I wasn't going to post on this

[muckefuck]

I've read a lot of sad things in the wake of Blacksburg, among them that_dang_otter's bitter point that, on average, more Americans than died there are killed every day in the USA, but since they're not all killed in one place, they don't garner the same kind of attention. We can glimpse just how inured we've become to their deaths by the fact that the officials at VA Tech weren't willing to cancel classes for 20,000 on account of only two on-campus murders. It makes me wonder what their cut-off was: Four students? Ten? Would it be the same for faculty and/or staff? What's the quota where I work? And has it changed in light of Monday's events?

But I think the saddest thing I've read so far is this:

Kim Min-kyung, a South Korean student at Virginia Tech reached by telephone from Seoul, said there were about 500 Koreans at the school, including Korean-Americans. She said she had never met Cho. She said South Korean students feared retaliation and were gathering in groups.

I so dearly wish I could say they were just being paranoid, but I'm too well acquainted with human nature--and past reactions to massacres with minority perpetrators--to say that.

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

I don't think the point about canceling classes is at all fair. Nearly all murders are just that -- a killing of a specific, almost always singular, target, not a rampage. If someone were killed in the building next door, I hardly expect that my office would close (and Virginia Tech covers some 2000 acres -- that's like saying Millennium Park should be evacuated if there were a shooting in the Sears Tower). There might be some cordoning off if the police were in hot pursuit, but that did not appear to be the case here. After the first shooting was reported, there was no special reason to believe that there was additional danger.

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

I agree that they're not just being paranoid, but I think there's a qualitative difference here from the examples linked, which is that there is no linkage (real, partially real, imagined, or otherwise) being made between the fact that Cho was South Korean and what he did, whereas the religion of the 9/11 attackers was a big part of the story. (Before he was identified, I'll grant you, it was kind of inexplicable to he was described only as "Asian and resident at the dormitories" rather than, say, "an undergrad".)

For the record, the saddest thing I've read was this:

I just watched a CNN reporter completely lose his composure while he described the local emergency officials removing the bodies from Norris Hall as the dead students' cell phones were ringing and buzzing, their frantic parents tried to make sure that they were okay. I don't even know what to do with that image.


(From the blog "Schuyler's Monster", I read it quoted in Brooklynite's lj)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've already seen one attempt to link the killer's nationality to his crime by means of South Korea's compulsory military service. (And this despite the fact that I can find no mention of his having reported for duty in any of the news articles.) I'm now bracing myself for the trickle of opinion pieces about how the pressure of familial expectations on Asian-Americans makes them all ticking time bombs.

I'm not sure what the religion of the perpetrators could possibly have to do with the post-9/11 hate crimes enumerated in the article I linked to. What they have in common is not their beliefs--among the victims are a Sikh and a Coptic Christian--but their appearance. They were targeted for no other reason than because they "looked Middle-Eastern".

[sconstant.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen that, but I've been watching mainstream media, not blogs. And I bet there will be the opinion pieces on Asian family expectations, but on the other hand, there will be more about mental illness.

I don't want to put myself in the position of defending the logic of idiots who commit hate crimes, I'll just say that such idiots don't have a full grasp of world religion and probably made the assumption that there's a relationship between "looking Middle Eastern" and "being Muslim." Fine-grained distinctions (or even coarse-grained ones) are not something often made by such idiots. Again, I see a qualitative difference in the perils faced by Muslims (and people who might be mistaken for Muslims) after 9/11 and the peril of South Koreans on the VA Tech campus now.

[gopower.livejournal.com]

The guy's family emigrated in 1992, when he was seven, so he would not have served in the S. Korean military. Friends of mine who have indicate that it was essentially boring civil service make-work. For a country that has technically been at war for over a half a century, S. Korea seems to have remarkably little militarism in its culture. Chalk it up to living under U.S. nuclear umbrella, I guess.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

But he's still identified as a South Korean citizen, which means he became eligible for military service at age 18. It's entirely possible that he could've returned to Korea for a year to complete his tour of duty; I've known other US permanent residents (chiefly citizens of South Korea and Israel) who have done this, even though some of them have also been living in the USA from a young age.

