Guns of course are ubiquitous at frats, but they’re an adjunct to the frat’s extensive drug dealing operation (see pages and pages of guns and frats here), or they’re AK-47s that the lads like to photograph themselves holding, or they’re be-well-son-and-take-care-of-yourself goodbye gifts from Maw and Paw as the little guy heads off to school. And of course they’re notoriously handy when suicide is in the air. All routine American gun use.

Real powpowpow, however, has been thin on the ground. Stuff that draws pledge-blood has been… anemic.

Yes, this Oklahoma State guy (an inter-fraternity council secretary)

used a loaded gun to scare two new fraternity recruits. The victims say (Owen) Hossack pointed the gun at their heads and asked if they would take a bullet for their brothers. Then, police say, he fired the gun …

But I mean big deal nobody got hurt and loyalty is an important value…

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

See, if you ask UD the omnipresence of guns, alcohol, drugs, teenagers, secret guys-only events, and loyalty tests should mean that America’s budding Stephen Paddocks begin routinely manifesting themselves at our fraternities. By national standards, shooting a gun at two guys’ heads but not killing them is, uh, kid stuff.

On the other hand, there’s evidence that things are escalating to the serious mass shootings UD keeps expecting. New Mexico State University (feast your eyes) is exactly the sort of walking abortion of a school you’d expect to be a first-adopter here, and sure enough they did manage to draw blood at a recent hazing event.

Dozens of students, including Jonathan Sillas, attended the Kappa Sigma fraternity’s initiation event.

As Sillas was leaving, another student, Miguel Altamirano, pulled him to the side and told him to turn around, according to a criminal complaint.

Altamirano pulled out a .40 caliber handgun, held the firearm against Sillas’ leg and pulled the trigger, the complaint states. The bullet went through Sillas’ leg.

Gun-friendly states always use the passive voice. The bullet went through. The shooter did not put the bullet in Sillas’s leg; the bullet decided to go through Sillas’s leg. And note the other thing going on at hazing events: Sadistic tyranny. Pulled him to the side and told him to turn around. Right out of The Story of O. Frat hazing (and sorority hazing) reeks, my dears, of S&M.

Duh. We all know that. It’s about torturing people pathetic enough to be willing to be tortured in order to join your club.

I mean, datz why I keep wondering why no mass killing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon yet! You know they’ve got guns galore, but no one’s gonna confiscate them because that would initiate a massacre of free Americans by the federal government. Little by little, a pledge shooting here and a pledge shooting there, we’re inching toward mass murder at an American university fraternity. Just be patient.

Just because we’re violent unregenerate hazers who reportedly take photographs in our house of members holding AR-15s doesn’t mean we should be evicted! Couldn’t be more proud of Chandler Elmore, owner and transporter of multiple big firearms and a football hero recruited from darkest Ark. How dare Wash U drive us from our home.

“It’s obviously not coincidental that this most recent incident [the AR-15 in the frat house] corresponded with the timing of our permanent suspension. Clearly, this is what caused our removal from campus,” [the fraternity’s vice-president commented]. “We understand the school’s frustration regarding the alleged social events. However, we also have frustrations and complaints regarding the way the school handled the initial investigation (which prompted our original suspension) and subsequent investigations that they conducted.”

We didn’t really haze actually in fact when you look closely. These were just some alleged social events. As for the AR-15, none of us knew anything about that, we promise. I mean, haha, except Chandler! The last thing in the world we’re interested in – after getting wasted and torturing pledges – is playing with big scary guns.

Nothing against your AR-15 or anything… We love frats here at Wash U and have just loved hosting you… And – haha – nothing to do with the whole Parkland thing… But… uh… could you leave?

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

And oh honey.

My lord what a morning.

If American universities actually start checking their fraternities for guns! It’ll be San Diego State all over again, baby! (Hm. Not really “all over again.” Guess it never really stopped.). Drug distribution networks around the country will be bereft, and no one will be able to figure out how to haze.

Fraternities are one of America’s very best places to hide weapons and drugs cuz you know – bright clean-cut lads preparing for the next charity carwash… Last place you’d look for AR-15s…

It’s an academic bloodbath down there. If you’re looking for the heavy-hitters, look no further than Texas Tech, where a wee freshman of nineteen years just blew a campus cop away – shot the guy to death in cold blood, holding the gun inches from his face.

