Massacre

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This article is about mass killings. For other uses of massacre, see Massacre (disambiguation).

Photographs of the My Lai massacre provoked world outrage and made it an international scandal.

The word massacre has a number of meanings, but most commonly refers to individual events of deliberate and direct mass killing, especially of noncombatant civilians or without any reasonable means of defense, that would often qualify as war crimes or atrocities. Massacres in this sense do not typically apply to combatants except figuratively; the deliberate mass killing of prisoners of war, however, is often considered a massacre.

At the same time, the term "massacre" is used more widely to refer to individual, civil, or military mass killings on smaller scales, but having distinct political significance in shaping subsequent events, such as the Boston Massacre. Individual or small group acts of murder may also be described as massacres, as in the case of some school shootings. In Guatemala, where massacres of Maya Indians have been common, the human rights commission agreed on a specific definition: "A massacre shall be considered the execution of five or more people, in the same place, as part of the same operation and whose victims were in an indefensible state." [1] In Colombia, the term is applied to the murder of half a dozen or more at one time.