By now, we’ve all heard about the horrific and very public shooting of two TV news employees in Roanoke, Virginia. The two young journalists were killed by a former employee of the same TV station where the journalists were working. In a fax received after the shooting, the attacker alleged that he was repeatedly harassed, bullied, and discriminated against for being black and gay, and on Twitter he alleged that one of the journalists had made racist comments to him and that the other “went to HR on me after working with me one time.”
While incidences like this are shocking, they are, unfortunately, not uncommon. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), homicide is the fourth-leading cause of fatal occupational injuries in the United States, and the main cause of death for women in the workplace. Of the 4,547 fatal workplace injuries that occurred in the United States in 2010, 506 were workplace homicides, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries. Nearly 2 million Americans report being the victims of workplace violence every year. And OSHA says many more cases go unreported. “The truth is, workplace violence can strike anywhere, anytime, and no one is immune,” the agency notes on its website.