INTERVIEW – JOHN LOTT – President, Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “The War on Guns”
- Virginia shooting gunman De Wayne Craddock resigned hours before mass shooting, officials say. (Washington Post) — VIRGINIA BEACH — After an unremarkable career spent tending the water and sewer systems beneath this city of 450,000, DeWayne Craddock quit on Friday morning. The engineer for Virginia Beach’s municipal government informed his bosses in an email that he was resigning, city officials said. But Craddock made one last visit to the drab brick building where he worked and methodically killed his colleagues. Investigators, Craddock’s former co-workers and residents of this stricken oceanside community on Sunday continued to grasp for clues to what precipitated the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since November. Armed with two .45-caliber pistols, at least one of them equipped with a sound suppressor and extended magazine, Craddock killed 12 people before dying in a gun battle with police. Some killers leave behind manifestos, YouTube videos or social media profiles that display a mind moving inexorably toward violence. What Craddock left was a resignation letter, according to city officials, and a work history that gave no hint of his intentions. “Right now we do not have anything glaring,” Police Chief James A. Cervera said at a news conference Sunday. He cautioned that investigators are still trying to determine a motive. Officials would not discuss what Craddock wrote in his resignation, but a person familiar with the email said it was short and there was “nothing out of the ordinary.”
