Post mass-shooting, people always say stuff like that. They always say mass shootings are a grotesque departure from local social life and make the whole place look bad.

But they need to begin to understand – certainly in our bloodiest states, like Texas – that spilled blood everywhere – football games, parks, churches, highways, schools, state fairs – IS the state of Texas. Blood and guts all over the place is our clearest reflection of places like Dallas. Blood and guts and shrieking families running all over the state fairground IS the news out of Dallas, just as much as massive suicide by gun is the news out of Wyoming.

Like… it’s time to rewrite the state song:

It’s the crimson rose of Texas…

But Texas isn’t ready for this transition, even if this is indeed the stark reality, so until it arrives at an acceptance of its killing fields identity, we are going to have to watch as its citizens draw themselves up in shock again and again and again and again as mass killers shut down public life.

More interestingly: What happens when Texas does eventually realize the elementary truth that when everyone in the state owns shitloads of unlocked guns, someone in the state, purdy much every day, is going to go shooting one of them off in a public place? Eventually, in states like Texas, events like state fairs, without clear defensive barriers/National Guard protection, will be seen as the provenance of shabby stupid pathetic people who don’t know any better than to come in from the blood. No one will be seen outside, except at hyper-surveilled gated community socials. Hell, in time even the gated landscape will become too dangerous. Everyone will move inside.

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Correction: It’s not the state song. UD thanks a reader.

… American youth football.

All of America is way gunny, but certain areas (Balto MD, larger Shreveport, Macon, and Richmond, among others) are just totally insanely gunny. Colleges in these areas are getting all shot up, especially during big, open, outdoor/evening events like Homecoming, which UD, for these campuses, calls Guncoming.

Morgan State has now indeed announced it’s building a wall around itself.

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And look – its not very college-y — everyone knows that. Which is why so many shot up schools are postponing the inevitable. It’s a mark, a stigma, a plain admission that your school sits in a shooting gallery. And so – parents and applicants ask – what does that say about the experience of going out at night to get a pizza? Do we really want to choose this school?

This is a partial list of schools where homecoming features (sometimes year after year) mass shooting on campus. Bowie State’s the latest. I think it’s time to call this a trend.

To call it a trend and think about it. Why is Guncoming (seems a better name for it) a thing?

Here are a few observations.

1.) These are already notoriously shot up locations: Baltimore, Shreveport area, Macon area, Richmond area. The gun crime rate in these locations is astounding; these campuses are unsafe.

2.) I don’t think the campuses quite acknowledge/realize how badly shot up things are around them. I recall Grambling’s president’s comment: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” His campus sits in one of the most murderous metro areas in the US, but he thinks he’s in Arcadia.

I mean, UD gets it that you’re profoundly disinclined to characterize the local bloodletting correctly if you want your institution to survive. Let the murder/injury rate get bruited about, and parents are going to be reluctant to entrust their children to you. I’ve made this point also about whacked out Waco, where parents still send their kids to Baylor, despite knock your socks off gun violence all over town. (Plus some, er, on-campus issues.) When will Guncoming locations become so infamous that people won’t want to go to school there? Things are definitely going to get bloodier.

3.) Big, open, often late-night homecoming events are just asking for it. Penetrate the crowd with ease and find the guy/group that has dissed you in some way and let it rip. Maybe you don’t know your victims, but someone jostled you and you’ve been itching to give your Glock a test run. Don’t make it easy for the gunnies: Close your campus, and I mean seriously close it. Don’t do late-night events.

This blog has long followed the way gun-mad America has ritualistically gunnified more and more of our public events, especially those involving parties and football/baseball/basketball games. Gather large numbers of excited people pretty much anywhere now. Make some of them drunk or high; piss some of them off because they lost a game or an object of sexual interest or indeed any sort of competition/argument.

Or hey maybe just make one of them plain ol’ celebratory and what better way to express your exuberance than to shoot your AK into the air, or into a crowd? Once guns are always and ever there, and once they take on massive symbolic/expressive significance, it seems pretty obvious that Morgan State and many others will, year after year, feature gunfire as a crucial part of homecoming.

And the logic of escalation/tradition means that by the third gun-year, five people will be shot (five people were just shot at Morgan State’s homecoming) rather than one or two. It also may mean groups of shooters: Baltimore’s mayor has announced that “It’s believed there were three shooters firing into the crowd, none apprehended or ID’d at this time.”

Getta loada that! THREE shooters.

Hysterically racing away from the shots; lockdown; weeping with your loved ones when lockdown’s over and you’ve survived — it’s a full-grown postmodern metanarrative now, self-defining and even somehow cathartic. We’ve come through! We’ve cheated the reaper again this year. On to next year.

Question: How do they relax in Wyoming?

Answer: By having lots of loaded guns loose around the house.

… Chapel Hill.

Every week they sprint.

And of course down there “People are armed to the teeth.”

And from the comment thread on a 2021 NYT story that asks in its headline “WHY DOES LOUISIANA CONSISTENTLY LEAD THE NATION IN MURDERS?” :

Combine the [nation’s] highest rate of gun ownership with the lowest rate of education, sprinkle in some STRONG white supremacy and insurrection and that spells doom for all Louisianans.

There are close to five hundred comments on the article, many of them from Louisianans, and most commenters agree that while you’re free to consider variables like a history of violence and an engrained distrust of government and its institutions, the crucial element is simply stunning numbers of guns in the hands of hyperemotional (the motive is often ‘disrespect’) and unschooled people.

