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.

“Oh, no. I can’t [support Grambling football]. No, no, no. If I support them, I condone it.”

Doug Williams

I’ve seen cynical desperate college athletics hires in my time, but nothing beats what Grambling – site of two very recent on-campus murders – has done in hiring coach Art Briles. At Baylor, Briles “repeatedly cover[ed] up allegations of assault, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by multiple Baylor football players.” “[H]e presided over a culture with rampant sexual violence toward women, including a former student’s lawsuit alleging at least 52 acts of rape committed by 31 football players from 2011 to ’14.” Many of them were players he recruited, though he knew before he recruited them that they were very dangerous people.

*************************

So maybe what’s going on at Grambling is a kind of unprecedented college product-placement. Lots of people like violence, and some of those people, while being violent, would also like to be educated. At Grambling you’re guaranteed to be living near one of America’s most outstanding murder capitals, with a mass shooting not long ago at one of the school’s homecoming events; you’re also guaranteed an ethos – embodied by Coach Briles – of tolerance of sexual violence and physical assault more broadly.

UD can’t track all of these stories – the protracted litigation, the endless terrible publicity, the money that has to be found for lawyers and settlements. They’re constant, a constant feature of the modern American university.

Monroe Louisiana isn’t Number One every year, but it’s always up there, esp. for violent crime, and this blog has followed its bloody fortunes for years. “If you want nothing more out of life than bass fishing, drugs, deer hunting, corrupt cops, high school football and crime, then Monroe is the place for you,” says a knowledgeable source, and UD doesn’t see “a college education” on that list.

There are four schools in and around Monroe, with Grambling a huge violence standout, but get a load of this wittle Louisiana Tech student’s dorm room! Not just tons of Nazi material; not just drugs all over the place being readied for sale; but “a 9mm handgun with one magazine, a .38 revolver, and the lower portion of an M4. An M4 is similar to an AR-15.” The tyke was manufacturing machine guns in there.

Even by San Diego State standards, this is really something. Good ol’ Monroe.

Grambling’s head football coach hires his mass rape and assault enabler buddy to be part of the coaching staff at his school, and the entire civilized world – including Grambling icon Doug Williams – says You and your school can go fuck yourselves.

In response to this devastating rejection, Jackson issues a mad slew of lies, boasting in particular that Grambling – a university so out of control as to have produced a mass shooting, with one murder, at its last homecoming event – has in its sports program – almost always the most violent location on campus – “well-developed programs… in place” to avoid the Art Briles-generated catastrophe at Baylor.

Both Putin and Jackson are self-immolating. Let us see if either can be stopped by any sane people that might be around them.

*************************

UPDATE: Does Art Briles know how to save money? Until a few years ago, he was earning over six million a year as a football coach; Baylor settled over fifteen million on him when he left in disgrace. That’s an awful lot of money, and now that Briles is out of yet another job – he ended up staying at Grambling for four days before public opinion made it impossible for him to remain – UD figures he can use that money – I mean, assuming he saved any – to live quite a nice life surrounded by the many Americans – Hue Jackson is only one of them – who don’t care about what he did at Baylor.

… a group of American universities where gun massacres coincide with their homecoming festivities. We’ve already covered Grambling’s celebrations; only a few days later, Fort Valley State in Georgia struts its stuff.

Stay tuned! It wouldn’t be homecoming without a spray of flowers and a spray of bullets.

Behind this flat descriptive sentence lie the breathtaking, deathtaking statistics of America’s most murderous state, Louisiana, where shooting, especially among the very young, is happening pretty much all the time, pretty much everywhere. Two fatal shootings within a week on one American university campus – Grambling State, with today’s killing at a homecoming party – tells you how normalized it’s all become. Soon this stuff won’t make the news at all.

Grambling’s not far from Shreveport, if you want to get a quick sense of the world we’re talking about here. Shreveport’s already got among the highest gun violence rates in the nation; this year, they’ve gone UP eleven percent from the city’s rate last year.

Today’s Grambling killing happened at two AM…? The shooter wasn’t a student…? You might say there’s not much one can do about this – but there is, actually. Why in the world would you let your kid go to school at a place where they let campus parties go til two AM; and why, given the riot of gun violence in Louisiana, would the school not check i.d.s and weaponry at campus gatherings?

The school claims it had all sorts of security there. And that tells you that not only is it dumb enough to sponsor large late-night parties in a very dangerous neighborhood, but it’s also incompetent.

Don’t let your kid go to Grambling.

*******************

Update: You see the … fatal disconnect in the president’s remarks: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” Man seems to think he’s in dear old Arcadia rather than dear old murder capital USA. With that degree of denial at the very top, we shouldn’t be surprised at these outcomes.

“As an alumnus, I’m embarrassed,” said Edmond Davis, who was visiting his alma mater with his wife. “Deeply embarrassed. It saddens me.”

Yes. Your school can’t hold a homecoming without a fatal shooting. You should take the school’s president by the shoulders – firmly – and say as directly as possible Grambling is unfortunately located in the heart of the heart of American homicide. If you want the school to survive, you are going to have to make it as much of an armed camp as possible. And by the way, doesn’t the school have trustees? Do they do anything?

*********************

“We must … accept that the issues we face with gun violence are non-students who come to our great institution and cause harm to students and other non-students who are casually enjoying themselves,” [Grambling’s student government president] wrote. “We must realize that at some point we must stop allowing outside individuals to pass through checkpoints without university clearance.” 

Scandalous that this obvious necessity occurs to students but not university leadership.

… Grambling State University?

“The athletics department runs at a $1 million-plus deficit on an annual basis. In the past we’ve taken those funds from the academic side and directed it toward athletics. This year (2012-13), we had to take it from auxiliary services — that’s student dining, the bookstore and dorms. We can’t do that again.”

Kevin Broadus brings more than 16 years of coaching and recruiting experience to Georgetown. His duties for the Hoyas include recruiting, game preparation, and player development. Remaining in the District for most of his professional career, he has coached at five universities in the metro area.

A native of the D.C. region, Broadus played high school basketball at Dunbar in the District and Montgomery Blair in Silver Spring, Md. He left the area for one year to play at Grambling State in Louisiana, but returned home to attend Bowie State, where he lettered for three years and earned his bachelor of science in business administration in 1990.

Following graduation Broadus served as assistant coach at Bowie State until 1993, when he returned to D.C. as an assistant at the University of the District of Columbia, where he stayed until 1997. While coaching at UDC, he earned his master’s degree in counseling in 1995. From 1998 to 2001, he was on the staff at American University. In the summer of 2001, Broadus moved again, this time to George Washington University, where he was an assistant coach until he came to Georgetown in 2004.

And where was Broadus from 2007 to 2009? Oh right. He was front and center at the SUNY Binghamton scandal; the New York Times calls his tenure at Binghamton the “scandal-ridden Kevin Broadus era.” He even gets an era!

But Georgetown has allowed him to airbrush that right out of his webpage.

Way 1984.

How impressive that a university committed to the truth — a Jesuit university, kids! — not only hires this notorious recruiter of diploma mill graduates and criminals, a man who sued for immense sums the last university for which he worked (Binghamton “paid Broadus $1.2 million to leave”), but allows him to fudge his work history on its official site.

Even by the standards of big-time university sports, this is really sickening.

************************

UD thanks Polish Peter.