Is Your Boss Responsible for Protecting You Against a Mass Shooter?

Last week, in the chaos that followed a murder-suicide in a professor's office at the University of California, Los Angeles, students and faculty were placed under a two-hour lockdown, just in case an armed suspect was still roaming the area. Thankfully, the horrors had ended, and the lockdown was just a precaution.

But for some on the UCLA campus, it was impossible to take the word "lockdown" literally, because a lot of the doors simply didn't lock. Students like Jason Schechter posted photos online of people MacGuyvering their own door locks out of things like belts and power cables, or fashioning barricades out of whatever heavy office stuff they could find, like photocopiers and tables.

Later that afternoon, when the lockdown was lifted, UCLA provost Scott Waugh said at a news conference that he was "troubled by some reports of unlocked doors," being posted online. "We'll review the locks on the doors," he said. "We want to learn from [this incident] and make sure that the campus is even more secure than it was at the start of the day."

But history shows that improvements in safety after shootings can be slow to materialize and are not generally spurred along by federal regulations or any sort of litigation.

Forcing students to stay in unlocked classrooms while a gun-wielding murderer stalks the hallways sounds like a horror-movie scenario. The real horror, though, is that it doesn't appear to be a violation of any existing standard for safety. "I'm not aware of any rules that speak directly to the ability to lock doors," J. H. Verkerke, law professor and director of the Program for Employment and Labor Law Studies at the University of Virginia School of Law, told VICE.

— Daph (@whydaphnewhy)June 1, 2016

And while it was terrifying that some of the UCLA doors also opened outward—leaving them both unlocked and nearly impossible to barricade—the logic behind that architectural choice is actually a no-brainer: "Building codes require that certain doors open outward in order to avoid trapping people who are trying to evacuate a room in the event of fire," said Verkerke.

Professor William Klug, the murder victim in the UCLA incident, was in an office rather than a classroom when he was shot, and offices aren't required to have locks either, according to Maureen Soyars, spokeswoman for the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA).

Soyars said OSHA has offered guidelines. She referred me to a brief section in the 1970 OSHA act called the "General Duty Clause," which broadly outlines the duties employers have in keeping employees safe. That clause has to cover everything from working at a Build-A-Bear Workshop to being a forklift operator. Basically, it says an employer shouldn't violate industry guidelines and must not make employees work around anything "likely to cause death or serious physical harm." Soyars described door locks for offices as "probably not something we would enforce."

According to the OSHA website, there are "currently no specific standards for workplace violence."

Other guidelines from the federal government are out of date in modern working environments. For instance, a 2011 video from the Department of Homeland Security about what to do in the event of an active shooter provides advice to employees like barricading doors, finding cover, and staying away from office windows. Common sense measures, sure, but ones that only makes sense in a workplace with hallways and individual offices—the kind of place you'd see in an episode of Mad Men, but probably not on Silicon Valley. Most companies today put their employees in open-plan offices, which now make up 70 percent of work environments. Open-plan offices are expansive places with no lock to lock, no entrance to barricade, and often nowhere to take cover.

According to Verkerke, that lack of cover doesn't mean open-plan offices are exceptionally dangerous places that should be regulated. Shootings are rare, he pointed out, and he added, "providing individual offices or bullet-proof cubicles would be both extremely costly and contrary to other important objectives of the open-plan office design."

Even when the federal government intervenes, it doesn't necessarily make a difference. In the wake of a 2012 shooting that killed two employees at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, OSHA investigated employee safety. OSHA's report, dug up in 2013 by the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, found that the clinic was disregarding employee safety from shootings and from all other sources of harm.

The Gazette found that in the event of an injury or death, patient safety was considered paramount, but that practices aimed at protecting employees were developed slowly by the hospital or not at all. That article noted that the relevant regulatory body for psychiatric hospital employees "does not have written workplace violence standards." According to the Gazette, the clinic had not heard of OSHA's findings at the time of publication, and no changes to workplace standards were being planned.

Lawsuits aren't much of a tool for change either, since the justice system generally decides fault in workplace violence issues through workers' compensation claims, Verkerke explained. That means insurance companies could potentially be on the hook and generally not employers. "Workers' compensation statutes are the exclusive remedy for accidental injuries arising out of and in the course of employment," he said.

But many workplaces—UCLA included—are full of non-employees, so employers could be subject to lawsuits that don't focus on workplace standards. Verkerke suggested a potential lawsuit "similar to the one that plaintiffs use in cases like school or theater shootings." He was referring to the Dark Knight Rises massacre in in Aurora, Colorado. In that case, victims—who weren't employees—sued the theater for neglect last month. In the end, however, the theater was found not liable. In 2013, a lawsuit against Virginia Tech by the families of victims of the 2007 shooting at that college was also dismissed.

"Perhaps with greater public awareness, and seemingly more frequent lockdowns," Verkerke added, "new best practices will develop."

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Note: A previous version indicated that OSHA regulated coal miners. Coal miners actually have their own federal regulatory agency. We regret the error. The phrase "downplayed the importance of locks—seemingly because they're small potatoes," has also been removed from paragraph 8 at OSHA's request.