ago the state’s
Legislature approved open carry of
irearms. The people of this region
of the state cherish their guns and
their rights, and we respect those
rights. What we are about to say
doesn’t contradict our respect for
those rights.
Further sale of military-style
high-capacity irearms to civilians
should cease as soon as possible,
by congressional action. Congress,
further, should limit the number of
bullets that can be loaded into those
guns by the civilians who already
possess them. And gun purchasers
should undergo a federally
mandated background check to
make sure they’re not fugitives
or otherwise prohibited from gun
ownership.
If the background check
complicates person-to-person sales
or sales at gun shows, so be it. A
background check wouldn’t be
any more an invasion of privacy
than the requirement to show
identiication to purchase liquor or
verify oneself as the holder of the
credit card being used in a purchase.
These all are reasonable
restrictions whose time came
long before Sandy Hook. They
also are constitutional. Last week,
the Supreme Court declined to
hear challenges of capacity limits
and bans on the sale of military-
style riles in New York and
Connecticut The Supreme Court
has acknowledged governmental
authority to place reasonable
restrictions without violating the
Second Amendment.
These recommendations
wouldn’t prevent gun users
from hunting, sport-shooting or
G
protecting themselves and their
homes from attack by anything
short of a military force.
Proponents of military-style
riles such as the ones used in
seven of the eight most recent mass
killings argue that there is little
difference between them and semi-
automatic hunting riles. That would
be true if the magazine capacities of
the military-style riles were limited
to the four- or ive-round capacities
of the hunting riles. Do that, and
put a scope on the military-style
rile, and, voilà, the owner has a
hunting or long-range target rile
that only looks sinister.
In each issue of the National
Rile Association’s magazine is
a section reporting incidents of
successful self-defense against
criminal attackers — always with a
irearm, usually a shotgun or small-
caliber handgun. These are stories
even a paciist would love. They
also afirm the NRA’s philosophy
of having the right to use a gun to
defend oneself.
But they also show that it doesn’t
take a military-style semi-automatic
rile capable of iring 30 rounds in a
matter of seconds to defend oneself
and one’s home.
If anything, iring that kind of
gun inside one’s home or from one’s
doorstep endangers the lives of
those in neighboring homes. It’s a
real possibility with a high-powered
rile ired multiple times, but highly
unlikely to happen with a handgun
or shotgun because of their limited
ranges.
We recognize that with so many
of this type of weapon already in
mass civilian circulation, years
would pass before they became
scarce if their distribution were
restricted to the military and law
enforcement. The longer we wait,
the bigger that problem becomes.