Episode 14: Going Postal, the shootings that coined the phrase

We don’t mail it in when we discuss the spate of US Postal Service-related shootings over a 20-year period that spurred the phrase “going postal,” particularly one in Edmond, Oklahoma, in 1986 that changed the way we look at mass shootings. Patrick Shirrell wasn’t the first disgruntled worker to shoot up his workplace, but when he killed 14 coworkers, it riveted the nation and brought us in to a new era. His was the deadliest of dozens of post office and/or postal working shootings from the early 1980s to early 2000s that, fairly or unfairly, gave us a new phrase for people who kill in the workplace.