Equally stunning but absolutely predictably, the killers are getting younger and younger, as in the latest story out of the blood-soaked Baton Rouge area, involving a high school kid blowing away one schoolmate and injuring two.

Zat all you got? 2.5 kids a month plus at least one adult gun death a day by homicide or suicide? Give me a call when citizens’ brigades are mopping up twenty buckets of blood every morning in Civic Plaza and getting shot at while doing it! Okay?

Meanwhile, Guv, if you think a few pulverized brats justifies seizing our AKs, you are looking at a world of pain.

America’s Number One most dangerous city!

“It’s very scary, and then you’ve got police officers telling you don’t come down here without a gun. I just won’t come anymore because if you have to go somewhere with a gun, why do you go?” the witness said.

Another man, who did not want to be identified, brought his wife and three small children downtown to enjoy the new playgrounds in Tom Lee Park. He said he heard a gunshot while they were walking back to their car, and when they got to the parking lot on Wagner Place, he saw the shooting victim next to his vehicle.

“It’s actually normal down here. It’s crazy in broad daylight,” he said.

Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.

A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.

Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.

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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.

[The] official GOP platform … accepts widespread, preventable death and suffering. I don’t actually believe most Republican voters accept that … , but the GOP apparatus does — not because party officials do not comprehend the gun-created, blood-splattered abattoirs in community after community, but because they need the votes of everyone who believes that any constitutionally reasonable laws to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries are a coordinated conspiracy [among] Democrats, RINOs, communists, socialists, globalists (aka a global Jewish cabal), Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Marxists. 

... Was a nation awash in guns what the framers of the Constitution intended?

… We are now a nation held hostage by trauma entrepreneurs who wield and brandish firearms as weapons of holy war. Believe it or not, the vast majority of my fellow firearm owners will broadly agree that [serious gun] reforms are necessary. 

This spiel now has the status of the Nicene Creed – all adherents to America are learning it by heart.

“Zijie was a wonderful human being. And I also know his family, so as a father as well. I start with that because it was indicative of how he interacted with people,” said Dr. Norbert Scherer, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, where Zijie underwent his postdoctoral training… “Zijie absolutely as a young scientist was certainly on a great trajectory to become a dominant person in his field,” said Scherer… Another postdoc fellow who worked alongside Yan remembered him as “a great researcher, always positive, smiling, and full of new ideas.”

In China Zijie’s jealous insane shooter would have had to content himself with private rage against a more successful (professionally; personally) human being; in Tinderbox USA he jest moseyed on over to the gun store, ammoed up, and blew his better’s fucking head off. No muss, no fuss, and he feels SOOOO much lighter on his feet now.

Just remember: “A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, … but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. … The discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, [comes ] down to guns.”

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Then there are the emergent social attitudes on the part of Americans as they come to accept their primary existential condition as Sitting Duck.

“It’s been heavy around campus. Physically mentally and everything else we have experienced,” [one student] said. “It’s sad that that this happened on our campus but this is also a reality for us especially growing up.”

Point One: SD is a structural reality, which is one of the most important things you learn growing up in this country.

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“I think we’re just very lucky it wasn’t more than what it was, we’re lucky to have each other, we’re connected well as a team,” [a soccer player] said. “We felt the support and love of each other, just prayers go out to the family.”

Point Two: Coulda been worse. He didn’t rampage through classrooms killing dozens like the guy at Virginia Tech. Plus, this has brought us together.

Looking at the bright side is part of the drill now, too.

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Point Three: ‘“I feel the same anxiety that I believe the students and faculty, other community members feel. The fear of not being able to send our children to school and not worry about them having to face senseless gun shootings,” said Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, a Chapel Hill native and UNC graduate, who represents the district.‘

A nearby elementary school was also locked down, which gave parents an opportunity to remember the pulverized children of Uvalde, and students the opportunity to start learning the ins and outs of SD at a very early age.

… North Carolina.

Such a treat to get pictures of these beautiful bright young people huddled in terrified silence, messaging their parents that they love them and have never been so scared… Wonder what the rest of the year will bring!

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The incident’s over, but no one’s saying anything about the incident. A few outlets are reporting one professor shot dead and another person wounded, but nothing’s been confirmed. Meanwhile, general trauma from having endured hours of lockdown/possible slaughter.

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Confirmation.

The killer’s tweets were, natch, full of paranoia; but a spot of paranoia never stopped anyone from amassing an arsenal in Tinderbox USA. OTC: No way being a maniac should keep a person from his very own AK47.

Local headline: UNC SHOOTING LEAVES ONE DEAD AND A CAMPUS TRAUMATIZED: ANOTHER DAY IN AMERICA.

Thousands traumatized, yes, but think hard too about how much fun it is to die like this. Maybe you’re lucky and you never know what hit you as the madman pumps away. Or maybe you die gradually, in agony, in shock, not knowing what’s going on, totally alone, anguishing in your last minutes of confused existence as you watch your blood pool. At least a dying soldier knows what’s up; at least he’s got buddies.

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The person shot to death in his office was the shooter’s advisor, with whom the shooter had published papers.

Motive? Sounds, if you read his tweets, like a John Lennon murder: A weak, envious paranoid decides to put his idol/nemesis out of business.