Remember Postman shooters "Going Postal"? Odd that that all stopped just before school shooting became a normal thing. Was going postal the beta program?

30  2018-02-23 by CivilianConsumer

Probably just a coincidence, but the timing is very odd.

17 comments

1  RyanUnited 2018-02-23

Interesting.

1  jaydwalk 2018-02-23

Came here to say the same thing!

1  CivilianConsumer 2018-02-23

How the timeline progressed

1  digitalhoudini 2018-02-23

People are still "going postal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_killings The last incident involving the US Postal Service occurred on December 23, 2017.

1  CivilianConsumer 2018-02-23

Not talking about killings. Talking about showing up and shooting. Pretty sue there are more that didn't result in deaths.

1  SafeSecureSecret 2018-02-23

seems like it's just been a pretty consistent phenomenon but if u had numbers on total workplace shootings per year it would be interesting to see.

1  russianbot01 2018-02-23

I was thinking of this as well. Beta program is a perfect example.

1  LaMerced 2018-02-23

Mass murder by deranged, mentally-compromised cowards exists all sectors of society. We chose to focus on very specific instances of it.

1  cracker--jack 2018-02-23

It wasn't super common for postal workers to snap and "go postal". The term came from a particularly bad incident, and pretty much all incidents were employees killing other employees. Mostly supervisors.

1  CivilianConsumer 2018-02-23

There was more than one incident. Started in 92-95 or so, couple years later Columbine happened, than every few years after that increasing in frequency.

1  cracker--jack 2018-02-23

I'm aware there was more than one incident. The phrase going postal stemmed from one particular incident. It's something I've talked about pretty regularly with my coworkers at the post office.

1  a1s2d3f4g5t 2018-02-23

going postal clearly puts the focus on the mental health of the shooter

it makes the shooter the focus, not the weapon

you don't even have to buy that there is a nepharius govt plot to take all the gun to understand why the focus is on guns now, not shooters. one crazy person doing something is news for less than 24 hours. there is no one size fix all solution to random mentally unstable people doing horrible things. there isn't really a solution period. but if you make the story about something that is seemingly simple and doable that will fix the problem once and for all that also happens to be highly divisive along party lines, you can milk the story for a long time, and each recurrance will draw more ratings than the last because of how much more stridant each side gets each time.

1  CivilianConsumer 2018-02-23

Excellent comment, glad I made this post.

1  Occams-shaving-cream 2018-02-23

Or maybe it was the layoffs.

1  preciousgloin 2018-02-23

Because the mail never stops, it just keeps coming and coming and coming. There’s never a let up.

1  Rogers773 2018-02-23

If i remember there is a documentary out there on the postal shootings, i wish i could remember the name, and it talked about the post office bringing in an outside company to help streamline things to save money and then the employees started getting treated like garbage. After so long of that some started to snap and the shootings started.