Fired! Ready! Aim! - the evolution of violent behavior from disgruntled employees and others who do not get what they want - Column

National Review, April 26, 1993 by David Klinghoffer

It's hard to remember now, but the weekend after a thousand pounds of nitric and sulphuric acids exploded under the World Trade Center, speculation about the identity of the bombers focused on two groups: crazed Serbians, and "disgruntled employees" of the Port Authority, which operates the Twin Towers.

The phrase - "disgruntled employee" - strikes fear into the heart of lawabiding Americans. It's one of those media cliches which, unlike the frequently heard "chilling effect," condenses truth rather than muddying it. Hear the two words together on the radio while you're in the shower, the noise of the water allowing only snatches of narrated news to get through, and instantly the body freezes in mid soaping.

It has become almost commonplace for the worker with a grievance to take a gun (or guns), show up at the office, and shoot everybody. Indeed the single word "disgruntled," which once carried the comic suggestion of distressed grunting, is all you need to hear to know that something terrible has happened.

Post offices seem to be particularly susceptible to such employee fermentation. In November 1991, Thomas McIlvane, dismissed from his job as a mailman, entered the loading dock of the post office in Royal Oak, Michigan, and walked around the building spraying fire from a Ruger semiautomatic carbine, killing three supervisors and wounding 14 onlookers, before shooting himself.

The same year, Joseph M. Harris, former mail sorter in Ridgewood, N.J., stabbed his former supervisor to death with a samurai sword, then visited his former workplace and shot dead two more postal workers. In a note left at his home, he recalled the 1986 murder, by another disgruntled post-office employee, of 14 people in a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma. He didn't mention the 1989 murder of two postal workers in Orange Glen, California, by another (disgruntled) postal worker. Thinking about such stories while visiting your own local post office gives a sinister twinkle to the customary sullen stares from the men and women behind the counter.

Nor is it only Postal Service employees who seem to love their job so much that losing it can drive them to murder. CNN's Moneyline reported last month that 350 Americans have been killed in the past decade by "disgruntled employees." Recent cases include Robert Early Mack, who shot two executives at General Dynamics in San Diego after they fired him; and Paul Calden, formerly employed at a Fireman's Insurance office in Florida, who waited eight months after being laid off before returning to the office and killing three former supervisors.

The killer needn't, however, commit his crime on the job site itself. Last April in Roseville, California, a young man was fired from his job on the assembly line at the Hewlett-Packard electronics plant. Instead of blaming Hewlett-Packard, he settled on a highschool history teacher who had flunked him a couple of years earlier. In May, the twenty-year-old highschool drop-out, identified by the New York Times as a "disgruntled former student," returned to Lindhurst High School in nearby Olivehurst and fired blasts from a shotgun and .22-caliber rifle into randomly selected classrooms, killing four people. "The school failed me," Eric Houston said over and over as this was going on. "They left me with a c---y job."

The country's deadliest shooting, in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991, was performed by a man driven by anger at women and frustration at the fact that, two years back, he had lost his job as a merchant seaman. And so George Hennard drove his pickup truck through the plate-glass window of Luby's Cafeteria, walked coolly around the premises, shot to death 22 people, then adjourned to the bathroom and shot himself.

The Washington Post noted, in puzzled surprise, that Hennard "apparently never worked for the [Luby's Cafeterias] chain or even applied to work there." Imagine that.

"If you're firing large numbers of people," warns one "crisis-management" expert interviewed by CNN, "you're liable to have a large number of people who are very disgruntled." Reporter Kitty Pilgrim adds that "all of [this] can be avoided if management is sensitive and realizes that even in the most difficult times employees are human beings, with fears and hopes."

Is insensitivity really the culprit here? Is it unemployment? Or is it the easy availability of guns? What has changed about America in the past few years to produce such dangerously high levels of disgruntlement?

Surely bosses haven't all of a sudden turned significantly more capricious or cruel in this era of law suits. Unemployment is higher than we might like, but lower than it was at other times in American history when employees did not come looking for their bosses with a samurai sword.

As for guns, since the end of the Civil War, when returning war veterans made firearms a common appliance of civilian life, America has been a well-armed country. Fashion in the late nineteenth century dictated that a gentleman's trousers include a "revolver pocket" at the waist: the welldressed man was assumed to be carrying a gun. Yes, today a David Koresh can amass a formidable stockpile of guns, but so could he have done twenty years ago. And yes, semi-automatic weapons are now obtainable: George Hennard used a Glock 17, capable of firing 17 rounds per magazine. But, while such guns may hike the body count, they don't increase the frequency of rampages by disgruntled employees.