I mean being reported when it happened not something you read about after the fact. A lot of people today are tweeting that Columbine is the first one they remember. For me it was an older one. In the 80s a guy shot up a McDonald’s in, I think, California. I believe several people died. It was all over the News and was a huge story for some time. I was a kid or just barely a teenager when that happened I think. What is the first one you remember?
University of Texas tower shooting in 1966. Charles Whitman killed 16 and injured 31.
Off the top of my head, I remember a mass shooting at a McDonald’s in California in the 80s.
The McDonalds one. I actually went to San Ysidro years later and saw the monument (they tore that one down and built a new one close by). Seems to have shifted from workplace violence to random and school shooting since then, Columbine being the “big one”.
The Oklahoma Post Office one. Looking it up, it was in 1986. 15 dead (including the shooter.)
Same one for me. Even though it was basically across the country, it was heavily covered and carried in our corner of north-east PA. I had relatives in San Antonio who went to Austin a fair bit so it really burned itself into my young brain.
And spawned the term “going postal”.
I was ready to answer with Columbine, but after reading the OP, I’m reminded of another McDonald’s shooting that happened in the early 90s in Killeen Tx.
Actually, I think I remember the incident that coined the phrase “Going Postal”. Can’t remember if that happened before or after the McDonald’s incident though.
The McDonalds one was in San Ysidro, CA in 1984.
Okay, I was thinking of the Luby’s shooting that happened in 91. Link
“I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.”
Brenda Ann Spencer shooting up the school playground at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego on January 29th 1979.
The Texas tower is the oldest one I have read about but it happened before I was born.
San Yisdro is indeed the one I was thinking of, thanks.
Five dead in Ohio.
Flashback memory, I had forgot about this. I was in the Navy stationed in San Diego at the time.
I remember the post office shooting (I was 7) most likely because it spawned “going postal.” The first one I remember intensely watching news about was Columbine.
I would have thought that as well, but, apparently, “going postal” as a term doesn’t show up until 1993. At least in print. Which makes sense to me, as the first few incidents of something like this would most likely be treated as an anomaly, but it looks like by 1993, there had been enough incidents to inspire a term for it. Now, granted, the Oklahoma one wasn’t the first postal killing, but the early 90s events were probably the catalyst for creating expression “going postal.” I certainly don’t remember the term before the early 90s.
Same here.
Me, too, fellow geezer! 
ETA: Another article about the term “going postal.” Also pinpoints its first use in print to that St. Petersburg times article. Now, granted, print use is usually going to trail spoken usage by a bit, but I can’t find anything nearly contemporaneous to the 1986 incident. You would think that there would be some print or other media usage of it (contemporaneous TV shows, news programs, documentaries, radio, MTV) of it if it really entered out vocabulary back then, but I find no evidence of this anywhere.
I do find a few web pages claiming that’s when the term entered the language, but all of the pages with citations have the 1993 St. Petersburg Times article as a reference. I could believe maybe after the 1991 incidents, it wormed its way into the lexicon and only showed up in 1993 in print or other media, but not all the way back to 1986.
The shootings in Hungerford, in 1987 - Hungerford massacre - Wikipedia - I would have been ten. I remember being a bit creeped out by that town-name if I heard it after that.