Here is video taken by an employee, caught outdoors when the shooting started, crouching behind a stone retaining wall

Content warning: gun shots, obviously

First the terrorist tried to enter campus in a car filled with guns. When he wasn’t allowed past the gates, he started firing from a CVS drugstore across the street. From a semi-automatic weapon, 500 shots is a lot. He was at it for a long time.

Here are the weapons & shell casings he left behind.

Miraculously, he didn’t hit a single CDC employee! But he did kill David Rose, the police officer who responded, who leaves behind two children and a pregnant wife.

I can't help but imagine the vast attention this case would have received if the race of the shooter and the victim were reversed.

But a white guy with a COVID conspiracy manifesto isn’t news at this point. After all, that’s who runs the government now!

The CDC is a part of Health & Human Services, headed by RFK Jr., whose conspiracy-addled ideology is indistinguishable from the motivations of this terrorist.

Trump has made no comment. The White House has found the time to post a video of the arrest of that guy who threw a sandwich at a cop, but nothing about a cop killed defending the government's own employees.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose district includes parts of Atlanta, has also said nothing.

CDC leadership also hasn’t been very communicative. To be fair to them, their staff who would would have dealt with this situation were mostly fired by DOGE.

So my fellow civil servants at the CDC feel abandoned. They are hated with a murderous rage and no one cares.

You know why CDC has blast-proof windows? A response to the Oklahoma city bombing, in 1995. That's how long the American right wing has been mass-killing federal workers.

The bombing followed the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, when hatred of government workers rushed into the political mainstream.

This meme expresses the hopelessness that government workers feel. We are enemies of the people, according to our own bosses. Violence against us is tacitly (or explicitly) sanctioned.

Black-majority places, and public health workers, in particular.

Follow-up:

The CDC boss has attempted to improve communication about this. There have been some comms hiccups but considering her boss is RFK Jr., I find her openness and honesty brave.

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Finally, note: DOGE and the Trump administration are so opposed to remote work that they rushed CDC employees back to the office without active shooter training.

Other security measures failed because of staffing shortages. The shooter killed himself because no one else managed to.

And now, federal spending is on track to rise even higher in 2025 just like Trump’s first term, when he racked up the largest deficit increase of any president over four years(even before covid19).

But once those savings are analyzed and corrected for errors, they actually amount to just $36 billion.