In today’s America, spree killings have reached epidemic proportions.

The term “going postal” has become the way we commonly refer to the mental state of anybody who goes on a shooting spree.

Most people don’t realize that in the overwhelming majority of cases people who commit these murders have no criminal record or history of mental illness. So what drives so many seemingly normal people to kill this way, what pushes them over the edge? Why all the bloodshed, and why now?

America has witnessed widespread changes over the last 50-years, along with a profound transformation of the relationship between the individual and society.

Could this shift have resulted in unseen forces, both within the workplace and outside of it, that are propelling this epidemic of “going postal”? After all, any epidemic requires certain societal conditions in order to break out and affect masses of people.

Murder by Proxy: How America Went Postal is the first documentary to look the so-called “going postal” phenomenon through the lens of the growing socio--economic changes that have swept over this country—beginning in the Reagan era and extending to the present.

As the film explores the basic question of what brings a seemingly normal person to the point of committing mass murder, it examines the complex interplay of personal and societal factors leading up to incidents of workplace massacres, starting with the earliest post office massacre in 1986.