Many workers and managers around the country are developing what-if scenarios in the wake of increasingly common mass shootings, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"Sadly, we live in a world where you should always suspect the worst," Maricarmen Molina, 26, a shop steward at a New Jersey apparel house told the Journal about her mental map of how she hopes to escape should a gunman ever enter her workplace.
Emelia Sherin, born 2½ years before the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting in Littleton, Colorado, told the Journal she spent most of her high school years doing active-shooter drills in classrooms. Now, working multiple jobs in Ohio, she told the Journal she often finds herself creating a "film reel" in her head of what she would do if a shooter entered a room.
"I genuinely fear for the future," she said. “When I was a kid, I never thought this would be my adulthood.”
Others workers and bosses told the Journal they had plotted out hiding spots, or stocked insect spray to disorient a gunman, or bought doorbells to use as makeshift panic buttons.
"It's a shame we have to live this way," Carlo Scissura, president and chief executive of the New York Building Congress, an industry group, who has added active-shooter training, told the Journal.
Other employers like Toyota, Allergan, and Saks Fifth Avenue also have installed gunshot-detection sensors, the Journal reported.
According to the Journal, in nearly two dozen states, including Texas, Florida, and Illinois, where citizens may carry handguns, most worksites still ban firearms on the premises. Many employers are now rethinking those gun policies, the Journal reported.
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