And with guns sold in big-box stores, gun shops and flea markets from one end of this country to the other, there is probably not a whole lot that anybody can do about it.

Thomas C. West, 50, a former truck driver who resigned two years ago from his Atlanta-based job for Watkins Motor Lines Inc., allegedly shot and killed two people and wounded three others in a shooting rampage that lasted only seconds.

The irony is that that's about as long as it takes for a manager to fire somebody.

We don't know all the details in the West Chester case. However, over the years, a number of workplace violence cases have involved disgruntled employees or former employees.

Linda Gravett, author of HRM Ethics: Perspectives for a New Millennium and senior partner at Gravett and Associates, a Cincinnati-based human resources consulting firm, says companies can be proactive.

"This is apparently somebody who was seething for a long, long time," she said. "And if somebody has intent to do harm, it is very difficult to prevent them."

The trucking company had a guard shack with a guard in it. It barely slowed down the shooter. He blew right past it, ran from his van and swept into a break room with two weapons blazing.

If there are any lessons for employers to learn from this incident and others like it, they have to back up a few years to find them. When a potentially disgruntled worker is still employed by the company, that's the time to defuse any anger, Gravett said.

It's true that people are the problem, not guns, and that Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms.

Still, the debate rages in society about what steps should or could be taken to control the threat of violence that haunts far too many American workplaces these days.

Our society - or community - cannot outlaw guns, and shouldn't.

But couldn't we outlaw or more tightly control the sale of ready-to-fire ammunition?

If laws exist that prohibit or tightly restrict the sale of ready-to-fire ammunition, a future shooter may have to do it with ammumunition he or she had to create.

That, alone, would show any jury that the shooter had clear intent to harm and nurtured that intent on a bullet-by-bullet basis.

It's true that outlawing or more tightly controlling the sale of ready-to-fire ammunition is probably not an absolute deterrent. But it's a step that lawmakers may at some point have to consider.

And in all life-and-death situations, considered thought and action are almost always better than doing nothing.

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E-mail at jeckberg@enquirer.com