Employee Handbook - Looking Out for Workplace Violence

The Virginia Tech shooting tragedy has once again raised America's and the world's awareness of possibly unstable individuals in school and in the workplace. The grim reality is that any one person could snap at any given time and businesses are not going to hire psychologists to sit on premises and assess all employees from CEO to janitor. However, following the VA Tech episode many companies have circulated lookout guidelines, hoping to catch a shooter before he or she goes too far.

In our time, awareness often turns into excessive madness as the line between healthy apprehension or alertness and paranoia is too often blurred. To Illustrate this point, I will bring some information from a recently updated Employee Handbook. The respectable company shall remain unnamed for obvious reasons...(notes under bold points are mine).

[...]if you observe or witness any of these early warning signals or other unusual behavior, you should immediately notify your supervisor or other manager and provide the details. Commonly mentioned warning signals include the following:

1. Direct or veiled verbal or physical threats of harm.
Repeat incidents may be cause for concern, but a lot depends on the tone in which the threats are delivered. An overly sensitive coworker might denounce someone for having playfully said he will kill him or wring his neck. My advise is as following: since you are going out of your way to write workplace guidelines, why not make them more specific, such as: If 'team member' spends his day hissing under his breath, covertly glancing at coworkers and murmuring 'Your time is near...infidels will die...death to the bourgeois...I was a latchkey child' alert your local HR office or supervisor.

2. Intimidation of others.
Again, this is too generic.

3. Carrying a concealed weapon.
I envision Comedy Central-like situations with the entire security staff surrounding an armed and dangerous employee and summoning the SWAT team only to discover that the harmful item under his suit jacket is a Treo 600 PDA.

4. Paranoid behavior.
I bite my nails and look over my shoulder to check if anyone is reading my emails. Is that paranoid behavior? I mean, who are we to define paranoid? My my, I wouldn't want to be a supervisor in this company. It would be like monitoring the elementary school playground.

5. Moral righteousness and indignation.
I'm stumped. Human characteristics vary greatly but I do not understand why being holier-than-thou could be a sign of potential violence. A psychotic individual might consider himself to be bigger and better than other lowly life forms, but so does my Aunt Golda and she's perfectly normal, if annoyingly aloof.

6. Inability to take criticism of job performance and/or holding a grudge.
Holding a grudge is a lookout sign... for a suing saga. Honestly though, I get it. Cho Seung-Hui hated rich people and everything else, and felt as if he was being forced into a corner by 'them', the enemy, so 'them' better watch out and be alert for grudge bearers in the workplace who are envious of their happy childhoods or one room $3500 a month studios. As for the Inability to take criticism, that happens to be a common tendency amongst us simple beings. It seems like the writer of this handbook has randomly picked characteristics out of a psychology textbook.

7. Extreme interest in semiautomatic or automatic weapons.
Another hobby I'll gave to give up on...

8. Fascination with incidents of workplace violence.
Yes and no. Sometimes people are just that: fascinated. If all regular readers of crime library.com were about to go out and gun down all of Main Street, such websites would have been outlawed log ago.

9. Obsessive involvement with the job.
Dude. It's called being a workaholic.

10. Being a loner.
Many shooter were loners. Other were not. Many loners are not shooters, just antisocial or shy. Do I even have to write this? It's self evident.

11. Violence toward inanimate objects.
I'll leave this to your interpretation. My husband has a coworker who bangs his head against his keyboard, but has yet to kill anybody.

12. Theft or sabotage of projects or equipment.
Would that be an indication of deep anger towards 'them' or the system? Or simple disillusion and/or dishonesty? Choices, choices... can we get any more ambiguous?