On the morning of November 14, 1991, recently fired letter carrier Thomas McIlvane entered the post office facility in Royal Oak, Michigan, walked to the area where management sits, and shot his former bosses. He killed four people, wounded four others, and then killed himself. It was not the first nor the last time a postal worker murdered his coworkers, nor was it the deadliest. But it was one of the most illustrative events of the "going postal" phenomenon.
By now, Americans are all too familiar with the pattern of media coverage after a mass shooting, much more so than they were in 1991. A common feature has always been the news interviews with coworkers, neighbors, and acquaintances of the shooter in an attempt to create some kind of profile of why this person committed such an atrocity.
Perhaps it is only in retrospect, having seen tragedies like this unfold so many more times, that I could truly appreciate how unusual those post-shooting interviews were in Royal Oak. Instead of the typical attempts to reckon with an unthinkable event, nobody at Royal Oak seemed to think it was so unthinkable. In fact, many of them had been waiting for something like this.
"When I heard there was a shooter, in my mind it could have been anyone," one postal worker told a news crew shortly after the shooting. Then, he said something you almost never hear anyone say after a mass shooting.
"I understand why he did it."
As I talked to some of my coworkers about this week's edition—who doesn't love someone slacking them about 30-year-old mass shootings?—I learned not everyone knows the term "going postal" refers to actual events. In the late 80s and early 90s, a spate of shootings by disgruntled postal workers became the primary way most Americans thought of the post office. Until Columbine, any outburst of violence was framed through the lens of "going postal." But if you grew up in a post-Columbine world, "going postal" generally means "going berserk" regardless of whether a violent act took place. Gradually, it even became a joke.