On February, 15, Gary Martin shot and killed five coworkers and wounded five police officers at the Henry M. Pratt Company in Aurora, Illinois. Martin, a forty-five year old African-American man and a fifteen-year employee of the company, faced — for the second time — termination from his job.

Martin had worked as an assembler for Pratt in Illinois’s second-largest city forty miles west of Chicago. His mother and sister told several media outlets that Gary was “very depressed” at losing his job, which meant also losing health care and much of his pension. Since Martin was also a convicted felon from the mid-1990s in Mississippi, the likelihood of finding a similar well-paying job was bleak.

The ferocity of the Aurora massacre was shocking even by the standards of workplace violence in the United States. Martin’s handgun, for example, was mounted with a green laser sight so he could shoot more accurately. Among Martin’s victims was Russell Beyer, the machinists union representative, who previously helped Martin get his job back after he was fired the first time, and Trevor Wehner, a human resources intern, killed on his first day on the job. Martin then brazenly fired upon approaching police officers before he fled into the Pratt Company’s 29,000-square-foot cavernous warehouse, where he hid for nearly ninety minutes before police shot him dead.