According to gun violence data, the shooting in a Louisville, Kentucky, bank is the most recent workplace-related among mass shootings in the United States over the last six decades.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan research center funded by the National Institute of Justice, the Violence Project found that current or former workplaces of perpetrators were the most common sites for mass shootings.
The organization said that many of the shooters were terminated from their jobs.
Workplace shootings
Based on Violence Project data, there were 53 workplace shootings that occurred throughout the country between 1966 and 2021. This represented more than 30% of the 188 mass shootings recorded during that period, the organization said.
The second most common location for mass shootings was at retail locations, which represented 16.9% of all recorded mass shootings, and the third most common location was restaurants and bars, which represented 13.4% of all recorded mass shootings, according to the Violence Project.
With workplace shootings, the biggest motivator behind these gruesome events was an employment-related issue, such as a termination, which constituted 70% of the recorded workplace mass shootings, according to the Violence Project’s data.
When it comes to the victims of workplace-related violence, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 392 U.S. workers were workplace homicide victims in 2020.
Roughly “30% of workplace homicide victims were performing retail-related tasks such as tending a retail establishment or waiting on customers,” according to the CDC.
The agency also compiled data on mass shootings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found “20,050 workers in the private industry experienced trauma from nonfatal workplace violence in 2020.”
Of those injured in these incidents, 73% were female, and 22% required 31 or more days away from work to recover, according to the CDC.
Mass Shootings Definition
A mass shooting in the United States is defined as an incident where four or more people were injured or killed. It is sometimes difficult to identify the cause of workplace killings (also called rampage killings), although many involved disgruntled workers and some involve perpetrators with mental health problems.
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