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A shooting at a fast-food restaurant in an Idaho shopping center kills 3 people and wounds 7 before the gunman takes his own life A gunman opened fire at a fast-food restaurant in a shopping center in Idaho, killing three people and wounding seven, a city spokesman said. Police said the suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Investigators had not given a motive as they worked to identify the attacker and the victims. Analogies The Massacre at Mycalessus The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden, and whatever other living creatures they saw; the Thracian race, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most so when it has nothing to fear.
Everywhere confusion reigned and death in all its shapes; and in particular they attacked a boys' school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In short, the disaster falling upon the whole town was unsurpassed in magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII, ch. 29 (trans. Richard Crawley; London: J. M. Dent, 1910), via the Perseus Digital Library. → The San Ysidro McDonald's Massacre (1984) On July 18, 1984, a gunman walked into a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, and opened fire on families eating lunch, killing twenty-one people and wounding nineteen in what was then the deadliest lone-gunman shooting in United States history. The siege ended after seventy-seven minutes when a police sniper killed him. An ordinary fast-food counter had become a scene of mass death, plunging a border community into a grief its survivors still carry decades later.
San Ysidro McDonald's massacre, Wikipedia (accessed 2 August 2026). → Cain and Abel (Genesis 4) And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 4:8-10. Project Gutenberg eBook #10. → Psalm 55: Violence in the City Destroy, O LORD, and divide their tongues: for I have seen violence and strife in the city.
Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof: mischief also and sorrow are in the midst of it.
Wickedness is in the midst thereof: deceit and guile depart not from her streets.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, Psalm 55:9-11, via Wikisource. → The Massacre of the Innocents A Roman soldier drives his knee into a mother's body and raises his sword over the naked infant she cannot save, her mouth wrenched open in a scream that fills the sunlit square. To the side another woman flees with a limp child in her arms. Poussin freezes the single unbearable instant when public order collapses into slaughter of the innocent.
Nicolas Poussin, The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1629), Musee Conde, Chantilly. Via Wikimedia Commons. → Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834 Honoré Daumier's lithograph shows the aftermath of a massacre in an ordinary Paris apartment: a working man in his nightshirt sprawled dead on the floor, having fallen across the crushed body of his small child, with another corpse in the shadows. Made after soldiers slaughtered the innocent residents of a tenement during an 1834 uprising, it turned a single quiet room into an indictment of sudden, senseless slaughter. Its unflinching stillness made it one of the most powerful images of civilians killed where they lived.
Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834, 1834, lithograph; National Gallery of Art, Washington. → 