This is one of the few guns-on-Texas-campuses stories that rose to national attention. The threats, the gun play, the fraternity weaponry — these are so routine as to pass unnoticed.

If you really want to get noticed – a student with a gun on a campus in Texas – you have to have a very big gun, you have to be on the football or basketball team, you have to threaten to kill multiple people, you have to have drugs on you, you have to be part of a conspiracy, you have to flee the police, you have to ditch the gun… You have to do a lot of shit to be worth paying attention to if you’re a college student with your gun out at a Texas university.

So props to Zaycoven Henderson, one of our Sacred Aggies, for accomplishing all of that, and getting all the press attention he and his gun-mad school so richly deserve.

Just a few hours earlier, Henderson was honored at the A&M team football banquet.

You don’t want the recent history of A&M. Trust me. You don’t want the background on A&M.

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

You know, when a few Texas professors, disgusted by the state-wide gun-love, resign or take jobs in safer states, they’re called pussies or whatever. But in Texas, the shits really are trying to kill us. And they’ve got amazing, amazing, guns. And they’re our students.

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

Here’s Zaycoven’s hagiographic page at Texas A&M. In the first photograph, he’s doing the classic WHERE’S MY RIFLE? TOSS IT DOWN TO ME. play.

Take the page down?

Nah.

It’s Texas A&M.

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

Have to go to the local paper for local responses. From a comment thread. Parenthetical remarks from UD:

rippy Dec 11, 2017 5:33am
Welcome to Aggieland Jimbo!

[That’s the new greedy coach they just hired for a zillion dollars.]

pragmatist Dec 11, 2017 5:51am
It is a big challenge to operate a successful program when you depend on young folks who have grown up with little or no guidance in terms of right vs wrong. Don’t know this guy’s history, but it is a safe bet his only male leadership came from football coaches. Coaches, at their best, can do very little to point an 8th grader in the right direction and once the kid gets off course, it is hard to self-correct. It takes a real Dad and a real Mom.

Tragic and far too common but there is no room for this guy at A&M.

[Sad little “pragmatist” hasn’t bothered to check that Zaycoven comes equipped with a father and a mother. And pragmatically speaking, I wonder why Aggie coaches recruit people like Zaycoven. The commenter fails to speculate about why many … questionable people end up on his football team. Do they show up and push themselves forward? Or are they feverishly sought?

“No room for this guy at A&M.” UD always finds this a touchingly delusional sentiment. Our pure school – where Johnny Manziel was so recently God – shudders and passes on morally impure people like Zaycoven.]

Dec 11, 2017 7:00am
Would you look at that. I’ll be willing to bet this kid was recruited solely for his athletic ability and not his character. Another legacy of Sumlin …that goes with the washed up Heisman winner [Manziel] and a new field. Neither of which spells National Champion.

[Implicitly, this commenter expresses the pathetic faith-in-the-new-coach thing. Bad old coach (Sumlin) did this; he was responsible for the now-embarrassing Manziel too. But new god Jimbo will make everything beautiful again.]

1.) My fraternity brothers were preparing for finals at the University of Florida…

University of Florida! Are you kidding me? That university was just ranked number one in America for most athletes arrested!… Oh whoops. Let me concentrate on the matter at hand. Fraternities. Ok. Frat boys studying for finals…? Uh… ok….

2.)

when word echoed throughout Zeta Beta Tau that we were being blamed for unthinkable behavior: harassing combat-wounded veterans.

Linda Cope, the founder of the Warrior Beach Retreat, a local charity in Panama City Beach, appeared on Fox News and other media outlets alleging that we spit on veterans and urinated on the American flag.

Panama City Beach? Are you kidding me? The rankest town in America, where three men raped an unconscious woman on the beach midday and no one did a thing… It was only discovered when the police chief reviewed video in connection with a slew of other crimes. … But ahem. Let me once again concentrate on the matter at hand. Spring break, unspeakable acts…

3.)

We went from being anonymous college students to being the most hated fraternity in America over allegations that, to us, came completely out of left field.

Completely? Says here (see response from the national chapter at the bottom of the page) that “What was not pointed out was that at the time these events occurred, the chapter was already on probation imposed by the University of Florida.”

4.)

Many of us have family members who have proudly served in the military. My grandfather fought during D-Day. I have a photograph of my grandfather sitting on the wing of a captured German fighter plane.

The focal point of our chapter house’s living room was an American flag that we proudly displayed.

