Newsweek piece on what precipitates workplace shootings?

By now you have heard of the workplace shooting incident in Connecticut yesterday, where an employee who was about to be fired for theft opened fire on coworkers. Relatives say that before he died, he blamed the motivation for the shooting on workplace bullying that went unanswered by union reps and company officials.

It's an interesting article examining the dynamics of workplace shootings and the conditions under which an employee may "lose it" and take it out on coworkers.

Mass shootings always make big headlines, but they're only a small fraction of the murders committed each year. Of the 15,000 average annual homicides, less than one percent of those are mass killings. But as the economy tanks and jobs are scarce, the rates of these killings increase. So says Jack Levine, the Brudnick Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Northeastern University.

"Almost all of these vengeful killers have suffered some catastrophic loss," says Levine. "It’s always the loss of the job or a loss of a lot of money in the stock market." The more lost jobs, the more likely an employee will be triggered to commit a violent crime.

Once the loss occurs, there's a lot of blame to go around. "These people tend to be conspiratorial," says Levine. "In their mind, it's not just their boss but the guy sitting at the next desk," who contributed to the employee's termination, which is why everyone is the target when the shooting begins. Racism may or may not have occurred at this company, but it's a motivating trigger used to justify the shooting. (Many types of mass shooters see themselves as victims — recall George Sodini, the mass shooter who killed several women in a Pittsburgh-area gym because he felt that women had denied him of the companionship to which he somehow felt entitled. (As far as the race of the shooter, Levine noted that 70 percent of mass shooters are white, which is proportionate with the percent of while people in the population, not a statement about the racial demographics of mass shooters).

Read the full article at the link; it's well worth the read.

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(please note, some articles are only available for a limited time.)

Posted by: gisela on 2010-08-04 09:47:56

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