Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

By now most people have heard about the shooting massacre at Virginia Tech yesterday. The shooter has been identified as a South Korean loner and there's a lot of talk by the clueless about poor police response, gun control and a slew of other irrelevant gibberish.

I'll cover some of those issues in upcoming posts but the most important lesson to be learned from this is that you are not safe in your home, at school or where you work. While you may be level headed and sane the guy two cubicles over, or sally from accounts boyfriend, might be complete nutters hell bent on wreaking havoc by killing a bunch of people before taking themselves out.

The bottom line is this...do you have a plan in place in the event someone enters your place of work, worship or study and begins to open fire? If not, why not? I bet if you could talk to anyone of yesterday's thirty one victims they'd be all about implementing plans if they could do it over.

What about the company you work for? Do they have a plan in place? Find out, and, if they don't, suggest they get an expert in to formulate one. If they balk at the expense remind them that the average payout to families after a workplace massacre is around the four million dollar mark. So, should Larry the lounge lizard from marketing lose his job and come back to work and kill his boss and four fellow employees the company will be looking at a 20 million dollar bill.

2 comments:

Scott Hughes said...

I agree! Thanks for posting that! Planning is a very important part of self-defense.

Marc said...

Virginia tech had a plan. The problem is their plan was to fail.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Policy 5616
Revision: 1 August 23, 2005
Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy Page 2 of 7

2.2 Prohibition of Weapons
The university’s employees, students, and volunteers, or any visitor or other third party attending a sporting, entertainment, or educational event, or visiting an academic or administrative office building or residence hall, are further prohibited from carrying, maintaining, or storing a firearm or weapon on any university facility, even if the owner has a valid permit, when it is not required by the individual’s job, or in accordance with the relevant University Student Life Policies. Any such individual who is reported or discovered to possess a firearm or weapon on university property will be asked to remove it immediately. Failure to comply may result in a student judicial referral and/or arrest, or an employee disciplinary action and/or arrest.

Their plan played out perfectly.