In the aftermath of Saturday’s shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas the retail giant’s employees across the U.S. have begun questioning how safe they are at work.
Some want the Bentonville, Arkansas-based department store chain to change its corporate policy so that trained and licensed employees can carry firearms, while others want armed security at store entrances.
Most of all they want the nation’s largest private employer to reassure them that it’s taking the necessary steps to protect them, especially as the FBI warns the massacre in El Paso, coupled with a second shooting in Dayton, Ohio, could inspire copycat attacks.
“People say it’s not going to happen here, but I try to explain we have what’s called the internet, and it inspires people,” a Walmart employee in California told the Washington Examiner. “If there’s a crazy in Los Angeles or Sacramento, if they want to do something, they’re going to do it. It boils down to what home office is doing to protect us as associates.”
Twenty-two people were killed and more than two dozen were injured Saturday when a lone shooter opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. It was the deadliest shooting ever for the retailer, which employs 1.5 million people in the U.S., and came days after a disgruntled Walmart employee in Mississippi was arrested in the shooting deaths of two other associates.
To ensure its workforce is prepared in the event of an active shooter, Walmart requires its employees to undergo computer-based training once a quarter and employs specialists tasked with providing security in the stores.
But Walmart workers say the training isn’t enough, leaving workers unsure about the best way to respond to an active shooter. One worker from Colorado said it’s unclear who makes up the store’s so-called asset protection team and how suspicious behavior should be reported.
The company, the Colorado employee said, “should start by having management talk about the recent shootings” and inform workers “what they are doing to keep both their employees and customers safe.”
Law enforcement officers identified the shooter in El Paso as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, and are investigating whether he authored a manifesto that declared the attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
“There are associates who are scared to go to work, me being one of them” the employee said. “I feared that there would be some sick copycat shooter.”
Democratic presidential hopefuls lambasted President Trump in the aftermath of the slayings for divisive rhetoric they say has stoked fear and encouraged violence, and lawmakers in the party renewed calls for more stringent gun regulation.
As for Walmart, it’s facing external as well as internal scrutiny, with activists such as actress Alyssa Milano taking to Twitter to urge the retailer to stop selling firearms.
Company spokesman Randy Hargrove said Walmart has made no policy changes so far. “Our main focus has been on our associates and customers in the El Paso community,” he told the Washington Examiner.
The company did tighten its policies on firearm and ammunition sales last year by raising the minimum purchasing age to 21 after a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Walmart doesn’t sell handguns and stopped selling assault-style rifles in 2015.
But the worker from California, where no Walmart stores sell firearms, said that even if the retail giant instituted the same practice at all its locations, someone could still “walk into a sporting goods store” and buy a firearm there.
That continued accessibility has prompted some workers to ask whether they can wear bulletproof vests to work, indicating a level of fear that’s “unequivocally unacceptable,” the employee said. “Walmart has to do something to protect its associates from these tragedies. We haven’t even gotten so much as a press release or a memo from home office, not a word.”
Walmart hasn’t issued any company-wide directives since Saturday on changes to its security practices, Hargrove said, but it continually assesses the needs of different stores.
The retailer and other businesses should take more sophisticated steps to prepare for an attack, said Joe Hendry, director of risk assessments and a national trainer at ALICE Training Institute. An important one is retaining an outside professional for a risk assessment and then showing employees how to “respond to these events in a realistic way.”
Public places such as shopping centers aren’t necessarily becoming more vulnerable to mass shootings, he said; they have “been very vulnerable from the start.”
“We’ve treated a lot of things in a very amateur fashion and not taken it seriously,” Hendry said. “We can’t treat this anymore like this is not going to happen to us. I don’t think it’s ever going to stop. Violence is an endemic human quality.”
