Shootout in the Big City

There was a shooting the other day in New York City. At the Empire State Building. It was the result of an ongoing animosity, a feud, between two men who once worked for the same company. One of them, Jeffrey Johnson had been laid off in 2011.

By all accounts, Johnson fits the usual profile of the guy who flips out one day. A quiet loner who kept to himself but who seemed just a little strange to those around him. He wasn't laid off for any other reason than the economy. His target, his victim, was the head of sales for the store where Johnson had worked. A much younger, and much bigger, man than Johnson, Steven Ercolino appears to have been a likeable guy (as most salesmen are) but the two just never got along.

In the comments to the story linked to above, I see a lot of calls for more gun control and some misunderstandings... about how the police fired too many shots and on a crowded street (9 bystanders were wounded). Johnson had legally purchased the gun in Florida some 21 years ago. He has, apparently, no history of mental illness or a criminal record. There was no reason for him to be prevented from buying a firearm.

As for the police, they did what they needed to do. Perhaps we watch too many westerns where the sheriff shoots the gun out of the hand of the bad guy, or just wings him, and no bystanders get shot by their stray bullets, because there are no stray bullets, and we believe real life is, or should be, no different.

But you wonder... why do people snap? What triggered Johnson that particular day to go shoot the object of his anger? An anger that had smoldered for so many years? Why did he not do it the day after he was laid off, if he blamed Ercolino for the loss of his job?  He certainly had that gun sitting somewhere in his apartment at that time.