A recent Science Friday investigated the absence of research studies of gun violence. Why does the CDC, for instance, shy away from supporting this sort of research?

The NRA “declined to come on the program,” but sent a statement complaining that researchers typically fail to mention positive outcomes associated with gun ownership, and only incorporate

“negative” outcomes such as suicide and/or homicides.

… before the United States bans assault weapons? We’re up to fifty killed in – what? – sixty minutes? Probably less time than that. (“It was done very quickly also.“)

UD bets we’ll need at least 300 killings – say roughly the contents of an airliner – in thirty minutes before something begins to happen.

I mean, multiple events with that body count/time frame, of course.

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There are those who refuse to wager.

“Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, tweeted in June of last year. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

… an AR-15-style assault rifle.

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[G]iven permissive U.S. gun laws, even someone like Mateen who allegedly abused his spouse and was repeatedly investigated by the FBI, could legally purchase an automatic weapon because he had not yet openly supported a terrorist group.

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“He had an automatic rifle, so nobody stood a chance.”

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Florida’s love affair with it.

Well, let’s just go down that list, shall we? Horrible hideous shit can happen anywhere, especially in a country where everyone has at least two guns. We’re getting the list now because of the latest entry on it – the nation’s premier Baptist university, and that university’s local police department, spent years ignoring rampantly raping football players. That’s Waco’s latest claim to fame.

Okay, so four things on the list are about Baylor, basketball, and football: The murder, the cover-up, the NCAA sanctions, and now the rapes. If you ask ol’ UD, who’s been covering big-time sports mayhem at America’s universities since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, there’s nothing reigniting or even igniting about that list — homicidal raping covering up and heavily sanctioned university sports programs are not uncommon in the United States.

Admittedly most of the murders take place shortly after the player has dropped out of the school.

Since 2007, [Aaron Hernandez has] been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses.

But who’s counting? It’s your beloved suspension-averse alma mater we’re describing here, and right this minute you’re loading up the Bud Light in anticipation of tailgate season for you and the young’uns.

So is Waco problematically special? Only stuff special on the list is the two cults – the Davidians and the Pagans.

I’m sure Texas gets more than its share of violent cults, just as Utah and Oregon do, because these states get all goose-bumpy over guns plus they hate laws and shit cuz that’s the state and fuck the state.

No, by prevailing big-time university athletics standards and prevailing state standards, there’s nothing special about Waco.

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UPDATE: UD thanks Derek for pointing out
that this is about basketball as much as football.

In the aftermath of the UCLA shooting, Scott Jaschik reviews what we know about the origins and characteristics of such events. Which isn’t much. Fields like engineering, math, and biology do seem to produce most of the attacks, but nursing professors and comp lit professors have also in recent years been murdered by disgruntled students.

I think that “spark” idea gets us somewhere. My own review of these attacks conjures, pretty consistently, a paranoid loser smoldering with rage.

Et alors? All professors who teach long enough encounter students whose behavior unsettles them. Maybe frightens them. (Professors lucky enough to teach on gun-friendly campuses get to worry that these unbalanced individuals may be packing heat.) Behind the vague word assessment lies the hard reality that most of us will never actually report a student, that we expect university settings to be about intensity and struggle and not giving up on people. Several of these killings came after a perpetual grad student was finally dropped from a program. University settings tolerate the sort of bizarre behavior that corporations would boot out the door in minutes.

For what it’s worth – killers in university settings (I’m thinking of professors who kill professors too, like the notorious Amy Bishop) aren’t just paranoid, from what I can tell. They are often strikingly grandiose, arrogant people. They kill those who refuse to acknowledge their superiority. They are solving a problem: They are ridding the world of people whose existence threatens their god-like self-perception. Professors who give middling or failing grades to shaky people who consider themselves transcendent geniuses would be at risk.

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The gunman has been identified.

[William] Klug was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and had been the target of [Mainak] Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who should not be trusted.

“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”

A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”

“The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic,” the source said.

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… Sarkar has been studying for his PhD since 2006 with no graduating date, two years longer than any of the other researchers.

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The killer had a list of targets and killed one of them – a woman who lived in his Minnesota town – before driving to LA and killing Krug.

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The woman was his ex-wife.

Watch live from the shooter-copter as we try to find the guy gunning down people at UCLA.

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Two dead. Shooter apparently still at large.

There is the marauding horde at the city’s Christian university, Baylor:

There have been altercations, sexual assaults, hidden police reports and no discipline. Everybody is in on it, trying to keep the football gravy trainrolling unimpeded by pesky justice for victims of the Bears’ marauding horde.

And there is the marauding horde at the city’s breastaurant:

Sunday’s fight escalated to include knives and firearms as gang members fired at each other in the Twin Peaks parking lot, police said, adding that nine suspected gang members died and 170 were arrested.

If you’re a diner or a shopper or a university student, try to stay out of their way. Now that the state of Texas is open carry, this should become easier. The marauding hordes are now likely to be displaying their weaponry.

If you’re a student and would like to study amid the bike engines, gunshots, police sirens, and screams of the dying, UD recommends earbuds.

Before the killing, massed police stood in wait outside the building; after the killing, they confiscated from the bikers

480 weapons: 151 guns, along with assorted knives, brass knuckles, batons, hammers, and the bikers’ blunt objects of choice — padlocks wrapped in bandanas.

But no one expected violence to occur, see.

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Why is UD on about Waco Texas and the bikers?

Because there’s a university in Waco. Baylor University. Given on and off campus problems, UD doesn’t think it’s such a hot idea for women in particular to apply to Baylor.

On campus, there’s the whole rape thing. Off campus there’s… well, there’s Waco.

Waco has problems.

