Going Postal / January 10, 2011 Is the Arizona Shooting A New Kind of American Murder?
By Mark Ames
Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, Arizona, has been variously described as an “assassination” and a “shooting rampage”—but which one is it?
This may seem like a semantic quibble, but what occurred in that Safeway supermarket appears to be an entirely new type of American murder: a hybrid of political assassination, of the sort that plagued America in the 1960s and 70s, and a “going postal” rampage massacre, of the kind that first appeared in the mid- to late-1980s, with the rise of Reaganomics inequalities and the deterioration of workplace culture.
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Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond
Book Description: An eye-opening look at the phenomenon of school and workplace shootings in America, Going Postal explores the rage-murder phenomenon that has plagued — and baffled — America for the last three decades, and offers some provocative answers to the oft-asked question, "Why?" By juxtaposing the historical place of rage in America with the social climate that has existed since the 1980s — when Reaganomics began to widen the gap between executive and average- worker earnings — the author crafts a convincing argument that these schoolyard and office massacres can be seen as modern-day slave rebellions. He presents many fascinating and unexpected cases in detail. Like slave rebellions, these massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes even inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Taking up where Bowling for Columbine left off, this book seeks to set these murders in their proper context and thereby reveal their meaning.
