We here at Bearing Arms tend not to play the Gun Violence Archive’s game of calling almost everything a mass shooting.
There are terrible incidents that they’d count as such that we won’t so as to not muddy up the waters, but there are some that are only exempt for that categorization simply because the gunman failed to kill four or more people.
I’m willing to concede that while that’s not a mass shooting, the causes and mechanisms involved are the exact same. This is important because we just had such an incident outside of Dayton, Ohio.
A gunman opened fire at a Walmart in Ohio Monday night, and wounded four people before shooting himself, authorities said.
The suspect had walked into the Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, a town of about 46,000 in the Dayton metropolitan area, around 8:30 p.m. and began firing a gun, according to the Beavercreek Police Department. Four people were wounded and transported to area hospitals.
“The conditions of the victims right now is unknown,” Beavercreek Police Capt. Scott Molnar said at a news conference late Monday.
The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. The suspect’s name, a motive for the attack, and other details weren’t immediately released.
Police added that no shots were fired by responding officers. Earlier on social media, police said the store had been cleared and secured and there wasn’t any “active threat.”
Oddly enough, this isn’t the first shooting fatality at this particular Walmart. In 2014, a man was shot and killed by police while holding a pellet gun he’d picked up in the store. Police believed it was a real firearms and shot him.
In this case, the bad guy only succeeded in killing himself, apparently, though we’re not sure how badly injured the victims are. Hopefully they’ll all make a full recovery.
Regardless, this is likely to play into the gun debate in Ohio, where they recently passed permitless carry and have a pro-gun bill in the works to prevent local law enforcement to work with the feds on gun law enforcement.
It’s kind of hard to imagine that this incident won’t be brought up during discussions on that bill.
However, we also don’t know anything about the gunman including what kind of firearm he used. One would assume a handgun is most likely, especially since he took is own life with it–that’s kind of hard to do with an AR-15, after all–but that’s an assumption I’m making and not the official word.
Since we don’t even know what kind of gun it was, we don’t know how he got it, if there was any reason he should have been barred from getting it, or literally anything else.
This is a story we’ll be trying to follow as it develops. Maybe we’ll learn something useful but we’ll definitely be learning stuff that will play into the state’s gun debates for the next few months at a minimum.
In the meantime, pray for the victims to fully recover. May this never cross that mass shooting threshold.