That’s all great. Great. But, you know, the male bonding that you love so much … too much… “Witnessing the tears and anguish of my brothers at the moment school officials clarified that our chapter had been officially closed was indescribably painful… [Nothing can adequately convey] the heartbreak and devastation that I and my fraternity brothers feel over losing an organization that we loved so dearly. Many of my brothers feel they have lost their collegiate identity.” … plus alcohol, can make you forget how much you love Old Glory…

5.)

Due process was conveniently cast aside to mollify an angry public that deemed the allegations indisputably factual in light of the stereotypical fraternity culture portrayed in the media.

Yes, it looks as though your fraternity didn’t behave as outrageously as initial reports suggested. Maybe you’re right to be upset that the resounding response from America to this clarification of your Panama City Beach behavior is So fucking what. But you go to the University of Florida, you’re a member of a fraternity already on probation, and your guys were part of ongoing, high-profile Panama City Beach foulness. Sorry.

6.)

With no means to defend ourselves, we had no choice but to watch our execution in the court of public opinion.

Soyez tranquille! Guns are on their way. Once you’re fully weaponized, no one will be able to shut you down.

The local paper goes there.

For a long time, UD went with stupidity as an explanation, because business-model party schools like San Diego State University have to admit a lot of stupid people. Then – for similar party school reasons – UD went with wasted, because being drunk certainly helps make it possible for men to hurl eggs and dildos at women …

(By the way: Remember what UD told you about a similar civil war at the University of Virginia, where frat boys are destroying anti-violence exhibits and, when asked to stop, loudly threatening the people asking them to stop? As with San Diego State, don’t expect the pro-rape forces to surrender without a fight. And those SDSU frats don’t fool around: The last DEA raid on them uncovered a number of guns, plus an impressive cash reserve. )

But it’s occurred to her that the editorial board of U-T San Diego is probably right: Group psychosis looks most plausible.

Let’s put it this way: Drug-running, gang-banging, eat-my-puke pledging fraternities are tailored to appeal to some of America’s most promising sociopaths-in-training. If you want to understand these people, read the chapter in The Story of O when O is brought to a become-a-slave sorority, and instantly goes from a psychopathic masochist to a psychopathic sadist.

UD wouldn’t think of denying that the personal traits honed in some of America’s highest-profile fraternities can be traded up to a career at Goldman Sachs. And, uh, Lehman Brothers…? She understands why predatory capitalism is called predatory capitalism. She sees perfectly well the through-line between secretive all-male sado-masochistic loyalty and this blessed bountiful land.

She just wonders why this form of social interaction dominates so many of our universities.

The place has been, for decades, a perfect shitstorm. You name what’s wrong with American universities, and it’s super-wrong with SDSU. Overpaid presidents? SDSU’s last non-interim president was so greedy an outraged state legislature and outraged citizens forced the SDSU trustees to make some changes. Bankrupting themselves through sports? An earlier president seems to have spent his entire term throwing all of the school’s money at a football team that played to empty stadiums. Homicidal fraternities?

Ah. Homicidal fraternities. Ever since an arsenal of big guns and a cache of big drugs were discovered at its frats (six were involved in a 2008 conspiracy so extensive and professional as to draw the involvement of the DEA) SDSU has held the distinction of being the site of one of our nation’s largest college drug busts. The conspiracy began to fall apart with the death of a student from a cocaine overdose…

… Which might explain why yesterday, in the wake of another frat-related death – he was a wee freshman who’d just gotten there – SDSU has done something less homicidal schools don’t do after each of their after all pretty routine frat drinking deaths: It has suspended fourteen fraternities.

I mean, fraternities being what they are, a bunch of them at SDSU were already being, er, scrutinized for the distant possibility that something untoward might be happening at them… But now! I mean, if you’re going to start killing nineteen year olds weeks after we’ve taken them from their parents and invited them to come here and study I mean, really!

*********

UPDATE: Suspension: It’s in the air! Washington State University – another ridiculous sports-obsessed school – has also decided that their frats are getting a little much.

UD applauds Daniel Muehring, a Southern Methodist University student, for posing the crucial question about pledgicide.

What’s the principle of brotherhood behind torturing, humiliating, and killing your brother?

