Orlando shootings mirror string of deadly US attacks

By Kasim Ileri

WASHINGTON (AA) – Sunday's deadly incident at Pulse, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida is being described as the deadliest in modern U.S. history.

According to figures compiled by several U.S. media sources including progressive magazine Mother Jones, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the 50 fatalities in Sunday’s mass shooting are higher than any other such incident in the U.S. since the 1960s.

The death toll at the Pulse nightclub is higher than the 33 students killed during the Virginia Tech mass shooting in Blacksburg in 2007, or the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school shooting in 2012 where a gunman killed 20 students and six adults before shooting himself.

The 53 people wounded in Orlando outnumber those wounded in any other single U.S. shooting but for the 2012 Aurora theater massacre in Colorado, in which 58 were injured.

The Orlando killings come months after the San Bernardino, California shootings where an allegedly self-radicalized couple gunned down 14 people.

Here are some of the deadliest shootings in the U.S. for half a century:

• April 16, 2007: Seung Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student, went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, killing 32 people, before committing suicide.

• Dec. 14, 2012: Adam Lanza, 20, gunned down 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut before killing himself.

• Oct. 16, 1991: George Hennard, 35, crashed his pickup through the wall of Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. He shot and killed 23 people before committing suicide.

• July 18, 1984: James Huberty, 41, gunned down 21 adults and children at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, before being killed by police.

• Aug. 1, 1966: Charles Joseph Whitman, a former U.S. Marine, shot and killed 16 people from a university tower at the University of Texas in Austin before being shot by police.

• Aug. 20, 1986: A part-time mail carrier, Patrick Henry Sherrill, shot and killed 14 postal workers in Edmund, Oklahoma, before killing himself.

• Dec. 2, 2015: Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a couple living in Redlands, California, opened fire at a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health event killing 14 people and injuring 22.

• Nov. 5, 2009: U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan fatally shot 13 people and injured 30 others at Fort Hood near Killeen, Texas. He was later convicted and sentenced to death.

• Sept. 16, 2013: Gunman Aaron Alexis, 34, fatally shot 12 people and injured three others at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C. He was later killed by police.

• July 20, 2012: James Holmes gunned down 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. Last year he was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder and sentenced to 12 consecutive life sentences.

• Oct. 1, 2015: Christopher Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old student at Umpqua Community College near Roseburg, Oregon, shot an assistant professor and eight students in a classroom. After a shootout with police, he committed suicide.

• June 18, 2015: A gunman opened fire at a weekly Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed. The morning after the attack police arrested a suspect, Dylann Roof, 21, who said he wanted to start a race war.

• July 16, 2015: Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez opened fire on two military installations in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Four U.S. Marines and a Navy sailor died; a Marine recruit officer and a police offer were wounded. Abdulazeez was killed by police in a gunfight.

• Nov. 27, 2015: A gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing a police officer and two civilians and injuring nine others. Robert Lewis Dear was taken into custody after a five-hour standoff and charged with first-degree murder.