The [biker] shootout was just the latest instance of mayhem and chaos to focus unwanted national attention on Waco. Ten years after the Branch Davidian episode, a Baylor basketball player shot and killed a teammate after an argument. The ensuing scandal led to the resignation of the coach and probation for the team.

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Waco attracts hordes of bikers. It’s in the heart of the breastaurant corridor.

En masse, roaring up and down your streets, bikers are really noisy. Most states care about the noise and try to regulate it, but don’t mess with Texas. They might have a law or two on the books, but why do you suppose all the bikers wanna be in Texas?

Do you like the idea of living in a town that’s ground zero for hundreds of bikers all year long? Does this seem to you compatible with university study?

Then there’s the bikers/guns thing. Waco doesn’t seem able to keep heavily armed caravans of bikers from storming through town on a regular basis. So far the bikers just kill each other. But eventually a revenge shootout’s going to hit other targets.

And, you know, Texas is all open carry now. What a fine thing to look up from your Bible As Literature class and watch these guys bombing through with their big guns hanging off their necks.

Perhaps Waco’s city council enjoys the bikers. Perhaps everyone on the council rides a bike. Dunno. I only know that Waco’s doing shit about motorcycle gangs going at one another on its streets.

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See, in UD‘s opinion, an undergraduate woman could do better than spend her afternoons on a rape-friendly campus and her evenings working as a server in a gang-themed breastaurant. I just think she could do better.

I mean, listen to this reporter. Read the accompanying story. At Baylor, you even have your choice of man-brawl locations: a Waco shopping mall, or, yet more conveniently located, just off campus.

Like everyone else ’round them parts, Professor Darden is marking the one year anniversary of the breastaurant-bikers shootout ‘cross town from his school, Baylor University.

After the melee and the nine deaths, “480 weapons: 151 guns, along with assorted knives, brass knuckles, batons, hammers, and the bikers’ blunt objects of choice — padlocks wrapped in bandanas” were recovered at the now-defunct, all-the-tits-you-can-eat Twin Peaks, and the exciting news is that the next biker happy meal will take place under a new law permitting every one of those guns to be open carried. With Twin Peaks fresh in their minds, Texas legislators passed an open carry law.

Well, it’s Texas. You still see a few professors bitching about the body count. But most of the professors who don’t love guns and aren’t on board with collateral damage will leave the state.

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Update: UD thanks dmf, a reader, for this link to details on the winsome ways of some of the gunniest gunnies in Texas.

My cousin’s husband is sheltering in place at the high school where he teaches.

La Kid’s first job was at the mall’s Lush store.

The mall is just down the street from UD‘s high school, Walter Johnson.

She was at Montgomery Mall two days ago, buying plants.

… is a phrase you often hear on faculty hiring committees. It typically refers to unusually attractive candidates who for various reasons emerge outside the normal vetting process (read here for details).

But now the already-hired faculty at gun-happy University of Texas Austin has become one big target of opportunity.

A pro-campus-carry group is considering paying students to help it file complaints against University of Texas at Austin professors who want to ban guns in their offices.

“[Students for Concealed Carry] is already working on a variety of plans to document incidents of wrongful exclusion on the UT-Austin campus,” the group’s southwest regional director, Antonia Okafor, said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “One of the proposals we’re considering is the offering of a cash prize to the student who documents the most verifiable cases of faculty or staff prohibiting licensed concealed carry in offices.”

It’s the student as bounty hunter and the professor as prey in the Lone Star state.

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UD suggests the following strategies for professors interested in bankrupting Students for Concealed Carry: Make yourself and cooperating colleagues sitting ducks, with large day-glo signs on your doors announcing NO ENTRY TO GUNS. Make sure there’s a security camera in the hallway outside your office (there probably is), and carry out, at your open door, a strip search on all students who wish to enter. Or brandish a fake airport security wand (show it to the camera) and go up and down their inseams.

A riskier but rewarding variant on this approach would be to find cooperating students who will visit your office packing heat. They will agree to share a portion of any winnings with the professor.

Faculty and students are beginning to leave – or fail to attend – the University of Texas because of the state’s impending guns-in-the-classroom law.

Not a bad idea to leave, particularly because this is the beginning, with the real aim open carry.

Long a magnet for rival biker gangs, Waco Texas could see a real uptick in biker-related business now that Denver, site of this year’s Motorcycle Expo, has wimped out after only one death.

In the wake of Saturday’s violence that left one man dead and seven hospitalized, the expo closed its doors on the 38th annual edition at the National Western Complex.

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One visitor to the Expo commented: “It is just wrong to bring guns to an event like this.”

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Gun-free biker event? Be like matzo-free Passover.

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Waco’s last biker get-together had nine dead and eighteen wounded and not in some closed off tickets-only expo space but sprawled out all over the street in front of a shopping mall (the shooting started in a restaurant) and just down the lane from one of America’s most Baptist campuses, Baylor University (see this post).

God Guns Grits and Gravy, to quote the title of Mike Huckabee’s memoir — Waco’s got it all. (Huckabee forgot Tits, which conveniently rhymes with Grits although it fucks up the alliteration. The breastaurant where the carnage took place has closed, but there’s a Waco Hooters.)

Waco’s shoot-out redoubled the state’s commitment to open carry. It didn’t have people talking horseshit about making biker gatherings gun-free.

Time for Waco to leverage its advantage and own the annual Motorcycle Expo.

Pulendrarasa, [a] French national of Srilankan Tamil origin, raised some questions regarding what was done during Chennai floods, at [a] seminar held at [the University of Madras] recently.

He was beaten up by a few professors and staffs of the University.

We are thankful that here in America, even our homeless have arsenals.

They may be down, but they’re not out. Of ammunition.