Going postal
The movie Clueless is credited with popularizing the phrase "going postal".
Written and directed by Amy Heckerling 1995
Cher: You get your report card?
Dionne: . . . Yeah, I’m toast, you’ll never see me out of the house again. How’d you do?
Cher: God, I totally choked. My father’s going to go postal on me.
"The phrase ‘go postal’, meaning to fly into an uncontrollable rage, has a grim history: it’s first recorded by the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) in 1993, which writes, ‘The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some circles excessive stress is known as “going postal.”’ Evidently, the phrase originally referred to several recorded instances of U.S. Postal Service employees shooting at their colleagues; going postal, therefore, meant to shoot at one’s colleagues. By 1995, the phrase was appearing in extended use, often describing an angry outburst rather than literal murder. In this example, it’s clear that Cher doesn’t think that Mel will actually kill her."
blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/language-of-clueless/
Here's the Wikipedia link to Going Postal. And a list of postal killings. You can decide for yourself. But it looks to me like the retail industry is worse but no one's going to say Going Retail.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_killings
Researchers have found that the homicide rates at postal facilities were lower than at other workplaces. In major industries, the highest rate of 2.1 homicides per 100,000 workers per year was in retail. The homicide rate for postal workers was 0.22 per 100,000 versus 0.77 per 100,000 workers in general.
Actually there are the same number of active pilots as Postal employees - about 600000 each.
fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22864.pdf
According to this site, there are about 100,000 airline pilots so, if we subtract that, you still have 500,000 non-commercial pilots.
With postal employees numbering 600000, it might just be close to 10-1 ratio in favor of Aviation, like I thought. Plus, we're not really talking about the same thing if one is a job-site phenomenon as in multiple murders at a post office by a worker. We're talking serial killings or spree, or mass murders not done at work.
There's always David Berkowitz. He's the only one I can think of. He worked for USPS. I, of course, think he was not alone. There was John Carr, the Air Force mechanic (above left). (The idea of Berkowitz acting alone like that in New York would be like casting Dustin Hoffman as Taxi Driver...)
Google Search turns up one more in American postal worker, another New Yorker, Robert Shulman. (Shulman would fit the mold of what Berkowitz would actually do if he was a lone killer in New York – kill prostitutes at home – crimes similar to Joel Rifkin and Rex Heuermann.)
The only other postal employee that turns up is John Christie and he's in the UK. My list of aviation killers now includes guys from the UK.
Score 20-3. Not that it's a competition.
But there seems to be some resistance to the idea.
Maybe next we can crunch the Canadian numbers, eh?
Canada has one postal worker killer—Rosaire Bilodeau. He was in 1934.
There were about 10000 postal workers in Canada at that time. There were about 800 pilots. That's not an even comparison (1:12.5), so I won't use this particular example or examples from this time period.
If we stick to modern times, when the number of pilots is roughly 1/3rd of the number of postal workers (25000 to 70000), then we have Williams and Millard in Aviation in Canada. I don't have any examples of killer postal employees.
3 to nothing. Not that it's a competition.
The Mad Trapper was a balloonist in WWI but he was an American and the point is already made.