I think the answer to the question is implicit in Muehring’s mistaken use of the term “constructive.” He assumes that the pledgicidal motive is constructive, when of course it is destructive. This is the reason Andrew Lohse correctly identifies ritual behavior in many fraternities with “a biker gang.” Both cults like to hurt themselves (body scarring, alcoholism, reckless driving, gun-play, fights) and to hurt others; both constitute a brotherhood of mutually voyeuristic sadism. For both, women represent fuckable or non-fuckable scags. In time, both typically drift toward organized crime (several frats over the last few years, with San Diego State’s frat system the standout, have been found to be running high-level, heavily-armed, drug distribution businesses).

Hyper-masculine, hyper-ritualized, sadistic, homicidal, secretive, criminal subcultures are unfortunately common in America; what’s shockingly uncommon is their placement and certification in universities.

UD thinks we should spend less time agonizing about the motives and deep meanings of fraternities and more time asking the following question: Why do American universities allow tribes of undergraduates to reduce the universities themselves to the status of pledges, to whipped and whimpering bodies?

Yeah, UD sees where Lisa Wade is going with this…

But two can play that game! Imagine a world in which everything was the same about higher education except that there has never been quasi-professional football and basketball on many campuses. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says ‘I want to start a corrupt and bankrupting enterprise which will bring anti-intellectuality, illegality, violence, and global derision to our campus, and will ultimately put our president, athletic director, and senior vp for finance in jail for criminal neglect.’

The NYT‘s Frank Bruni forgets that frats/quasi-professional sports represents “the total way of life of a people,” as Clifford Geertz put it, and you can’t just decide to extract one element of a total culture (fraternities, university-sponsored alcohol sales at stadiums, coach-sponsored on-campus houses of prostitution for recruits and players, general excitement at the spectacle of college students getting their heads concussed, decades of fake courses, the adulation of violent, mentally ill people if they can play football, the routine cancellation of scads of classes so that everyone can attend games…) that you don’t happen to like….

Ooh, you don’t feel comfortable with guns in fraternity houses! The thought of packs of young men, alcohol, secrecy, weaponry, and post-game rage makes you uncomfortable, does it? Well fuck you. It’s a way of life, and you don’t get to say ixnay on the guns but the sexual assault of scores of female students is okay… Not at all or all in all, as Tennyson says…

Killing-field fraternities, like massive numbers of big guns in the hands of people like Stephen Paddock, are simply part of the wonderful world of many American males, and nobody gets to mess with frats or guns.

Mr. Horras, quoted in this post’s headline, is charged with defending frats in the wake of yet more torture and slaughter, but, as Caitlin Flanagan notes, he’d do a better job if he, like, knew anything about what he was defending.

Yet why bother checking the narrative – straight out of the Marquis de Sade – of Tim Piazza’s death, when Horras knows that no one will ever do anything about sadistic, homicidal, fraternities in American universities? It’s like asking how many ten minute long massacres of scores of people the country can tolerate before it enacts gun restrictions. Answer: There is no upper limit.

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university [the drenched-in-shame Penn State] that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

… as well they should, since it’s not every day that a fraternity enters a national forest with a gun and hatchets and starts chopping (shooting?) it down.

The lads continue to try to lie their way out of it, but the evidence against them seems to be overwhelming.

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

A good lawyer, though, might say something like this to the court.

Your honor: This was Chico State. This was a fraternity. These people had firearms and hatchets. Did they use the secrecy of tree cover to murder and behead their pledges? They certainly could have. Others might have. But these young men held back, instead channeling their aggression into the far less anti-social flattening of a forest.

… but meanwhile there’s a blog about universities to maintain, and I just happen to have some stuff here that I think you might like…

Close to home, there’s the fun story of one of the fraternities at UD‘s place of business, George Washington University. We’ve had to pay a lot of attention to fraternities on this blog, given the hilarious disconnect between what many of these cults broadcast about themselves and what they actually are/do. The American university frat story is a subset of the American university big-time sports story, in which these closely allied units grab our elbow and direct their alcoholic breath to our face in order to bray about their charity car washes and team work and brotherly love and inspirational school spirit. And we buy it, which is pretty remarkable…

So yet another GW frat has been shut down or suspended or whatever (happens constantly), but this time it’s not about the routine gruesome party or trashed hotel.

The chapter was under investigation after DC Leaks hacked the personal email account of a White House staffer and alumnus, which included messages from Pi Kappa Phi’s Listserv from February 2015 to June 2016. GW’s Greek life official said in a message sent to students that the chapter was shut down after officials found information that showed the group had violated University standards.

