UPDATE #5: The Washington Post has a good article up about the Virginia Tech shooting. From reading that and just watching the news today this guy was clearly nuts or mentally ill, but clearly being Korean had little to do with it. He had some serious issues that many teachers had noticed before the shooting happened. The drum beat of possible reprisals against Koreans is continuing:
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday the government hoped the Virginia Tech shootings, allegedly carried out by a 23-year-old South Korean native, would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” (…)
The diplomat said there was no known motive for the shootings, and added that South Korea hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.”
Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Korean born UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also offered apologies and condolescences for the shootings. I seriously doubt there will be any “racial prejudice or confrontation” and it kind of makes apologies (which aren’t necessary) and condolescences seem hollow if that is what the reason is that they are offering such statements.
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UPDATE #4: The Joong Ang Ilbo has an interview posted with the wounded Korean student:
Among Cho’s victims in the deadliest shooting in American history was a Korean graduate student who was shot three times. His injuries were not considered life-threatening.
“Shortly after the lecture began, he came in,” said Park Chang-min, 27, a master’s degree candidate in civil engineering. “He shot the professor first and then started shooting the classmates. Blood was all over the place quickly and it was chaos. “I could tell that he was an Asian, but because of his mask and hat, it was hard to see his face,” Park said. “There were about 15 students in our classroom. The shooting took place in a split second, and I had no time to
hide. He then moved on to the next classroom.”
Park said he got as low as possible instinctively and he did not even realize he’d been shot in the arm.
“Police came into our classroom after time passed and things were all quiet,” Park said. “We were told to raise our hands if were are okay, and only three, including myself, stood up.”
Park was sent to the Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment.
The South Korean Embassy in Washington dispatched Consul Choi Seung-hyeon to the scene.
“Except for Park, there were no other Korean victims in the shooting,” Choi said, at the time.
There are also concerns from Korean students that they may be targeted for reprisals:
After news reports about the killer’s possible identity, concerns grew among Korean students about discrimination.
Located 390 kilometers (240 miles) southwest of Washington D.C., Virginia Tech has 26,000 students.
The school has 1,600 Asian students, including 763 Korean undergraduate and graduate students.
“I am worried that the Americans will treat all Asian students, including Koreans, as criminals,” said Lee Seung-wook, head of Virginia Tech’s Korean student association, before the gunman was identified as a Korean.
I for one would be very surprised if any serious reprisals take place. If anyone wants to talk about racially motivated reprisals how about the aftermath of the 2002 armored vehicle accident in Korea where GIs and foreigners were attacked on the street including kidnapped and paraded on TV. Or the signs put up in windows denying admittance to Americans or foreigners in general. Some how I doubt anything like that is going to happen after this tragic incident. Like past shootings these maniacs come in all shapes and colors.
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UPDATE #3: It appears Cho may have targeted the engineering department because he had failing grades and had to transfer over to an English degree:
On a chat room of (mostly Asian) engineers that I’m on, someone posited that the killer was probably a “real major†(i.e., engineer, scientist, etc.) who played too many video games, “got horrible grades and had to transfer to english.†This hypothesis was put forth by someone who didn’t know about the killers’s anti-engineer department ramblings, so I’d say it’s a pretty decent speculation that he wanted (and failed) to be an engineering major. It would explain the note.
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UPDATE #2: The Chosun Ilbo has a report up on the shooting. They have identified one Korean student as being injured in the attack:
The shootings have horrified the U.S. The death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured are in critical condition. Korean student Park Chang-min, who is in the civil engineering doctorate program, was slightly injured in the hand and waist, head of the university’s Korean student association Lee Seung-woo said. Park is not in serious condition. Some 450 Korean students study at Virginia Tech – 150 in the master and doctorate program and 300 in the undergraduate school.
Here is more from the Korea Times.
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UPDATE #1: South Korean media was already exploiting the tragedy by drawing not so funny cartoons before they realized it was a Korean shooter.
