“Expert” tells Toledo businesses job shootings aren't so rare

Readers of the Toledo Blade business section were recently treated to a story on workplace shootings, which included some extremely biased and questionable information.

The story was prompted by the recent a shooting in a “no-guns” Jeep plant, and featured details on a seminar in Toledo sponsored by SKY Insurance, and attended by 200 area business leaders.

The seminar speaker, Paul Michael Viollis, Sr., is president of Risk Control Strategies, of New York. Described by the Blade as a “a national expert on workplace violent crime”, Viollis told business leaders that “the general aspects of the Jeep plant shooting are consistent with about 3,000 cases he has studied for 20 years.”

In the story, the Blade noted that he declined to discuss specifics to back up his claim. Perhaps there is a reason:

In order for his claims to be accurate, simple math shows:

3000/20 = 150 "Jeep-like" shootings per year;
or about 3 "Jeep-like" shootings per state per year;
or about 3 "Jeep-like" shootings per week nationwide.

Mr. Viollis is quoted as saying a steady increase in workplace violence has "clearly hit epidemic proportions here in the United States." He told attendees there are now an average of 17 workplace homicides a week, but that many go unnoticed by the national media unless multiple victims are involved.

It is important to note that when citing these statistics, Viollis includes violence OF ALL TYPES (fists, clubs, hammers, knives, guns, etc.), and includes single homicides and cases of domestic violence. Given the size and population of the United States, is really not as startling a number as it first appears. Even so, we are given to question whether Viollis is including victims of crime (i.e. defenseless employees murdered in robberies) in his homicide count.

John Wingerter, a Sky Insurance training coordinator, told the Blade the forum was geared toward educating human resource directors on behavioral cues in the aftermath of the Jeep shootings. Was Sky Insurance also expecting Viollis to regurgitate his anti-gun vitriol at the seminar?

Click on the "Read More..." link below for more.

From the story:

State legislators, he said, are reluctant to challenge the Second Amendment. In Ohio, employees can still legally take loaded weapons to work unless their employers display placards forbidding them. Oklahoma has a law that forbids companies from disciplining anyone who takes a weapon onto work premises. Mr. Viollis described the latter as "the most ludicrous, most irresponsible piece of legislation I've ever seen."

In his presentation, Viollis stated that "workplace violence is always avoidable." But what he did not say is that gun ban policies, gun ban signs, etc. are not an acceptable avoidance policy. Even if Viollis’ workplace violence data is accurate, doesn’t this provide every reason for businesses to stop banning employees and customers’ right to bear arms for self-defense at work? These policies and signs will do nothing to prevent workplace violence unless the employer enforces them by having EVERY employee go through a metal detector at every entrance 24/7.

As we have seen all too much, those planning to do harm will ignore policies and signs to bring a weapon,
(which is not necessarily a gun) into the work place. As for the argument that having a gun on hand will increase the chance of violence: Those who are taken by the moment will seize what is at hand. Factories, and even offices, are full things that can easily be used as deadly weapons by a person in a fit of rage.

Perhaps what was not mentioned in the story speaks the loudest: