While the rest of the country was handing out candy and watching kids in dinosaur costumes, college towns from Indiana to Colorado turned into open-air shooting galleries. Fox News tallied the weekend’s body count near five campuses: three dead and at least twenty-nine injured.
The left will call it “gun violence.” The rest of us see what it actually is—the predictable result of a culture that has spent decades mocking fathers, dismantling standards, and treating the fear of God as optional.
Start in Bloomington, Indiana. Around 1:30 a.m. on Kirkwood Avenue, officers already watching a post-homecoming crowd heard shots. Seven people, ages 17 to 27, took bullets. None of them were Indiana University students. They drove in from Indianapolis and Greenwood to party.
One 18-year-old from Indianapolis was arrested after running with an AR-style pistol; he already faced a pending felony weapons charge in another county. Shell casings from multiple guns littered the sidewalk. This is what “celebrating Halloween” looks like when young men with criminal histories treat a college town like a free-fire zone. The New York Post has the details.
A few hours earlier in Birmingham, the Magic City Classic—Alabama A&M versus Alabama State, nearly 70,000 fans—ended and the guns came out near Legion Field. One person died. Eight more were wounded, one critically. Mayor Randall Woodfin said the community was “hurt, shaken and rightfully angry.”
Two separate shootings minutes apart. A 17-year-old was later held with a Glock conversion switch. These are not random “mass shootings” in the media sense. They are young men settling scores or flexing after a big game because nothing in their world has taught them that other people’s lives matter.
In Boulder, Colorado, a registered Halloween house party on Marine Street was shut down for noise. A smaller group stayed. Later a group forced its way in. Two 19-year-old University of Colorado students were shot inside the house. One died. The other remains critical.
It is Boulder’s first homicide of the year. Police released photos of two persons of interest—one wearing an Art the Clown shirt. Chief Steve Redfearn said the community “deserves to feel safe.” Fine words. The reality is a college party culture that mixes alcohol, drugs, and people who have no stake in the neighborhood.
Newark, Delaware saw at least six hospitalized after midnight on Main Street near the University of Delaware. Costumed students fled. University President Laura Carlson wrote that it was “difficult to know what to say when violence like this erupts.”
Near Illinois Wesleyan in Bloomington, Illinois, a 19-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene and seven others were hit. ATF is assisting. Add the earlier Florida A&M homecoming shooting that wounded eleven, including children, and the pattern is hard to miss.
The usual suspects will demand more gun laws while ignoring the obvious. Most of these shooters are not licensed, law-abiding citizens. They are young males who already ignore the laws that exist. Fatherless homes, a culture that celebrates thug life, soft prosecutors, and universities that treat party culture as a right rather than a liability produce this.
Romans 1 describes the fruit when a society gives God over: “being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity.”
And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
We have watched it happen in real time. College towns used to be places parents sent their kids with some expectation of relative order. Now parents check the news after every homecoming and Halloween to see whether their child is one of the wounded.
The answer is not another federal background check that criminals ignore. It is restoring the things that actually restrain evil—intact families, swift justice, and a culture that still believes some things are wrong. Until then, the body count after football games and costume parties will keep climbing.