No, it’s not Clinton/Weiner-level; but you gotta admit in its own small way it’s kind of impressive. A just-graduated GW person, fraternity prez, moves too quickly to the White House, still “being dead in his sins and the uncircumcision of his flesh,” (Colossians 2:13), and his frat-prez correspondence gets a high-level hack, which if you’re GWU you’re likely to find a mite embarrassing.

Pi Kappa Phi was [already] under disciplinary and social probation until Dec. 31, 2015 for hosting a registered off-campus event with alcohol where several attendees – some of whom were underage – had to be treated at a hospital for overconsumption of alcohol. The chapter had been on social restriction until June 30.

But that’s a trifle here. That’s like… Aren’t all fraternities under social restriction? Let’s get to the good stuff.

The email hack included Listserv messages instructing members to watch out for puking pledges, [and to] contribute to a slush fund; [the messages also included] anti-semitic remarks calling members “Jewish” for not donating to philanthropic events.

“This is such a bad violation of recruitment policies [responded our man] and nationals could royally fuck us if they wanted to… I’m not being a narc but you gotta at least keep a clean paper,” he wrote.

An April 2016 email reprimanded two fraternity members for yelling “fuck you you fucking faggot” at their gay neighbor for 20 minutes during a party, which allegedly led the neighbor to consider pressing criminal charges.

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

And here’s something from the big-time sports part of the frat/sports industrial complex.

The University of Memphis. Put university memphis in this blog’s search engine and feast your eyes on one of America’s most lurid locations of any kind, much less a university location. Memphis, like Auburn and Clemson and Baylor, is one of those schools that UD grudgingly admires for their determination to be faithful to what they truly are: totally amoral football-game-makers. Scummy cheating coaches flying high on zillion dollar salaries; broad-shouldered who-gives-a-shit trustees; recruits who spend so much time on the field, or playing video games, or shooting guns, that UD worries they might not have enough time to get their schoolwork done…

University of Memphis football players Jae’Lon Oglesby and Kam Prewitt fought Tuesday night over video games and Prewitt was later taken to a local hospital because of injuries to his mouth, according to a university incident report obtained Thursday morning.

Oglesby told university police that the fight took place between 9 and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Carpenter Complex, a residential building on campus. Oglesby said he then left the complex and returned to his apartment, which is located off campus on Patterson Street. Officers subsequently visited Prewitt’s apartment to check on him and determined that he needed medical attention, according to the university incident report.

Gunshots were fired at a car belonging to Oglesby after 10 p.m. Tuesday, according to a police report. Oglesby told officers that he did not see who fired the shot but that he had been in an altercation with Prewitt earlier in the day.

And that was Tuesday night! Homework night! Imagine what they’re up to on Saturday.

Now you can do this on campus as well as off! Y’all come down.

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

Our students’ safety and well-being are paramount at the University of Texas.

SWAT officers ordered the suspects to come down with their hands up.

“Seeing that in West Campus is really just alarming,” [a student] said. “I saw the guns on them and the shields, so I was pretty terrified.”

Well, hold onto your hat, UT student! Booze, frats, and guns galore: Life of the mind, Texas.

… 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.

If I may quote myself. It’s not just the notorious cases, like Cal Poly and San Diego State. More and more frats are discovering that their secrecy, their clean cut college guy front, and their ability to form themselves into tight loyal gangs, means that organized crime of all kinds can flourish in-house. The drug trade is simply the organized crime of choice.

Problem is, drugs bring another crime: the crime of violence. These frat boys pack guns. There’s their drug gang and your drug gang and… you know. Maybe you even live in Chicago.

Serious university drug markets almost always center in and around the frats. Unserious university drug markets, like those at preppie schools like Wesleyan, tend to be a bunch of unarmed deadhead friends making a bit of money selling stuff to their roomies. But serious university drug markets, like the one at the Delta Chi fraternity at Northern Arizona University, do not fool around.

Why hasn’t Northern Arizona University shut down Delta Chi, with its history of drug sales? Some of its members, according to reports, were involved in some way in the shooting (one person dead, three injured) that took place yesterday on NAU’s campus. It’s too soon to know if the shootings were drug-related, but let’s say that they were. Why was Delta Chi still in operation?

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

Correction: In the original post, I mixed up the University of Arizona in Tucson and Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. I’ve now corrected that, thanks to a reader who noticed the error.