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.

Don’t turn people away from your party. That seems to be what happened at Northern Arizona too. And in the years UD‘s been covering university shootings, she can recall several other examples.

Another theme she’s picked up on is the vast size of some of these parties. Hundreds of students and non-students, and lots of drinking and drugging. Things get way out of control.

… had nothing to do with the drug-market past of the fraternity to which all of the victims belonged. From what UD is reading, it was instead about that most common and toxic campus brew:

1. A party.

4. Groups of young men.

Specifically, UD has over the years read many stories about drunk male students barred from, or kicked out of, parties, and murderously pissed about it. This particular guy – the shooter – grew up with a silver Glock in his mouth and seems to have spent most of his eighteen years (eighteen! how fast the nation’s little shooters shoot up!) preparing himself for the moment when he’s annoyed enough to begin strafing a public space. As one of his friends delicately puts it, “Steven was a bit of a hothead when it came to small, personal quibbles.”

Oh dear oh my oh yes those pesky personal quibbles.

Gwendolen. Do you allude to me, Miss Cardew, as an entanglement? You are presumptuous. On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to blow your brains out with this Beretta. It becomes a pleasure.

Cecily. Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When experiencing a quibble I bring out my Bushmaster. [G. and C.’s heads simultaneously explode into bloody stumps.]

But rest easy. Now that more and more campuses are legally compelled to allow students like this one to carry guns onto their streets and into their classrooms, we can expect future NAU-like events to produce large-scale, protracted, three-way (party-barring group; party-barred group; police) gun battles. Think Waco bikers.

Cute!

So here’s the deal. The New York Times’ Frank Bruni is still carrying around campus a monastic model of the university. Haven! Really? From what? The University of Texas is a massively profitable sports empire with classrooms.

“All this marketing and globalization of big-time sports entertainment based at public universities has invaded and transformed the whole politeia of the university,” said UT classics professor Thomas Palaima. “Students come to campus now not feeling awe at the prospect of learning and investigating truths about our world and ourselves but to get ready for game day and have a ‘college experience’ and then get a job.”

Palaima said he had recently walked past the University Co-Op, a campus institution, and thought the storefront an apt metaphor for what critics believe are the school’s misplaced priorities. “(It) was entirely given over to images of footballs and Longhorns souvenirs,” he said. “Not a book in sight or any suggestion that there was a center of learning across the street.”

You wanna watch out for that politeia. Once you hand it over to yahooiae, you can kiss your theater of ideas goodbye.

And Texas is ground zero, ain’t it? Know how Baylor University families celebrate graduation? Dodging bullets at the local war zone. Hard keeping the noise down in the library.

Almost the exact same story as Adam Lanza, including knowing your son has mental problems and blasting and stockpiling away with him anyway.

… here are a few headlines, to get us up to date on guns in America.

IOWA GRANTS PERMISSION FOR BLIND
RESIDENTS TO CARRY GUNS IN PUBLIC

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SLAIN GUN INSTRUCTOR’S FAMILY WANTS LAW
TO BAN CHILDREN FROM AUTOMATIC WEAPONS

(Don’t worry. No chance in hell it’ll pass.)

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AFTER WACO SHOOTOUT,
LAWMAKERS CONTINUE
OPEN CARRY PUSH

(That’ll pass.)

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However.
As Andrew Sullivan used to say:
Know Hope.

It began with the Oct. 24 candidate’s debate at Virginia Tech, the site of the worst mass shooting by an individual in U.S. history. In response to a question, Cuccinelli boasted of his A rating from the NRA.

And then McAuliffe did something surprising: He said he didn’t give a fig about the powerful lobby’s rating. And, oh, by the way, he had earned an F.

McAuliffe won the election.

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The No Hope position:

[G]uns are tools conceived, built, and used for the primary purpose of killing living things very quickly and with very little effort. They are perfect, and whether men and women and children and babies use them correctly or incorrectly, people get maimed or killed. For this reason, it should be illegal, as it is in most of the world, for most citizens to own guns.

This is apparent to many people, even and especially to many people who sell guns. But it is even more apparent that nothing anyone says or writes about how it is an absolute fucking farce that it is legal for most citizens to own guns matters. Episodes like Roanoke, and Sandy Hook, and Aurora, and Blacksburg, and Charleston affirm that the fight is already lost.

… Ann Arbor resident Joshua Wade [openly carried a gun] to his little sister’s choir concert…