A gunman opened fire inside Bronx Lebanon Hospital in New York City on Friday afternoon, killing at least one person and injuring six others.
According to the Associated Press, the shooter was a doctor formerly employed by the hospital, and wore a lab coat during the assault. Police said the gunman died from a self-inflicted gunshot.
Disgruntled employees shoot up their current or former workplaces with alarming regularity. The incident in the Bronx marked at least the fifth incident in June, according to an analysis by The Trace of shootings logged by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. At least a dozen people died in the attacks, not including the shooters.
- On June 5, a recently fired employee of an Orlando awning company fatally shot five former co-workers and then himself.
- On June 8, a grocery store clerk in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, fatally shot three of his co-workers and then himself.
- On June 14, a UPS employee in San Francisco fatally shot three co-workers before killing himself.
- On June 20, an employee at a San Diego biotech company shot his coworker in the head, critically wounding him.
There’s no uniform standard for what qualifies as a workplace shooting. An analysis by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of 160 active-shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013 found that active shooters targeted businesses “more than 40 percent of the time.” The report focused on shootings that left three or more people dead.
That analysis, however, considered healthcare facilities as a separate category from businesses. Four active-shooter incidents, accounting for 2.5 percent of incidents over the time considered, took place in a hospital, clinic, or doctor’s office, the report says.
The analysis also did not seek to identify the relationship of the shooter to the business he or she targeted — meaning that the count includes shootings by people who had not worked at the place where the incident occurred.
