A man killed four people and wounded nine others in a shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, on Monday. According to the AFP news agency, the man was Connor Sturgeon, 23, a local employee. He was killed and shot by the police. According to CNN International, Sturgeon would have been notified that he would be fired, and wrote a note in which he stated that he would commit the act.
The gunman was killed just three minutes after the first call police received about the incident. Acting department head Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel noted that the quick response time saved lives.
Before being shot down by the authorities, the criminal broadcast the shooting on social media, but the video was soon interrupted. In a statement sent by Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) to AFP, the company said it “promptly removed the live stream of this tragic event this morning”. Police said they were “hopeful” to get the footage offline and find out more about the boy.
The four people killed were identified as 40-year-old Josh Barrick, 45-year-old Juliana Farmer, 63-year-old Tommy Elliott, and 64-year-old Jim Tutt. Nine people were taken to the hospital. Of these, three have already been discharged. Three others are in critical condition, including a newly minted police officer who was shot in the head and required brain surgery.
US President Joe Biden condemned the shooting and linked it to the lack of more gun control measures in the country, where gun policy is one of the most flexible in the world. In June of last year, amid a wave of massacres, the US Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a fundamental right to carry firearms in public in a non-ostensible manner, overturning a New York law dating back to 1913.