Ruminations: Psychopathy

"He was just shooting all throughout the room. It didn't matter who he hit. He didn't say anything. He didn't look at anybody in any specific type of way."
"It was all happening so fast. It is by the grace of God that a bullet missed me. I saw the smoke leaving the gun, and I literally watched bodies drop. It was crazy."
"He just liked to pick, honestly. I think he just looked for little things ... because he had the authority. That's just the type of person that he was. That's what a lot of people said about him."
Brenda Tyler, Walmart employee

Billy Schuerman/The Virginia Pilot/via AP

Just like that. Out of the blue. Another mass shooting. A data base shared by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northwestern University tracks mass killing in America back to 2006. There have been 60 mass killings in the United States in 2022, a year not quite over. The database defines mass killing of at least four dead, exclusive of the killer.

Now, for the second time in a week Virginia has another major shooting. Previously, three University of Virginia football players on a charter bus returning to campus from a field trip on November 13, were shot to death, two other students wounded. Three days following a gay nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs where five people were killed and 17 wounded, a Walmart assault saw six people shot dead.

A Walmart manager using a handgun in a room where a routine employee meeting was to take place suddenly began firing around the break room . Responding police found his body, believing he had shot himself in an act of murder-suicide. Leaving police to attempt to discover what the man's motive might have been. Six people dead, six people wounded on Tuesday night at a time the store was crowded with customers stocking up for Thanksgiving.

31-year-old Andre Bing, an overnight team leader with the Walmart store, employed by Walmart for the past dozen yearsm suddenly left normalcy and in a psychotic but obviously planned manoeuvre, decided to kill fellow employees at the store. Briana Tyler, who was a recent hire of two months' standing worked with Bing a night earlier and said she had never experienced a negative encounter with him.

Another employee, Jessie Wilczewski, hid under a table in the break room. She saw the killer look her way, pointing his gun at her. Then he told her to go home, and she left the room. In 2019, an attack took place at a Walmart with a gunman targeting Mexicans, in El Paso, Texas. There were 22 victims whose lives were cut short that time. Leading the company to decide it would discontinue sales of certain types of ammunition, notifying customers they may no longer openly carry firearms in the store.

Handguns were taken off the store shelves and ammunition, along with short-barrel rifle ammunition. Thereafter, the company restricted its firearms sales to hunting rifles and related ammunition exclusively.

"[At first, it] didn’t register as real,"
" I could have ran out that door … and I stayed. I stayed so they wouldn’t be alone in their last moments,"
"I had to touch the door which was covered (in blood). I just remember gripping my bag and thinking, ‘If he’s going to shoot me in the back – well, he’s going to have to try really hard cause I’m running,’ and I booted it. … and I didn’t stop until I got to my car and then I had a meltdown."
Jessie Wilczewsk, recently-hired Walmart store employee