The ultimate sources of some anti-authority violence lie at the societal level and these cannot be remedied easily by public policy. Therefore, to understand anti-authority violence it is first necessary to address the sources, the justifications, and ramifications of violence in American society. This paper identifies some factors that are particularly associated with attacks on governmental authority figures. Willa Bruce Bruce argues that physical violence in the work place is a manifestation of the spiritual and psychological violence created by downsizing, cost-cutting, supervisory ineptitude, and criticism of workers. The hearts and souls of the American worker are damaged by a violation of personhood as insidious as the physical acts which get reported in the national news.
Violence begets violence.
Violence is a habit that must be broken. Bruce suggests that the work place can be recreated by an individual acknowledgement of a Power greater than one's self. She offers a Twelve Step Program, Violence Perpetrators Anonymous, as a way that this can happen. Dealing With Workplace Violence in Georgia's Cities and Counties William L. Waugh , Jr. and Lloyd G. Nigro Using the fears of workplace violence expressed by public employees as a reference point, this analysis examines the responses of city and county governments in the State of Georgia to the threat of external and internal violence. As a preliminary assessment of the responsiveness of city and county governments to the problem of workplace violence, officials in Georgia local governments with populations of 50,000 or higher were asked about both their perceptions of the threat and the specific actions taken by their governments to address it.