A New Report On Workplace Shootings.
Sometimes when you do research, you have to chase the
data. Other times, the data chases you. And a new piece of research coming out
of the Johns Hopkins research group seems to be more of the second than the
first. The paper
covers gun homicides that occurred in the workplace from 2011 to 2015. It is
drawn from data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics which tracks
workplace injuries,
of which there were 18,327 fatal injuries over this same five-year period. How
many of these deaths were due to guns discharged in a workplace? 1,553, or eight
percent.
This happens to be half the percentage of gun injury
deaths that are counted in all injury deaths for the same five years. Of
984,554 deaths from injuries listed by the CDC, 169,396 were caused by guns, or 17
percent. The gun mortality number
includes 105,235 self-inflected injuries – suicides – which aren’t covered by
the workplace data at all. Pull gun suicides out of the overall gun numbers and
we have 64,161 gun deaths where someone shot someone else, and the workplace percentage
of all gun deaths drops to 2 percent.
On average, there were slightly more than 300 workplace
fatal shootings each year. The total daily workforce is roughly 150 million, of
which some 7 million work at home. Which means that on the average workday,
more than 140 million Americans are in a workplace of some kind. In other words, on average, one out of
466,666 people at work might be killed with a gun. Know what the odds are for
getting shot outside of the workplace if you are between the age of 19 and 34?
Try one out of 8,570, a figure which would probably be one out of 4,000 if we
just counted males. What would the odds look like if we calculated the
gun-homicide rate for males, ages 19 to 34 in inner-city neighborhoods where
the overall gun-violence rate is four, five or ten times higher than the national
rate?
What is missing from this paper is context, and what
the context shows is that compared to other environments, when it comes to gun
violence, the workplace environment is a pretty safe place. In a way, this
paper reminds me of all the talk about arming teachers in schools, when what is
overlooked again and again is that schools are much safer environments
than the streets around the schools, particularly for the age-group that’s
supposed to be attending school.
On the other hand, using the data from the Census of
Fatal Occupational Injuries does allow this research team to grab details about
gun homicides that provide a more nuanced assessment of why some conflicts
between individuals in the workplace end up with one of them pulling out a gun.
The researchers found that it’s not just an argument escalating into violence
which brought about the appearance and use of a gun. The shooting might have
been precipitated by a long-standing conflict between co-workers rather than resulting
from a specific, observable event.
If there is one data gap which I would hope can some
day be filled, it is that the definition of a ‘workplace’ should include the size
of the workforce and/or the number of workers in the workplace when the
shooting occurred. More than half of the 250,000 firms classified
as manufacturing companies have 9 employees or less, yet there are also nearly
15,000 companies that employ between 100 and 500 or more. How do you set up a
program that could spot troublesome employee relationships in plants that vary so
much in size? You probably don’t.
Of course the simple answer is to prohibit guns in the
workplace, right? Not so simple because as this study points out, nearly half
the shooters who killed co-workers first had to go to some place other than
where they were working in order to get their hands on a gun.
Does access to guns in the workplace increase the risks of gun violence? Gee, what a surprise.
