Download a sample chapter here!!

NEW EDITION COMING SOON!

Going Postal examines the phenomenon of rage murder that took America by storm in the early 1980's and has since grown yearly in body counts and symbolic value. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Mark Ames is able to juxtapose the historical place of rage in America with the social climate after Reaganomics began to effect worker's paychecks. But why high schools? Why post offices? Mark Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn't--and doesn't pay--what it used to. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal answers the questions asked by commentators on the nightly news and films such as Bowling for Columbine.

Mark Ames is the founding editor of "The eXile," a Moscow-based English-language newspaper and web magazine, co-author of the book The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia with Matt Taibbi, and author of V Rossiu s Lubovyu, a collection of translated columns published in Russia. He is a regular contributor to The New York Press and has been published in the Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Metro Silicon Valley and several Russian newspapers including Kommersant and Limonka. He has lived in Russia for most of the last ten years.

INTRODUCTION
Before Columbine, I looked at rage murders the way I viewed all gory crimes with high kill counts: with sick fascination.
Office and schoolyard murders meant little to me and I believe to most others who came of age in the Reagan Era except as material for black humor, ice breaker in punk conversation, variety in the mass murder and serial murder playbook. That's because none of us saw the need to dig too deeply: society was sick, man is a jackal, ha-ha-ha.
But Columbine changed that. Columbine was different. For me, and for millions more.
My first reaction to Columbine was that it made sense. It wasn't man being his vile self again. It wasn't Evil Nature springing another horrific surprise on us. The bottom line was that Columbine had meaning. It had context. Columbine actually inspired me. I felt vindicated. And as I was to learn in conversations, on web sites, I wasn't the only one who reacted that way. For many, the question was: why didn't it happen sooner, and why not more often? And more importantly, why haven't these murders been better exploited by the artists and authors? I was amazed when I started studying this issue how few serious books there are on the subject of office and school rage murders; those available are either lachrymose victim's memoirs or management consultant's handbooks. The only serious, literate attempt to confront rage massacres is Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, which became the highest-grossing documentary of all time. Yet still nothing in book form.
Which is incredibly strange if you consider the sheer number of office and school massacres, as well as the fact that the crime first appeared less than twenty years ago. The few available studies on the evolution of rage murders generally trace the crime's inception to the first post office massacre in Edmonds, Oklahoma, in 1986. Fifteen people died, including the assailant, and six were wounded. The massacre at Edmonds set off a spree of post office massacres: two dead in a Cheslea, Massachussetts post office killing on June 29, 1988; one worker walked into his post office in Pomway, California in 1989, put a gun to his head and shot himself; May 9, 1989, Alfred James Hunter III commandeered a light plane in Boston and sprayed the post office he worked at with an AK-47; three killed in an Escondido, California post office on August 10, 1989; October 10, 1991, a fired postal employee murdered his ex-supervisor and her boyfriend in their home in Wayne, New Jersey, then went to his former post office in Ridgewood and murdered two more; four dead and six wounded in the Royal Oak, Michigan post office, November 14, 1991; a Dearborn, Michigan post office worker kills two, wounds two in 1993; and so on. The murders and suicides among postal workers continue up through today.
From post offices the rage murders moved into the private sector office. The first cited by most went down at the Standard Gravure printing press in Louisville, Kentucky in September, 1989: 9 died, 12 were wounded. It didn�t take long to spread: one dead, two wounded by a disgruntled employee at the Fairview Development Center, Costa Mesa, California, 1991; a fired employee shoots three at Elgar Corporation, San Diego, 1991; also in 1991, a female employee unhappy with how she was being treated kills the plant manager at the Eveready Battery Co. in Bennington, Vermont, wounds 2, tries setting the plant on fire; fired employee from Fireman's Fund Insurance kills three, wounds two in Tampa, Florida, 1992; fired employee kills supervisor and coworker, Richmond Housing Authority, Richmond California, 1995; three dead, one wounded by fired employee at Trans-Continental Systems, Evandale, Ohio, 1995; three killed, four wounded by fired employee in Asheville, North Carolina, 1995; recently-fired refinery inspector kills 5 coworkers, self in Corpus Christi, Texas, 1995. Recent office murders include the massacre of 7 at the Edgewater software company in Massachusetts; four dead and four wounded at a Navistar plant in Melrose Park, Illinois in 2001; two wounded and six injured at a shooting spree at a Goshen, Indiana plant in late 2001; last year's nursing school massacre in Tucson resulting in four dead; and again last year, three dead and one injured in a Providence, Rhode Island newspaper massacre;
By the mid 1990s, office and postal rage massacres invaded one of the last safe places in America: white middle-class schools. Although the first modern school massacre took place in 1996 in Moses Lake, Washington, resulting in three murders, it was the massacre during a prayer class, resulting in 5 dead, at West Paducah High in Kentucky, in 1997, that really shocked America and established schools as the next massacre stage. Before Paducah, two were killed and three wounded by a student in Bethel, Arkansas in 1997, and two were killed and seven wounded at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi. After Paducah, murders and threats on school campuses exploded. 1998: An eight-grader in Edinboro, Pennsylvania burst into a school dance with a gun, killing one, wounding four; an 11-year-old and 13-year-old in Jonesboro, Arkansas shoot fifteen, killing four students and one teacher; student kills two, injures eleven in Springfield, Oregon. 1999 was the year of Columbine, a massacre that was followed by a string of "copy-cat" murders, attempts, plots and threats. They continue into the new millennium. In early 2001, a freshman in Santee, California shot and killed two fellow students and wounded 13; shortly after, at a school in a neighboring district, a 16-year-old shot and wounded 10 students, and shortly after that, a 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl at a Catholic school shot and wounded a fellow student. In late 2001, three students in New Bedford, Massachusetts were caught plotting a massive shooting and bombing spree at their high school which they hoped would be "bigger than Columbine." Last year, a Carmichael, California 13-year-old pulled out a .22 handgun and prepared to start shooting students and teachers from his "hit list" of eight, but was persuaded to stand down.
The phenomenon of rage murders in once-safe places like offices and schools is now a permanent feature of America's culture. We understand it so little, however, because the subject has been so insufficiently explored. It was only after Columbine, when I felt a deeply censored sympathy for the perpetrators (a sympathy widely shared not only by many observers, but surprisingly enough, even victims, as I'll later show), that I began to come up with the idea of exploring the whole issue of rage murders from the point of view that on some unexplored level, those murders are both inevitable and even, in a sense, justified.