The tragic shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, that left five people dead and eight others injured appears to be another instance of a shooting tragedy unfolding at a gun-free zone, a recent report found.
Police in Louisville began receiving calls at 8:38 a.m. Monday of shots fired at an Old National Bank location in the city, just minutes before the bank was set to open at 9 a.m. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel said that officers "unflinchingly" engaged with the shooter and prevented further loss of life.
The Crime Prevention Research Center reviewed the national bank’s team-member handbook, which outlined various rules employees must follow or risk disciplinary action or even termination. Among the list of rules, employees must act in a professional and honest capacity at work, they are also prevented from taking firearms into a bank premises.
"Possession of dangerous or unauthorized materials, such as explosives, firearms, or any type of weapons inside the workplace or on company premises. In some states, there are additional laws about this subject," the handbook, which was also reviewed by Fox News Digital, states under a list of "examples of some of the infractions or conduct that may result in disciplinary action."
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A spokesperson for the bank told Fox, when approached for comment on the handbook and gun-free zones, that the company is currently not commenting "on team members or company documentation in the wake of this incident." Kentucky is a permitless carry state but still prohibits firearms in certain locations, such as police stations and government buildings.
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Shooter Connor Sturgeon was a 25-year-old employee of the bank who carried out the attack with a rifle, according to investigators.
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"Importantly, the bank’s employee handbook makes it clear that carrying a permitted concealed handgun into the bank is a fireable offense. This employee would have known that the employees were banned from having guns," the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) wrote in a post Tuesday. "Why isn’t it newsworthy that time after time these mass murderers pick targets where their victims are defenseless."
CPRC founder and President John Lott has repeatedly spoken out about how gun-free zones could serve as magnets for murderers who want to cause as much bloodshed as possible.
"The media just refuses to cover that these killers purposefully pick targets where they know victims can’t defend themselves. The media also continually ignores that these murderers explicitly explain why they pick these targets," Lott told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
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"These mass murderers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. Their goal is to get media coverage, and they know the more people they kill, the more coverage they will get, so they go to places where they know victims can’t defend themselves," he added.
Just last month, a shooting at the Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, left three students and three employees at the school dead. The shooter, Audrey Hale, allegedly "looked at" two other schools but did not carry out the attack at those schools because "the security was too great to do what she wanted to do," Nashville City Council member Robert Swope told the New York Post last month.
