Would you rather leave him there with even an easier opportunity? How many situations are there where an employee has been removed for these kinds of subtle threats and has come back, gotten in and done something? Honest question- I don’t know the answer. I know my advice if I believed there was a chance of an incident would be to get the person out of the workplace.
HR at my H’s former job often had the local police involved in workplace situations. The police encouraged companies to call when in doubt.
When we had a major lay off, every dismissal was timed. Computer access was cut off at that specific time, the supervisor had an hour or so to walk the person out. We weren’t expecting big problems but were prepared.
At a government office we had an announcement that the office was closing - in 11 months! And we were a temporary office so we knew this announcement would be coming at some point. Still had armed officers in the lobby, IDs were checked, there were more walk throughs of the office floors.
@MomofWildChild –
“Would you rather leave him there with even an easier opportunity?”
Of course not. But let’s not kid ourselves. Disgruntled employees have left many a corpse in their work place before and after their dismissals. And they will again. And again. And again.
The first two obituaries were in the local newspaper this morning. Very heartbreaking to read.
America is ok with that… that’s meaningless.
America is 360mm people with different views and perspectives.
A complex republic with many freedoms is sometimes a lot messier than despotic and controlled populations.
No other countries are violence free unfortunately.
All of these shootings are in gun free zones. Murder is already a capital crime subject to execution in many cases. If capital murder penalties aren’t enough to dissuade these maniacs I’m not sure gun confiscation would either.
There’s pressure cooker bombs in Boston, Fertilizer bombs in Oklahoma City, box cutters on 911 and trucks driving though crowds. There is poison on trains in japan and plenty of murder and mayhem in Europe. Look at the situation in Sweden a few years ago.
Maybe it would help. Maybe it wouldn’t. There’s lots of guns and problems in Israel. Schools don’t get touched. Too secure. Doesn’t stop rockets.
France has really tough gun laws. Between trucks in Nice and machine guns in Paris. Do the French not care either ?
I don’t know the answer but I do think it’s very complex. And as much a mental health issue as anything.
But please stop with no one wants to do anything or America thinks x. It’s just not factual. There’s no one who doesn’t want to do something. It’s just not everyone agrees on what that is exactly.
This was an employee in good standing and not asked to resign. He was talking to a guy in the bathroom just minutes before he came out shooting.
That is a false equivalence, private banker. Yes, violence exists everywhere. But within each society, the means of violence are largely dictated by the accessibility of the weaponry. No one in the US has been machine-gunned to death recently, probably because we do not allow the sale of machine guns to civilians in 99.99% of the time. Other weapons are easily acquired here, hence we have a massive daily gun death problem .
There are some crazies everywhere in the world and there likely always will be the odd homemade bomber, poison-giver, and political terrorists, here just like in Europe and elsewhere. That does not begin to address the massive disparity in our homicide rates, which is due almost entirely to gun violence. We do not have more crazy people per capita, but we have way more crazy people with access to deadly weapons.
I am certain mine are not the only kids who made a point of identifying who in their high school class they thought might be the next school shooter. Mine went out of their way to be nice to that kid, hoping that he might remember their kindness if he ever snapped. Is this really how we want our kids growing up- fearfully assessing their classmates craziness and access to weapons?
This isn’t accurate. Civilians can own NFA class III weapons. It’s illegal generally for a civilian to own a machine gun manufactured post-1986.
@katliamom Violence has been prevented by people speaking up - unfortunately it doesn’t get the media coverage that murder does. Do some research - numerous cases of employees, students, neighbors etc going to the police or workplace authority with information and potential violence being thwarted.
The worst thing society can do fo is bury its collective head in the sand because “nothing will change.” That’s just sad.
@Roethlisburger, 99% of the public is uninterested, unwilling or unable to go thru the lengthy process to get a class 3 license. Comprehensive background checks and processes do successfully deter access.
No, however, there is some possibility that being kind and friendly to someone might help with their feeling of being isolated. It would be better to be friendly to someone out of understanding and compassion, than fear, but it seems many teenagers are more comfortable ignoring or bullying the loner than speaking to him.
The shooters are more often bullies than victims, according to several surveys, so we really need to stop that myth. And you may wish to read the Op-ed by the young lady who was a peer tutor to the Parkland shooter. As she points out, she was kind and compassionate to him, and in return he treated her cruelly and shot her friends. She was understandably infuriated later that she, or any young girl, was placed in that position with a sociopath and told to be kind to him. Solving his psychosis was not her job, and we shouldn’t expect girls to do it.
How many times do we read that the person was quiet, isolated, kept to themselves, the weird kid…the loners in the classroom? I don’t think that’s a myth, that seems to be the norm. While solving someone’s psychosis is not another teenagers “job”, it is sad that anyone has to feel like that. Sometimes all a person needs is just one friend. It’s too bad that compassion is difficult to teach to young people, if not impossible.
That they would otherwise not have been nice to that kid is telling.
There is a huge spectrum between going “out of their way to be nice” and falling into the “not have been nice” camp, right? Nothing telling, IMO.
When I was in 8th grade, at lunch one day the school counselor asked me to sit next to the girl we all thought of as a weird loner. I did so, a little reluctantly. Lo and behold, she turned out to be funny and kind. 43 years later, we are still best friends. She lives in Austin so I see her every time I visit my family. And she comes up to Maine almost every summer to visit us. Other than my parents and sister, she is the only person who got my kids birthday presents every year. I am so glad that counselor spoke up and I followed through. 
News alert-all the compassion in the world does not fix sociopathic behavior, according to medical professionals. And yes, my kids are very kind and helpful, but they avoid danger when they sense it, @sylvan8798. Silly of you to argue otherwise, and past time to stop portraying mass murderers as poor little victims. They caused victims, they are not themselves victims.
Read the article, @bus driver. The author was physically and verbally assaulted, abused, and terrorized by the shooter. Why do we expect girls to be nice and compassionate in the face of such treatment? We dont make similar demands of boys. Why is anyone in high school expected to put up with that kind of behavior in the name of “showing compassion?”