Take Your Gun to Work Day

It had to be Florida, didn't it? There's a news story out of West Palm Beach about two supermarket employees who foiled what turns out to be not so much a robbery attempt or a takeover/hostage situation as a "shopping rage" incident because they were both carrying guns while on the job. You can read about it above if you want to. Now, I will admit that I have spent a few hours in retail management, down at the pointy end of a general merchandise retailer (a drug store), and in that position you find out very soon -- usually within hours of manning the Customer Service desk for the first time -- why the uniforms do not come with side arms...

In fact, this is a big part of why so many companies do not permit employees (other than licensed security personnel) to bring ANY weapons to work with them; because no matter how good you are at customer service, managing stress and holding your temper, eventually there will be at least one customer so obnoxious that you will have all you can manage not to shoot him or her. Admittedly, the company is probably also worried about the possibility of you accidentally shooting someone, shooting an annoying coworker, "accidentally" shooting someone who stands between you and that promotion, or doing in a supervisor who you think has torpedoed your career, and then being sued down to their underpants for failing to provide a safe working environment, but annoying customers and "street justice" are definitely on the list...

I'm not going to argue in favor of an armed workforce; as with society as a whole, gun ownership only works if the owners are responsible people, and I have worked with (and continue to this day to work with) people I wouldn't trust to operate a pea shooter in a responsible manner, let alone a firearm. I'm just going to point out that either of the gun-toting grocers in this story could easily have been killed if they hadn't been armed; that the night manager of the convenience store next to my drug store WAS killed during a robbery in 1995 while unarmed; that a single Sky Marshall with a single firearm could have prevented any one of the 9/11 hijackings from succeeding; that a single professor with a single firearm might have stopped the Virginia Tech killer in his tracks...

I’ll also point out that while this is something of a slippery slope argument (if we start allowing some employees in some companies to come to work armed, where will it end?) the lines are not as easy to draw, and the solutions are not as easy to invent, as people seem to think. No one wants to have armed security personnel everywhere in our society; I certainly don’t want them in my office while I’m working, or in the classroom if I’m teaching (or studying). Many small businesses could not afford such protection in the first place, and even if they could this type of solution takes us one step away from converting our society into one giant open-air prison. One quite small step, in fact.

Of course, there are security measures short of actual armed security guards that a business can take, such as the bulletproof partitions you see in some banks and gas stations, for example. A company can install silent alarms, make sure employees do not carry cash, and make sure that cash is collected from the registers and dropped into the safe on a regular basis. But there’s really not much you can do about some lunatic walking into your place of business, becoming offended by some kind of “rudeness” (real or imagined) and deciding to retaliate by shooting you or some of your employees. The only thing you can really be sure of in that situation is that everybody who hears the story will know exactly what you should have done to prevent the situation.

And that none of it will make a bit of difference after the fact...