Source: Time Magazine, January 14, 2013
Date	Location	Name	Body count
July 18,1984	San Ysidro, California	James Huberty	21
August 9, 1987	Hungerford, England	Michael Ryan	16
December 6, 1989	Montreal, Canada	Marc Lepine	9
October 16, 1991	Killeen, Texas	George Hennard	23
March 13, 1996	Dunblane, Scotland	Thomas Hamilton	17
April 28, 1996	Port Arthur, Australia	Martin Bryant	35
April 20, 1999	Littleton, Colorado	Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold	13
April 26, 2002	Erfut, Germany	Robert Steinhauser	13
April 16, 2007	Blacksburg, Virginia	Seung-Hui Cho	32
November 7, 2007	Tuusula, Finland	Pekka-Eric Auvinen	8
September 23, 2008	Kauhajoki, Finland	Matti Saari	10
April 3, 2009	Binghamton, New York	Jiverly Wong	11
April 30, 2009	Baku, Azerbajan	Farda Gadyrov	12
November 5, 2009	Fort Hood, Texas	Major Nidal Hasan	13
January 8, 2011	Tuscon, Arizona	Jared Lee Loughner	6
July 22, 2011	Utoya, Norway	Anders Behring Breivik	69
July 20, 2012	Aurora, Colorado	James Holmes	12
August 5, 2012	Oak Creek, Wisconsin	Wade Michael Page	6
December 14, 2012	Newtown, Connecticut	Adam Lanza	26
Total			352

Death By Government by R.J. Rummel Since 3,500 BC, there have been a suspected 14,000 wars or conflicts that have killed some 3.5 billion people. In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not of germs." New conceptions require new terms. By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide killing), thus corresponding in its formation to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against the individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. Draconian rules: The penalty is always death. "did not express sufficient exuberance for the regime" demographic catastrophes The sanctity of life did not increase with time. Governments have generally accepted the fruits of their military victories, not excluding the riches of wealthy cities that were sacked, no matter the human cost in innocent lives. That such killing was traditional or customary, served a military purpose (removing an enemy population from the rear; creating terror and fear among populations in the line of advance), gave incentive to the troops (rape and booty), or enriched the state, should not lessen in our eyes the montrous immorality of this killing. Although hardly significant in its scope to an American one of the more interesting of these is the Mountain Meadows Massacre by the Mormons. To escape persecution from Gentiles, the Mormons fled west to the Utah Territory and succeeded in turning it into a de facto independently governed theocracy. Seeking revenge for past wrongs done them by Gentiles, and in a declared state of war against the federal government, church leaders assembled Indian "confederates" to set up an ambush at Mountain Meadows of a passing wagon train of twenty to twenty five prosperous immigrant families. During the resulting battle, Mormon militia appeared, ostensibly to save the train from the Indians. But after disarming the defenders by a ruse, they slaughtered 121 men, women and children. (Some escaped to tell the tale). Whether of heretics or witches, this was a religiously induced and ritualistic form of government killing. Witches were presumably allied with Satan; heretics presumably had defied or defiled God. Sacrifice is another religion-based form of killing that is government practiced or approved. As an appeasement of or offering to a diety, sacrifice has often been extravagant in the number of lives it has demanded. The unknown number of people decapitated, punctured, burned, sliced, stoned, beaten, or suffocated to death against their will to appease or glorify some diety, or celebrate or inaugurate some occasion or building, is uncounted, but must add up to tens of millions in unrecorded history. In my home state of Hawaii well before colonization, people would be killed if the Hawaiian king got sick and more would continue to be slain, sometimes twenty at a time, until he got well. If he died, then his entire household would be killed to keep him company in the next world. In building a royal canoe, a man would be killed at the base of the tree from which the wood was cut, another when it was finished, others at the launching ceremony. In ancient Greece, the law demanded that imperfect children be killed. Someone even wrote a text on How To Recognize a Newborn That Is Worth Rearing In this ideology of Power, the living were to be sacrificed for the unborn. The living were objects, like mortar and bricks, lumber and nails, to be used, manipulated, piled on each other, to create the new social structure. Personal interests and desires, pain or pleasure, were of little moment - insignificant in the light of the new world to be created. saccharine-sweet sentimentality The Japanese intervention and the consequent Sino Japanese war forced the nationalists and communists into a common front, each maneuvered for strategic advantage. Soon Japanese soldiers would be able to enjoy a picnic while watching them kill each other. No Communist was beneath the law. Japanese armies and secret police killed defenseless people seemingly as a matter of tactics, expedience, convenience, revenge, recreation, and an utterly amoral disregard for human life and suffering. Later a new interrogator, one I had not seen before, walked down the row of trees holding a long sharp knife. I could not make out their words, but he spoke to the pregnant woman and she answered. What happened next makes me nauseous to think about. I can only describe it in the briefest of terms. He cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach, and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the fetus by its neck. When he got to to the prison, just within my range of vision, he tied a string around the fetus and hung it from the eaves with the others, which were dried and black and shrunken. Then there was the killing of people for laziness, complaining, wrong attitudes or unsatisfactory work. It was... of Tan Samay, a high school teacher from Battambang. He was accused of being incapable of teaching properly. The only thing the children were being taught at the village was how to cultivate the soil. Maybe Tan Samay was trying to teach them other things, too, and that was his downfall. His pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher! until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children took obvious pleasure in killing. The targets for extermination would be intellectuals, resisters, communists, nazi sympathizers, collaborators, opponents, anticommunists, renegades, bourgeoisie, landlords, rich peasants, rebels, critics, protesters trouble makers, the disloyal, those that expressed pro-Soviet sentiments wrong thinkers, those with impure ideas and those who failed to express appreciation and loyalty. The common North Korean citizen faces a plethora of laws and rules that he transgresses only at the risk of his life. Half the violations covered in the country's criminal code are capital ones. In Mexico, the rebels imposed their own sense of criminal justice. Zapata's men hung three people outside the police station with signs announcing their crime. One was a "thief", a second a "counterfeiter". The sign for the third said "this man was killed by mistake". Pancho Villa's officers were no better, but among them stands out Fausto Borunda. He always killed his prisoners and when there was too few of them he would shoot civilians instead.

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