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The Marmot’s Hole has a whole lot on the announcement that the shooter responsible for killing 33 people yesterday at Virginia Tech is in fact a Korean student. The shooter’s name is Cho Seung-hui and is 23 years old and first came to the United States in 1992 with his parents. His parents run a shockingly a dry cleaning business in Centerville, Virgina and his sister attended Princeton University.
The Washington Post has good blog updates going on as well on this that is worth checking out. They say the students in Cho classes knew him as the question mark kid:
Classmates said that on the first day of an introduction to British literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho’s turn, he didn’t speak.
The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. “Is your name, `Question mark?â€â€˜ classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.
Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. “He didn’t real out to anyone. He never talked,†Poole said.
“We just really knew him as the question mark kid,†Poole said.
I’m watching the news right now and they are saying this guy is a V.T. student and had a reputation as a loner and a problem student. He is suspected of making prior bomb threats on the school and even starting fire before this incident. Supposedly he was using the bomb threats and the fire as experiments into testing the response time of the police and firefighters. They are also reporting that he bought the gun five weeks go, indicating that he has had this planned for quite some time.
Cho left a note at the scene of the first crime where he murdered two students in their dorm room with one of them suspected of possibly being his ex-girlfriedn. In the note he wrote about “rich kids” and “deceitful charlatans”. His body found at the scene of the second crime had the words “Ismail Ax” written in red ink on one of his arms. BoingBoing was able to find this out about what “Ismail Ax” means:
This is how the New York Post broke it down:
The reference may be to the Islamic account of the Biblical sacrifice of Abraham, where God commands the patriarch to sacrifice his own son. Abraham begins to comply, but God intervenes at the last moment to save the boy … Abraham uses a knife in most versions of the story, but some accounts have him wielding an ax.
A more obscure reference may be to a passage in the Koran referring to Abraham’s destruction of pagan idols; in some accounts, he uses an ax to do so.
One of BoingBoing’s commenters left this link to a Flickr page with a picture of Cho sayinig he went by the name Ismail because his Korean name was hard to pronounce:
Michael over at the Metropolitician also has a very good post up explaining his thoughts on the shooting. Here is a sample:
There is going to be serious national shame, expressed through the shock of this “representative of the culture” – even if the kid had been living in the States most of his life. There will be Korean media pointing at the parents, expressions of shock that “a Korean could do such a thing” (despite the fact that violence in the schools and against women are actually rampant in Korean society), and the glee that many people here in South Korea have at pointing out “American” character traits whenever horrible things happen in the US will be inevitably tempered.
Because the flip side of the logic now applies, like a mofo.
So how will this play out in South Korea? I think it will play out much like how Michael suggested:
I wouldn’t even be surprised if this is used as more ammo to show just how much America can “corrupt” good Korean youth. Just like Western porn is responsible for Korean boys (and girls!) conspiring to rape and sexually extort the victims that have made the news in a couple of pretty scandalous cases over the last few months.
Michael also offers some very insightful commentary about how he has been asked in the past by college professors why Korean students in the US are most likely to be problem students. He also shares this fact that the world wide record for the worst shooting rampage in history is held by a Korean man named Woo Bom-gon who killed 57 people in South Korea in 1982 after an arguement with his girlfriend. Sound familiar? Lot’s more good stuff, go and read the rest.
Overall as others have suggested we shouldn’t jump to conclusions and blame the entire Korean race for the actions of one lone crazy man, unlike the Korean media which loves the paint the entire US military due to the action of a very small few that commit crimes in South Korea. So far at least in the US media I don’t see anyone blaming Koreans in general and most of the debate is now centered around gun control and not the stereotypical angry Asian man pissed off because someone stole his girlfriend.
For more good postings on this make sure to check out DPRK Studies posting on what to do about mass shootings and One Free Korea who has a good posting going on as well about crazy Cho.
