Thailand Mass Shooting
Readers might encounter this text by reading The New York Times, using social media, or looking online and coming across it. To find this article, I searched for mass shootings on Google. The statement of fact I am checking is “The gunman operated in a military whose officers often have outside businesses and take advantage of lower-ranking soldiers. He killed 29 people, the worst shooting in recent Thai history.”
Was this the worst shooting in recent Thai history? For Move One, I searched fact-checking sites and Wikipedia for previous work. Cited in Snopes, “Gun violence is not unheard of in Thailand. Firearms can be obtained legally, and many Thais own guns. Mass shootings are rare, though there are occasional gun battles in the far south of the country, where authorities have for years battled a long-running separatist insurgency.” The mass shooting is cited in Snopes from February 8, 2020. The article goes on to talk about the amount of people killed and injured, along with the motive for the gunman’s outburst.
Wikipedia includes a paragraph based on the mass shooting in Thailand: “On the way to the shopping mall, he also fired at several people on the road and at Wat Pa Sattha Ruam, a Buddhist temple. During the attack, the suspect posted updates and shared a live stream on his Facebook account. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Thailand’s history.” On Wikipedia, there is a section for “List of massacres in Thailand.” After clicking this page, I came across the previous massacres that have taken place in Thailand. In 1973, there were 71 deaths; in 1976, there were 46 deaths; 1992, 52 deaths; 2004, 32 deaths; late 2004, 85 deaths; 2010, 87 deaths; late 2019, 15 deaths; and 2020, 30 deaths.
Seeing that the highest number of deaths is 87 in a 2010 Thai Military Crackdown, I took a look at that massacre. More than 2,000 people were injured. The perpetrators were: Royal Thai Army and Royal Thai Government. After trying to search on Snopes and PolitiFact, I was unsuccessful with finding the 2010 Thai Military Crackdown. Assuming that the mass shooting rate in Thailand being 87 isn’t entirely accurate, since I can’t find much information on the crackdown, I believe the statement for the 2020 shooting to be the worst one in Thai history to be true. While there were a lot of shootings that took place in Thailand, the most recent mass shooting has the most deaths by just one mass shooter.
The gunman had a motive after a dispute on an army base and killed his superior officer. After going to the largest popular mall in the city, he gunned down many more. After going upstream, there weren’t articles on Snopes or Politifact about the previous Thailand mass shootings. The only proven article found was the most recent mass shooting in February 2020.
Mariah's Blog 