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Yeah. The brother of a friend was on the team that secured the building, and described having to walk past bleeding kids crying for help while they made sure there was no more shooting going on, and having to ignore the cell phones of the dead and injured. I gotta say, while I agree that the potential for senseless retribution is scary, and hate crimes despicable, I think the saddest thing about the murder of dozens of people is, well, the murder part.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

For the record, I've been specifically avoiding reading such graphic and grisly accounts. I've read enough descriptions of bloody massacres in the histories of umpteen wars, conflicts, and senseless butcheries to last me several lifetimes.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

This piece on Morning Edition yesterday did not cover any of the grisly details, but it stopped me in my tracks and left mbe bawling in my car for a couple of minutes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9615639

So I guess that is the saddest thing I've heard about the events this week, or at least the most compelling.

[his-regard.livejournal.com]

I so dearly wish I could say they were just being paranoid

Well, I will. I think there's a qualitative difference between nutjobs murdering for a Cause and murdering because they're nuts, and I think Americans recognize the difference. If Cho had been waxing eloquent about retribution for some (real or imagined) injustice to Korea, maybe the other Korean students' fears would have been justified. That doesn't seem to be the case.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Nope, I'm with muckefuck here. While it may be that the average American (or any other national, for that matter) can distinguish between ideological crimes and individual meltdowns, there's still a small minority that can't and may well lash out (and, at the other end of the spectrum, a small minority that, when confronted by any such act, tries to understand first before reacting). I'd be nervous.

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Well, the other thing you don't hear about homicide is that the rate has gone down quite a bit lately.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/htus00.pdf

The larger problem is that Americans, on the whole, refuse to think quantitatively. So perceptions and policies are driven by anecdotes rather than the actual magnitude of a problem.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Today I was musing that one of the aspects of these kinds of horrors that makes them more likely to distort most people's perceptions than "everyday murders" is not their magnitude so much as their relative unpreventability. What I mean is: Most murders, as gopower points out, are "crimes of passion". The murderer is well-known to the victim, who may even have tried to escape their assaults in the past. To the extant that we can refuse to associate with violent, unstable personalities, we can reduce our chances of being victims of such a perpetrator. But we have much less control over who our colleagues and neighbours chose to associate with, and with that uncertainty and loss of control comes a tendency to exaggerate the risks.

Now that I've laid it all out there, it looks like a pretty banal realisation. But that describes pretty much all of my reactions to the massacre.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I felt upset and jittery about the massacre, too, perhaps because I'm also working at a University. And I'm unhappy that so much of the blogosphere (and to some degree the mainstream media) have devolved into useless and tasteless yammering on both sides of the gun control issue.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why I initially avoided the addressing the issue: Because the absolute last thing I want to get into right now is a discussion of gun control. (Well, that and the fact that I thought--and still think-- that I didn't have anything interesting to say.) In other words, I agree with Ross Douthat when he says:

I'm extremely skeptical, though, that there's actually anything significant to learn about gun policy from yesterday's violence: Extreme, unpredictable events like this one seem like precisely the kind of thing that shouldn't dictate lawmaking decisions (though of course they inevitably do). If there's a case for gun control, it's in the daily run of shooting deaths that don't make the front page; if there's a case against gun control, it's in the daily run of crimes deterred by an armed citizenry (and in more abstract questions of personal liberty), not in the faint chance that a kid with a conceal-and-carry permit might have taken the Virginia killer down.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

I'm predicting a backlash not against Korean-Americans, but against young men who are too quiet and won't look you in the eye or say 'hello'. If they seem "mean" and too interested in weapons ...

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

I find it strange – well not strange, but not especially helpful – that he has been so firmly identified as "a Korean". I read that in S Korea the public reaction has overwhelmingly been along the lines of "Look, he left here to go to the States when he was 16 - it's America that formed his character, leave us out of it" and I can see their point.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Odd, the impression I've gotten from browsing the headlines is exactly the opposite. I see a surprising amount of shame--to the point where people were talking about sending a delegation from Seoul to Blacksburg to apologise in person for Cho's actions.

At least they're consistent. Whenever an American serviceman abroad is accused or convicted of some harm against against Korean civilians, there are shrill denunciations of the USA and its "shame" for letting "one of its own" commit such vile acts. I used to think that was all just political posturing, but now I see they apply the same standards to their own citizens.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

Apparently, he also watched "Oldboy" repeatedly in the days before the event. Media outlets are already contrasting some of the pictures he sent to NBC with movie stills of actors in similar poses (Cho even posed with a hammer). Expect lots of hand-wringing commentaries about the violence of S. Korean cinema.

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting, good links there, thanks.