America’s rapeabilliest campus, Baylor University (scroll down), conducts its life of the mind business in Waco Texas, famous for murderous cults, biker boy shootouts, and breastaurants. To be kind, Waco is probably as close to the creation of an atmosphere for serious learning and respect for women Texas can manage, so let’s not be judgmental. Let’s instead update ourselves on the various ongoing Waco trials of various biker boys.

The 2015 shootout, a routine druggie-gunnie turf war that spilled beyond the confines of a breastaurant onto streets where Baylor families were celebrating graduation, killed a lot of people and kinda left a bloody mess all over Waco but I mean bikers go to Waco cuz Waco loves guns so much. Gunnies feel genuinely welcome there.

475 weapons were seized following the incident. The number includes 151 firearms, 12 of which were long guns. Other weapons recovered included knives, brass knuckles, batons, tomahawks, a hatchet, stun guns, bats, clubs, a machete, a pipe, an ax, pepper spray and a chain.

It can get a little noisy trying to study at Baylor, but that’s the sound of freedom.

Now here’s one trial we can take a look at. Headline:

Bandido biker yells at Waco judge in court: “Three years and nothing!”

This guy, seen standing over the dead body of a rival biker at the shootout, is pissed because it’s taking a long time to hear his case and meanwhile he can’t carry his AR-57 or talk to gunmates. But the mean judge seems to think the guy still shouldn’t have access to firearms….

But haha you and I know the guy still carries guns; he just wants to do so and not risk arrest.

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

UPDATE: But UD doesn’t want you to think that her very own neighborhood hasn’t been stockpiling too!

You have to understand Waco, Texas. You have to understand Baylor University. You have to understand fraternities. You have to understand football.

Once you begin to understand the culture of Waco, you’ll have no trouble understanding the likely legal outcome of the university’s 1,534th rape this week.

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

Begin by understanding context. To start with, this latest campus rape was just a rape: it wasn’t a gang rape, and it wasn’t filmed. At Baylor, this barely rises to the level of an event, let alone a crime.

As for a jury made up of average Waconians: Waco’s famous for breastaurants that host rival biker gangs that slaughter each other in hours-long shootouts right down the street from Baylor.

It’s just that kind of down-home all-American place okay? and no way the good citizens of Waco are going to convict a Baylor frat president of rape. I mean, that’s not what Waconians would call a violent crime. And remember: Baylor’s a Christian school! This boy’s a Christian.

When the Dallas News even bothers posing the death penalty question for Baylor University, you know fans of the Baylor Rapists are allowing themselves to wonder whether their football heroes really deserve their full measure of devotion. “If there was ever a case that warranted a college football program getting the death penalty, this sure is it,” says one sports site in response the latest team-bonding-gang-rape-on-film allegation. Did the lads even stage dog fights? Did they drug the women?

Oh, pish. Not to worry. I defy you to conjure a scenario that would draw a serious NCAA penalty of any sort. Let alone the death penalty. Cuz we just love our brain-battered boys to death.

Kim “Knock Them Right in the Face” Mulkey.

As [Baylor ponders] what to do [about a football player filmed savagely beating his dog], let’s not forget Queso the cat, murdered and mutilated by Baylor baseball players, and Baylor basketball player Patrick Dennehy, shot twice in the head by his teammate Carlton Dotson. And then there are the victims of sexual assault handled so well in house.

Another local reader admires Baylor’s contributions to the Baptist faith.

For a Christian school, Baylor needs to clean up its act! A fancy new stadium doesn’t mean anything when the alumni are willing to ignore athletes who rape women and beat dogs!

Rumors abound that Baylor is finally going to go the honesty route. They are apparently working on an official statement that will go something like this:

Baylor grad, Waco mayor, she’s – to paraphrase Freud – our royal road to to the Waco political unconscious. Let’s do an Online Schoolmarm scathe of her recent opinion column in the Waco Trib.

