"Asian" or "Asian American?" (Cont)

Reposting from SFGate.com. It's a great article addressing this problem of the shooter's racial and national identity, and it's impact on political discourses and analysis.

Virginia Tech Massacre
Shooter Debate: Speculation Mars Discussion Online
by Vanessa Hua

Initial media reports described Cho Seung-Hui -- whose shooting rampage Monday at Virginia Tech left 33 dead, including himself -- as a resident alien, an Asian and a South Korean.

On Tuesday, racially tinged speculation, based on the 23-year-old Cho's heritage and immigrant status, flew around the Internet, even though he spent two-thirds of his life in the United States.

"Yet another reason for the U.S. to further restrict immigration to this country," a user going by the name of Christabella posted on a blog at SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site. "Had they not allowed Cho to waltz into the nation on a student visa, those 33 people would still be alive."

Cho, the underlying argument went, was a foreigner.

That kind of thinking has alarmed Asian American leaders. Overemphasis in news coverage of his immigrant status, and stereotyping in general, could influence perceptions of all Asian Americans -- not only Koreans -- especially in areas with little connection to Asians and Asian Americans, said Eric Mar, a San Francisco school board member who is Chinese American.

The Asian American Journalists Association, headquartered in San Francisco, questioned stories and online comments posted Tuesday morning that highlighted Cho's race and immigration status because that emphasis suggested those factors played a role in the shootings.

In fact, Cho was like many school shooters -- about three-quarters of whom have been white boys and young men, according to a 2000 report from the U.S. Secret Service. Cho appeared to feel marginalized and angry, according to criminologists and psychologists such as Louis B. Schlesinger, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Born in South Korea, Cho, 23, immigrated as a child to the United States in 1992. He was raised in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the son of a couple who worked at a dry-cleaning business. He was sullen and depressed, an English major whose twisted fiction concerned faculty and a fan of bloody shooting games, according to media reports.

"A useful way to think about this is, 'How connected might an individual feel to a community and a society?' " said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. "Sometimes the barriers might be racial, sometimes it might be language. Sometimes it might be their own mental health that prevents them from forming bonds."

The public is attempting to make sense of the tragedy by categorizing Cho and his motivations, said James Garbarino, a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of "Lost Boys: Why Our Boys Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them."

People have "an impulse to distance themselves" from the campus killer, Garbarino said. "The more someone is like one of us, the harder it is to sleep."

Some of the people posting to blogs and chat rooms online Tuesday blamed Cho's actions on his "foreign" status. Others dismissed such arguments as preposterous and asserted that the massacre resulted from easy access to guns, violence in the media or the popularity of violent video games. Still others theorized he was a member of al Qaeda, carrying out a terrorist attack. He was an English-as-a-second-language student depressed about finals, according to another theory.

Indeed, commentators' theories may say more about them than about the gunman.

"It's a psychological protective technique," said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "This is about gun control, or immigration, or not allowing guns on campus. People are painting the picture."