Hey, welcome back, bingers. I want to start today's episode by saying one category of crime

we generally don't like to cover on our podcasts is mass shootings. In fact, you may have noticed true crime

podcasts in general tend to avoid covering mass shootings. You think the reasons are obvious, but

they're actually rather murky and uncomfortable to explore because make no mistake true crime content,

whether it's date line or forensic files or binge the very podcast you're listening to, at the end

of the day it's entertainment. This is storytelling, this is content, and there are a lot of ethical

considerations, questions, and quandaries embedded in both consuming and creating true crime content.

Though this isn't to say you should feel dirty about consuming it, our interest in the dark,

the scary, the gruesome, and humans killing other humans dates back. Will it dates back millennia

from the Bible to the murder ballads of a few centuries ago? True crime has been around for a long,

long time. But there are some stories that cross lines and flirt with taboo in a way that makes

it difficult to incorporate them into entertainment. Crimes involving children sometimes fall into this

category and so does mass shootings. The problem with mass shootings is we're living through an

unprecedented mass shooting epidemic. Mass shootings have become commonplace in America.

The symptom of a deeply sick and wounded society, it's a fact of life in America, one that's painful,

politically, and morally divisive, and oversaturated in the news media. So as true crime stories,

they're often not especially interesting. But when you look further back in time to the 20th

century, before mass shootings in America were a weekly occurrence, you see the seeds of the

epidemic starting to sprout. Like, remember when people would go postal? The phrase going postal

arose from a 1986 incident that remains to date, the deadliest workplace mass shooting in United

States history. When 44 year old postal worker Patrick Cheryl upset by, among other things, a

recent reprimand entered the Edmund Oklahoma post office branch where he worked and opened fire,

...