She begins with lengthy throat clearing:

To my friends and fellow citizens: Baylor University regents, former Baylor President and Chancellor Ken Starr, Baylor first lady Alice Starr, Coach and Mrs. Art Briles, Ian McCaw, Interim President David Garland, Baylor administration, faculty and students, Waco Mayors Kyle Deaver, Malcolm Duncan Jr. and Jim Bush, City Manager Dale Fisseler, city staff, council members, chambers of commerce, Waco churches, schools, parents, Tribune-Herald, KWBU, KWTX, KCEN and other media outlets, Waco Business League, Providence Health, Baylor Scott & White Health Hillcrest, Family Health Center, McLennan Community College and Texas State Technical College leadership and students, Rapoport, Cooper and Waco foundations, Caritas and Mission Waco, to name only a few of Waco’s community: I write with you in mind:

It’s the rare op/ed writer self-important enough to speechify in this way before beginning her content (though we’re going to discover that this person has no content, so the throat-clearing makes sense). One envisions Harold Hill gathering the townspeople to tell them there’s trouble right here in River City. With the Baylor rapes and the breastaurant massacre, I think Waco already knows this.

The writer seems to share Hill’s confidence that when she pens a piece in the local rag everyone in town will be reading it.

(SOS finds “a few of Waco’s community” awkward. A few what?)

There is much that we don’t know or understand about Baylor University’s current situation. But we, informed or not, will grieve and face this time together.

Her second paragraph heralds the theme of her piece, if theme there be: Life is a Mystery. The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways. Ah Sweet Mystery of Life. Just no knowin’ sometimes. What’s the Use of Wonderin’.

And why grief? A lot of people round them parts are angry, which seems a more reasonable response to a piously religious school looking the other way when its students get raped.

Now there’s a long emotional paragraph reminding her fellow Wacoans of how they’ve laughed and cried together over the years.

Waco and Baylor have matured together. [Biker shootouts at breastaurants? The rape-friendliest school this side of the University of Montana? Maybe this counts as mature behavior in Texas.] We’ve cheered, won and lost together. We’ve prayed, sung, anguished over a horrific day in history, run races, raised funds, volunteered, built homes and voted. [Strange list, moving relentlessly from high crisis to charity work to the mundane.] We reared our children and relished in our grandchildren. [Reveled? I don’t think you relish in. You put relish in.] We stood by, helpless and mute, when the [Branch Davidian] Compound burned. We awkwardly welcomed world press and learned. We saw Baylor move from an accomplished but contentious presidency though a transition more difficult for Baylor than Waco, ultimately transitioned by beloved Interim President David Garland, then President Kenneth Winston Starr.

Sometimes bad writing is just about strangeness. Although nothing outrageously bad appears in this piece, there’s a general sense of weird vague wandering around whatever it is this person actually wants to say. Is her goal to cheer up demoralized Wacoans? Why should she want to do that? Given her self-importance, this comes across as patronizing, as if she’s designated herself Lady Sunshine… And why give us Ken Starr’s full name when no one uses that?

Having reviewed Waco’s many triumphs, the writer now says:

In recalling these victories, in no way do I condone systems that protect attackers and fail to protect women. Effective systems were and are imperative. Together we pray for all victims’ healing and strength to rebuild their lives. They’ll need friends and family, as well as effective medical and legal services.

Again patronizing. A short paragraph stuck at the end of the piece saying And girls now I just pray you’ll find closure… Make sure to get effective medical and legal services! And note that the piece has been personal to a fault throughout (actually naming her readers in that first paragraph) until it gets to the rape scandal, at which point it’s all about ‘systems.’

Here’s how she concludes:

• In absence of knowing, stand with Baylor in facing the future. It is and will always be Waco’s inextricably linked “Siamese twin.”

God grant us all wisdom, grace, mercy, courage and peace.

See what I mean about creepy? Not twin but Siamese twin, a phrase she puts in quotation marks, which leads SOS to believe that this is a well-known formulation ’round Waco. An unfortunate birth anomaly, one person unable to move without the other… Surgeons seem to think Siamese twins are worth going to great lengths to try to separate… This is the beautiful Waco/Baylor relationship.

