That may explain why so many mass shooters have followed in the footsteps of Brenton Tarrant, who attacked the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 whilst live streaming his murder spree via Facebook. In addition to broadcasting his mass murder, Tarrant also published an online manifesto, shedding light on the fractured psyche of a broken man whose life's work amounted to the murder of 51 innocent people.

It should come as no surprise that Connor Sturgeon, the 25-year-old mass shooter of the Old National Bank in Louisville Kentucky, who decided to livestream his own heinous crime via Instragram would take another page out of Tarrant's book by authoring his own manifesto. Unlike Tarrant before him though, the rationale behind Stugeon's mass shooting didn't paint the picture of the prototypical villain that gun control advocates point to in their attempts to exploit tragedy to attack the second amendment. Instead, Sturgeon's manifesto showed that the shooting was intended to push a gun control agenda itself.

According to an exclusive report from The Daily Mail, Sturgeon outlined the basis behind his decision to gun down his colleagues at the Old National Bank in downtown Louisville on April 10th. The three key tenants of the manifesto were to realize Sturgeon's suicidal ideation and in doing so highlight America's mental health crisis and put a spotlight on how easy it is to obtain a firearm in his home state of Kentucky. Under Kentucky state law, residents with mental health disorders, violent misdemeanor convictions, and restraining orders against them for domestic abuse are not prohibited from purchasing a firearm. Sturgeon's mass shooting was meant to bring that policy making into focus following the purchase of the AR-15 assault rifle he used to kill five and injure eight before being killed himself in a firefight with police.

In the wake of the shooting, Stugeon's family revealed that the shooter had been struggling with mental health problems ranging from anxiety to depression which required him to be medicated. His family expressed fears that Sturgeon developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy following a head injury he sustained during a high school basketball game. However, the extent of CTE in its victims is typically not measurable until a postmortem examination of their brain. The Sturgeon's family attorney, Peter Palmer, revealed that the shooter's brain had been tested for CTE during his autopsy but that results would not be conclusive for six to eight weeks.