Before 9/11, before Columbine, America had mass murderers

[EDITOR’S NOTE: We have just learned of another horrible school shooting, this time at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. As always, politicians will try to take political advantage. That’s the point I was making in this classic column at a time when President Obama was making untrue statements. Here is the truth: In a perfect world, we could stop mass murderers. In the real world, we can’t.]

This column was written on December 6, 2015.

Sometimes President Obama is just full of it.

Screen shot, Uvalde shooting 5/24/22 (Photo by Lynn Woolley for WBDaily)

Every time there is a mass shooting in the United States, he tells us that only in America do we have these kinds of events, and he insists on “common-sense gun control measures” as if mass murder is something new and we could stop it — if we just take away people’s Second Amendment rights.

He’s wrong on all counts.

Obama was just in Paris where 130 people were shot in a mass murder spree. In his beloved Islamic countries, there are daily reports of honor killings, stoning, bombings, suicide vest murders and that old favorite – beheadings.

In this country, we’ve had a steady stream of mass murders dating back to the 1800’s. Surely the President knows this.   But the only real truth to him is that that which helps push his agenda forward. So that’s what he does.

There are three main types of mass murderers in the United States

Of course, you can break it down into hundreds of categories, but consider these three:

• The mentally ill. The recent shooting at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs by Robert L. Dear is likely an example of this. Our guess is that Dear is what we used to call “crazy,” although that word is out of vogue.
• Political extremists. People who bomb abortion clinics in an attempt to save unborn children, and people who blow things up to save the environment are good examples.
• Jihadists. These are people who murder because they believe they are defending the Prophet and serving Allah. President Obama pretty much denies that these types of murderers exist.

Today’s liberals often place the blame on guns. Politicians like Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton espouse an undefined policy of “common-sense gun regulations” that they tell us will solve all these problems. They seem to think that mass murder is a new phenomenon brought about by the proliferation of guns and right-to-carry laws. They are ignorant of history.

Here’s a look back at mass murder in America before 9/11 and before Columbine. 

Here is a sample – by no means exhaustive – of mass murder in our country. All the following occurred prior to 9/11 and. Most of them, in a time when politicians did not politicize such events as they do today.

• H. H. Holmes. Real name: Herman Webster Mudgett.  Holmes was perhaps the country’s first major serial killer, operating in Chicago, at the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Holmes opened a hotel as a front for trapping people and killing them. How many is unknown.

• Andrew Kehoe.   This nutcase pulled off what remains the deadliest mass murder in a school in U.S. history.  Known as the Bath School disaster, it was a series of violent attacks that took place on May 18, 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan. First, he killed his wife. Then he firebombed his own farm. Then, he set off an explosion at the school that killed 38 elementary schoolchildren and six adults and inured about 58 other people.   Then, he committed suicide by detonating an explosion in his truck.

• Paul Harold Orgeron.   This ex-convict brought a suitcase bomb to the Poe Elementary School in Houston on September 15, 1959 shortly after the school had denied his request to enroll his son, 7-year-old Dusty Paul. He asked the children to gather around him on the playground, and after a teacher sent for help, he set off the suitcase thought to have contained 6 sticks of dynamite.   The death toll reached 6, including Orgeron and Dusty Paul, a custodian, and a teacher. 18 others were injured and two 7-year-old children each lost a leg.

• The Boston Strangler. Albert DeSalvo was a criminal in Boston who confessed to being the Strangler. His confession is disputed to this day and no one knows if he actually was the murderer of thirteen women in the Boston area from 1962 to 1964. DeSalvo did go to prison, but on a conviction of a series of rapes.

• Richard Speck. An alcohol-abuser who systematically tortured, raped, and murdered eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital on July 14, 1966.

• Charles Whitman. Suffering from a brain tumor, this student at the University of Texas and former U.S. Marine killed 16 people in the “UT Tower Massacre.” On August 1, 1966, Whitman murdered his wife and mother in their homes and then brought rifles, a shotgun, and handguns, to the campus of the University of Texas at Austin where he shot another 14 people and wounded 32 others from the 28th-floor observation deck of the Tower.

• The Zodiac. This serial killer was never identified. He operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Zodiac murdered four men and three women, ages 16 to 29, in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. The killer sent taunting letters to local media and named himself “The Zodiac.”

• Bill Ayers. This despicable human being, now a respected “educator,” and a close friend to President Obama, was a leader in the counterculture movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group with wife Bernadine Dohrn that conducted a campaign of bombing police stations, the U.S. Capitol Building, and the Pentagon. The body count is low, however, there was an explosion in 1970, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers’ friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers’ girlfriend, Diana Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb being assembled in the house blew up.

• Juan Corona. This Mexican serial killer was convicted of the murders of 25 migrant farm workers found buried in shallow graves in fruit orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County, California, in 1971. Among the evidence: two bloodstained knives, a machete, and a pistol.

• Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., Dean Corll and David Brooks. “The Houston Mass Murders” of 1970-1973 were centered about the procurement of young boys for Henley by Corll, and sometimes by Brooks. At least 28 teenage boys were abducted, tortured, raped and murdered by Corll, who was shot dead by Henley, then 17 years old on August 8, 1973. Henley is now serving six life sentences.

• John Wayne Gacy, Jr. This homosexual lunatic was known as the “Killer Clown,” and went after teenaged boys, raping them and then killing them. He murdered at least 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago. He would lure them to his house, assault them sexually, and then kill them by stabbing, asphyxiation or strangulation with a tourniquet.

• Son of Sam. David Richard Berkowitz was also known as the “.44 Caliber Killer.”   He was convicted of a series of shooting attacks that began in New York City in the summer of 1976, using a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver. He killed six victims and wounded seven others by July 1977. Like other “nicknamed” killers, he enjoyed leaving letters that taunted the police. A true nutcase, he claimed to have been obeying the orders of a demon, manifested in the form of a dog named “Harvey” who belonged to his neighbor — Sam.

• The Unabomber. Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski was the “Unabomber” — an American anarchist who despised technology. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign, targeting people involved with modern technology. He planted or mailed homemade bombs, killing a total of three people and injuring 23 others. His writings have been compared to those of former Vice President Al Gore.

• Jim Jones. The Jonestown murders and suicides did not happen on American soil, but Jones is included here because he was an American cult leader and the victims were Americans. Jones was the founder of the “Peoples Temple,” in Jonestown, Guyana on which he is known to have engaged in sexual relations with both women and men. During an investigation, U. S. Rep. Leo Ryan and NBC newsman Don Harris were murdered. In November, 1978, around three hundred children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning, leading to the term “drink the Kool-Aid.” Jones died from a gunshot wound to the head, apparently self-inflicted.

• Henry Lee Lucas. Who knows how many he killed? He falsely confessed to as many as 3,000 killings and was eventually convicted of 11. He was sentenced to death for the murder of an unidentified woman dubbed “Orange Socks” on Halloween, 1979. Lucas made law enforcement officials look foolish by confessing to so many murders. He died in prison of heart failure at the age of 64.

• Jeffrey Dahmer. The “Milwaukee Cannibal” was a homosexual sex offender, who committed the rape, murder, and dismemberment of seventeen men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He engaged in necrophilia, preserved some of his victims’’ body parts, and ate parts of some of his victims. He was found to be sane at his trial.

• Kenneth Allen McDuff. Known as the “Broomstick Killer,” McDuff was convicted of murdering pretty sixteen-year-old Edna Sullivan, her boyfriend, and his cousin. They were all strangers whom McDuff abducted after noticing Sullivan. He repeatedly raped her before having her neck broken with a broomstick. McDuff was given three death sentences but was granted a parole and was freed in 1989. He was given a new death sentence and was executed for a murder committed after his release. He is suspected to have been responsible for as many as 14 murders – possibly more.

• George Hennard.   On October 16, 1991, at a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas, Hennard, crashed his pickup truck through the front of the cafeteria, and shot and killed 23 people, and wounded 27 others before killing himself. His motive is thought to be a profound hatred of women.

• Janet Reno. Newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno approved recommendations by the FBI to mount an assault on a compound at Waco belonging to a religious group called the Branch Davidians by federal and state law enforcement and US military between February 28 and April 19, 1993. Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians were killed in initial raid, followed by a 51-day standoff. In the final assault, 76 people were killed including women and children and cult leader David Koresh.

• Timothy McVeigh. Even though some say there was a Middle East connection, most people believe it was McVeigh that detonated a truck bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. 168 people died including children in a daycare.   More than 600 were injured.

There have been other shootings and mass murders in addition to what you see here – but the list is a stark reminder that mass murder has been with us for generations.

Note that most of the people on the list were mental cases of some sort – category 1 from our “3 categories.” Several were homosexuals who lured and murdered boys, and at least one was a female hater. Some of them, like the Unabomber, Bill Ayers, and Timothy McVeigh, were domestic political terrorists – our Category 2. Up until 9/11, there wasn’t much reporting – if anything at all – regarding Jihad in America.

Jihad is here now, even if the political left doesn’t want to admit it. And mass murder has been here for much longer, even if the political left doesn’t admit that either. The left tells us that America is the only place in world that experiences this type of violence – and that’s not true.   They want us to believe that it’s a new, modern-day phenomenon that is occurring because more people have guns – and that’s not true!

They refuse to admit that the one type of mass violence that we could control is Category 3 – jihad against America. Take a look at they list one more time; see if you can spot any instances that might have been prevented by “common-sense gun control measures.” The people we listed are monsters. No matter what the law, they would have killed.

Lynn Woolley is a Texas-based author, broadcaster, and songwriter. Follow his podcast at https://www.PlanetLogic.us. Check out his author’s page at https://www.Amazon.com/author/lynnwoolley. Order books direct from Lynn at https://PlanetLogicPress.Square.Site. Email Lynn at lwoolley9189@gmail.com.