On Monday, a 23-year-old bank employee named Connor Sturgeon opened fire at his workplace in Louisville, US. The attack resulted in the deaths of five people and the injury of nine others. Sturgeon was armed with a rifle and even livestreamed the attack on social media. The police immediately responded to reports of the attacker, and officers fired at Sturgeon, who was fatally shot at the scene.
The status of Sturgeon’s job at the bank was not immediately clear, but confidential law enforcement sources cited by CNN claimed that Sturgeon had been notified that he would be fired. Sturgeon had no prior contact with Louisville police, according to the police chief. Among the dead was Thomas Elliot, a senior vice president at the bank, who was a close friend of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. Two police officers were also among the wounded.
This tragic incident is the latest in a long series of mass shootings in the US. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 146 mass shootings so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since 2016. The statistics use the definition of four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter.
President Joe Biden responded to the news of the shooting by calling for Congress to pass legislation requiring safe storage of firearms, background checks for all gun sales, and the elimination of gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.
Sturgeon grew up in southern Indiana, just north of Louisville, and attended Floyd Central High School. He enrolled at the University of Alabama in 2016 as a business student and became a full-time employee at the bank in 2022 as a portfolio banker, according to his LinkedIn profile page. Sturgeon had interned at the bank for three summers, from 2018 to 2020.
Sturgeon’s mother posted on Facebook that her son was “very sick,” and expressed condolences to the victims’ families. This is not the first time that a gun rampage has been live-streamed by an attacker. The gunman who killed ten people in a racially motivated shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022, and the attacker who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in May 2019, had also live-streamed their attacks.
The incident has once again raised concerns about gun violence and the need for stricter gun control laws in the US. The President’s call for action comes amid a recent increase in mass shootings and a rising demand for legislative action. The nation continues to grapple with this pervasive issue, and the victims of this tragedy remain in our thoughts and prayers.