Gun control activist David Hogg said the gun culture of the United States is rooted in the country’s history of genocide and “white supremacy.”
Hogg, 19, offered his opinion on the nation’s history during a Saturday interview on All In with Chris Hayes, saying, “I think it comes down to reckoning with our history, and our history of white supremacy in the United States and the fact that we live in a post-genocidal society oftentimes that was orchestrated by the United States government,” Hogg said, attempting to explain the roots of U.S. gun culture.
Hogg, a survivor of the February 2018 Parkland mass shooting and one of the co-founders for the activist group March For Our Lives, continued, “If we want to talk about mass shootings, we have to recognize the massive number of indigenous mass shootings that were committed by the United States government.”
The gun control activist pointed to the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, where American troops opened fire on a tribe of Native Americans who did not surrender their weapons to the U.S. government.
At Wounded Knee, an American soldier was trying to wrestle a rifle weapon away from a Lakota Indian when the weapon discharged. American troops surrounding the tribe opened fire, killing up to 300 Native Americans. Around 25 to 30 American soldiers died.
“If you recognize the actual history of the United States, it’s okay to hate that injustice that much of this country has been founded on and much of the oppression that this country was founded on,” Hogg said. “That doesn’t mean you hate America because it means that you love your fellow Americans so much that you don’t want to repeat the same mistakes we made in the past.”
