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 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.

Whether it’s autumn or winter, young mass murder’s always in season at Texas A&M Commerce and environs. Those of us trying to follow today’s double homicide among the impulsive tyke demographic were sent over to last October’s bloodbath among the babes. So that’s… October, November, December, January… We almost made it through three months without a big ol’ Texas A&M killing.

Now this one, UD‘s thinking, probably involves Commerce having admitted a mentally unstable freshman… This sorta little feller, say… Down Texas way a man – even a nineteen year old man – ain’t raised to go all boohoo and talk to some counselor or what have you. In our manly states (Texas, Wyoming, Montana, Alaska) you tend to deal with your problems by killing yourself (an extremely popular thing) and/or killing other people but the point is it’s gonna be something with a gun. Montana has the highest suicide rate in the nation and I think there’s like ten psychiatrists in the state. Who needs a shrink when you have a schwarzlose?

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I was wrong. A random thug, from whom his ex-girlfriend (who was visiting her sister, a student at Commerce) should have been given protection (a career criminal, he was released from jail when he, uh, shouldn’t have been) killed the ex-girlfriend and her sister. Specifically, he was

free on bond related to an alleged assault family violence incident that took place last week. The report was filed by Abbaney Matts, one of the shooting victims.

... Abbaney said Smith assaulted her Jan. 26 … with a frying pan, lamp and then pulled out a knife …. Though she was not hospitalized, Abbaney reported injuries to the right side of her head, her eyes and had red marks and abrasions after the alleged attack.

[Jacques Dshawn] Smith was arrested and an emergency protective order was issued on Abbaney’s behalf. Smith was freed Jan. 29 after posting $15,000 bond.

… Smith has a string of priors dating back four years with charges including evading arrest, theft and aggravated robbery.

Three whole days in custody! I’m sure Abbaney’s surviving family feels real good about that.

Southern University homecoming event.

This tweeter expresses surprise (smh: shake my head) that one of America’s most violent campuses – Virginia State University – features violence. It was homecoming; there was a hiphop concert; the evening featured gunfire, injury, and a bunch of fights.

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.

… 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.

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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?

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“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.