And there’s the whole absence of knowing thing again, although we do know, which is why Baylor’s president, much of the athletics department, and much of the latest class of football recruits, has been fired or has fled.

Finally there’s the Great Amen, featuring another bizarre list — very long, with nice thoughts in it, and it could go on much much longer. Maybe it originally did. Maybe the Waco Trib’s editor deleted love, humility, tolerance, resolve…………

But misogynistic thuggery IS Waco! Every city has to be about something, and only Waco boasts a biker massacre at a breastaurant, Branch Davidian child rape, and a religious university complicit in the rape of its women students.

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

Baylor University: Stupid is as stupid does.

The disregard for victims at Baylor wasn’t some kind of oversight. It wasn’t merely callous. It was sick. What kind of adult looks into the beseeching face of a young victim who could be his or her own daughter and decides that football is more important?

The Ken Starr kind. The same kind that went after the Clintons, first on trumped up public charges, then for sex. It’s this very cycle of history, coming back to take Starr down at last, that Baylor missed seeing over its shoulder and now is bumbling and stumbling in panic to evade.

… have all featured the camp followers and comfort women that typically accompany men in battle. The commanders of Waco’s Branch Davidians, in their protracted campaign against the government, prostituted the daughters of sect adherents. At the outset of pagan hostilities at Waco’s Twin Peaks, breastaurant women ran for their lives. Coeds at Baylor University knew to run just as fast when any of the men running the ball for the greater good of Baptism approached.

Davidian, Pagan, Baptist – whatever the divine cause, Waconan soldiers will make sexual use of women. It’s the Waco way.

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

Eh. It’s the world’s way. When the bellicose righteous fight their righteous cause…

[Dominique] Strauss-Kahn … told the court that group-sex sessions were rare “recreation” in his hectic schedule as IMF chief, taking place only four times a year because he had been very busy “saving the world from catastrophe” at the time of the US sub-prime crisis.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A Texas sports journalist puts the rape scandal at Baylor in perspective for us. (UD‘s comments appear in brackets.)

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

So am I calling Art [Briles, Baylor football coach,] a liar?

On that leave ’em laughing note, we know heads will roll over all this. And we know Art will be watching from a Waco safe place, high above it all. [Hilarious to think that the official head of a football factory has any power. The God who stands above it all directing and watching is the coach. UD read somewhere – can’t find the link – that a sacrificial woman from somewhere in the administration has been selected to suffer for her Art.] [Good one, UD.]

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

Remember: This guy is writing about a place that was founded as a university.

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

Oh. And here’s a great blast from the past. In a recent tussle with his league over their team ranking system (it placed Texas Christian, the place Briles found Baylor’s most famous rapist, over Baylor), Briles said

[The league is] obligated to us because we’re helping the Big 12’s image in the nation.

Totally, Art, and keep up the good work.

[M]aybe, as Waco Convention Center Director Liz Taylor suggests, things just happen.

I met Taylor during the Branch Davidian siege, when it was her task to convince the world that Waco wasn’t what it appeared to be. “I have learned to take things in stride,” she told me this week [after the biker shootout]. “It is all part of a growing community.“

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

Higher Ed, Texas-Style

Governor Abbott has promised to sign open carry. He also has endorsed another gun lobby priority — legislation to permit concealed handguns on the state’s college campuses. That bill has drawn alarm from university officials, including Chancellor William McRaven of the University of Texas system who posed a dilemma about gun rights and free speech: “If you’re in a heated debate with somebody in the middle of a classroom, and you don’t know whether or not that individual is carrying, how does that inhibit the interaction between students and faculty?”

Oh please. Ask me a hard one. Once everybody’s packing, everybody knows everybody’s packing. Heated disagreements are resolved exactly the way the two sides of the Bandidos vs. Cossacks debate resolved them.

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

A bar is one of the very few places in Texas where you cannot openly carry a weapon — one of the few where you can’t carry an assault rifle, for that matter — but no one seems to have doubted that the [Waco] bikers would have easy access to serious firearms. This is a state where a request by Chipotle that people not display guns while ordering burritos caused a public protest.

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.