12 Sep Houston Releases Video to Help People Survive Workplace Shooters

The City of Houston is trying to educate people as to how to survive an incident where an active shooter invades their workplace or another location. The city produced a video that offers a dramatization of a shooter, armed with a shotgun, walking through a place of business and opening fire at random. With several mass shootings making the news in recent months, this information should be useful to anybody who works in a public place or, for that matter, who enjoys attending a lot of public events.

The video offers advice, like many videos, in a very simple and easy to remember format. The video recommends that people who are faced with a workplace shooter first try to run and find a way out of the area. It recommends that you don't let anyone else hold you up and that you do everything you can to get out fast. It then recommends that, if you cannot get out of the area, to find a place to hide and to hold up there until the authorities arrive. In the most desperate situations, the video recommends that you improvise weapons and band together and fight, if necessary.

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According to reporting by the Associated Press, other cities have already asked if they could use this video to educate people. One of the most dangerous factors in any workplace or public place shooting incident is panic. Like videos that give people solid, intelligent and reliable advice about emergency situations such as fires and floods, this one seeks to break down the procedure into simple and easy to remember steps so that, when people are faced with such a situation, they don't have to think, they can rely on what they've already been instructed to do.

Safety in the Workplace

Safety in the workplace is the responsibility of the employer. Most of the time, when somebody ends up getting hurt at work, it's the result of an employer being negligent with safety requirements or, in many cases, it's simply an accident that nobody could have seen coming and nobody could've prevented. When people get hurt because of lax security conditions at a workplace, however, the employer may well be held liable in court.

If you are the victim of workplace violence that ended up causing you injury, psychological trauma or other hardships, make sure you make it a point to sit down and speak with an attorney about the matter.