The Walmart shooting in particular raised questions of whether employees feel empowered to speak up because it was a team leader who carried out the shooting.
NEW YORK — The mass shooting Wednesday at a Walmart in Virginia was only the latest example of a workplace shooting perpetrated by an employee.
"We have built an industry around how to lock bad guys out. We have heavily invested in physical security measure like metal detectors, cameras and armed security guards," said James Densley, professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and co-founder of the nonprofit and nonpartisan research group The Violence Project. But too often in workplace shootings, he said,"this is someone who already has access to the building.
Walmart launched a computer-based active shooter training in 2015, which focused on three pillars: avoid the danger, keep your distance and lastly, defend. Then, in 2019 after a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, store in which an outside gunman killed 22 people, Walmart addressed the threat to the public by discontinuing sales of certain kinds of ammunition and asked that customers no longer openly carry firearms in its stores. It now sells only hunting rifles and related ammunition.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security's active shooting manual states that human resources officials have a responsibility to"create a system for reporting signs of potential violence behavior." It also encourages employees to report concerning behavior such as increased absenteeism and repeated violation of company policies.
A recent federal government report examining workplace violence over three decades found that workplace homicides have risen in recent years, although they remain sharply down from a peak in the mid-1990s.
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