Is Las Vegas the worst mass shooting in US history? It's surprisingly complicated.
Is Las Vegas the worst mass shooting in US history? It’s surprisingly complicated.
It depends on what counts as a mass shooting — and the typical definition leaves out some pretty bad attacks.
It’s already been said again and again in the span of a day: The shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, with at least 58 dead and hundreds injured, was the deadliest mass shooting in American history. But was it really? The answer, it turns out, is surprisingly complicated. The short version: It was definitely the deadliest mass shooting in recent history. But if you look further back in the US’s past, the real answer depends on how you define a mass shooting.
The National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, for example, pointed to two past attacks as examples of previous massacres with higher death tolls than the Las Vegas shooting. In 1873, an all-black militia defended a local courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana — fearing, at the height of racial tensions after the Civil War, that white supremacists were about to topple the regional government, which was evenly split between white and black citizens at the time. Soon after, a mob of more than 150 white men — made up of Southern Democrats, former Confederate soldiers, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the paramilitary White League — surrounded the courthouse and attacked. Three white men and as many as 150 black men died, according to Smithsonian.com.
Another example: The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre — a white-led race riot — left at least 39 black people and nine white people dead, according to official estimates. But as Smithsonian.com noted, it’s widely believed that more than 100 black people were killed during the three-day massacre.
There are many such events throughout American history, from the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the 1919 mass lynching in Arkansas. After the Civil War and during the ensuing 100-year struggle for basic civil rights protections, white groups often lashed out in violence to try to assert their control of the South — and a lot of people, particularly black Americans, died.
Before that, there were also horrific attacks on Native American populations, such as the Sand Creek Massacre. (Although many of these events can be seen as acts of war.)
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https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/2/16401510/las-vegas-shooting-deadliest
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The score-keeping in our culture. 
