First Thing: Names of Virginia Walmart shooting victims released

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Guns have killed 22 people and injured 44 in Thanksgiving week. Plus, could hemp be a key tool in the fight against global heating?

Good morning.

The six people killed by a gunman at a Walmart store in southern Virginia late on Tuesday have been named, in the latest mass shooting to strike the US, this time shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday.

A witness, Jessie Wilczewski, told a local TV station that the gunman began shooting at a group of about 14 employees gathered in a meeting room at the start of their shift in the store, in the city of Chesapeake.

Wilczewski said the shooter was a manager who targeted other managers, firing from left to right. “It didn’t even look real,” Wilczewski said, describing “the pow, pow, pow” of the gun.

Briana Tyler, another employee, told ABC workers were gathered as part of their regular routine before their shifts. “I looked up, and my manager just opened the door and he just opened fire,” Tyler said. “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,” she said.

  • ‘It’s the guns’. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 injured by guns in Thanksgiving week, as 2022 shapes up to be one of the worst years in recent memory. But the public response has fallen quickly and predictably into patterns all too familiar to observers of America’s gun crisis.

Source: The Guardian