"Going Postal".
It's a synonym for "going berserk".
I'm defining it because I'm not sure it's got quite the cultural cachet it had, say, 20-30 years ago, when it was a very popular expression to say that someone had slipped the surly bonds of rationality.
And even if someone uses it, I don't suspect most people under 50 have the faintest idea where it came from.
For a while, starting in the mid 1980s, there was a rash of massacres at post offices - Johnson South Carolina, Anniston Alabama, Atlanta, Manitou Oklahoma, New Orleans, Edmond Oklahoma (with 14 dead, worst workplace shooting in US history), Royal Oak Michigan, Ridgewood and Wayne New Jersey, Dearborn Michigan and Escondido and Dana Point California - many carried out by postal workers.
There was a national push to figure out what was making US Postal Service employees so homicidally unstable (with some success - although there have been post office shootings in the past 25 years, still mostly invoving USPS workers going, er, postal.
One of the other responses was to make it illegal for citizens to carry guns in post offices - essentially reinforcing the ban on legal civilian firearm carry on federal facilities to the post office. And to this day, even if you're a legal carry permit holder or law-abiding resident of a "constitutional carry" state, getting caught with a legal firearm in a post office is a ticket to a federal felony.
Which is a little like forcing people to take the bus to a NASCAR race because there might be crashes on the track.
But that might be changing.
FPC WIN: The District Court ruled that the federal ban on firearm possession, storage, and carry at US Post Offices and related properties violates the 2A in our case of Firearms Policy Coalition v. Attorney General Pam Bondi.https://t.co/9R1EsyiPhB
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) September 30, 2025
A federal court judge has ruled that the USPS's rule violates the Second Amendment, in yet another post-Bruen win for gun rights
Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, said both the post office’s own regulation and a federal law barring firearms possession in a “federal facility” cannot survive scrutiny after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in the Bruen case. That ruling said that for firearms restrictions to stand, they must be consistent with what the founders who crafted the Second Amendment would have envisioned.
Judge O’Connor said post offices existed at the time of the founding. Lawmakers at the time made laws punishing attacks on mail carriers and postal facilities, but did not bar weapons themselves....“Absent a relevantly similar historical analogue, it is hard to envision that the founders would countenance banning firearms in the post office — particularly because they did not do so themselves,” he wrote.
Gun rights groups took a victory lap - in this case, Brandon Combs of the Firearms Policy Coalition:
“As we’ve said all along, governments cannot ban weapons in unsecured public spaces, full stop,” said FPC President Brandon Combs. “For too long, peaceable people have been threatened with prosecution simply for carrying weapons for self-defense while mailing a package or buying stamps. That ends here. The Second Amendment simply does not permit governments to invent new so-called ‘gun-free zones’ wherever they please.”
This should, of course, have a cascade effect as state gun rights groups challenge "gun free zone" laws in legislatures and in court. There are still quite a lot of them, ranging from picayune fossils of administrative turf-mongering (in Minnesota, the state judicial branch declared itself gun-free so as to tell the legislature "you're not the boss of me") or parochial superstition (public parks are "gun free" in Boston, San Francisco and DC, which is why parks in those cities are such exemplary crime-free zones. The light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina is "gun free", which meant the guy who murdered Iryna Zarutska didn't have to worry about any good Samaritans spoiling his dissociative break.
So if you hear that whirring, that's the sound of more lawsuit printers warming up.
