Monday’s mass shooting at Old National Bank in Louisville, Kentucky, is the latest instance of horrific gun violence in a workplace. According to CNN, the shooter, a bank employee, had been informed that he was being fired after working at his current job for about a year.
The Louisville attack follows other recent workplace shootings including on a mushroom farm in Half Moon Bay, California, in January and at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, in November 2022. Both were perpetrated by someone who was employed or formerly employed by these establishments.
Mass shootings at work, like mass shootings generally, are rare occurrences. Though more common in the US than elsewhere in the world, mass shootings make up less than 1 percent of gun violence deaths in the US, and workplace shootings comprise a smaller subset of those fatalities. The workplace is the most common location for a mass shooting, however, according to the Violence Project.
And mass shootings in the workplace have seen a slight uptick in recent years. Since 2020, there have been eight such mass shootings, per data that James Densley, a sociologist at Metropolitan State University, shared with Vox. That’s a higher rate than in preceding years, when there were nine workplace mass shootings documented between 2010-2019. In the decades before, such shootings were more prevalent, however, with 14 taking place between 2000-2009 and 17 occurring between 1990-1999.
According to gun violence experts, workplace mass shootings typically involve current or former employees who have a problem with the workplace, who have easy access to guns, and who may be experiencing their own mental health challenges. “They are underlined by some grievance with the workplace and the people in it. But mass shootings generally, including workplace shootings, are more deeply driven by despair,” says Densley.
What drives workplace mass shootings
There could be several factors behind the increased frequency of…
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