Issues & Opinions

This evening, I caught a bit of Paula Zahn’s show on CNN. She was doing a segment on the Virginia Tech shootings, and while I missed the first portion, the part I saw included her coverage of the views and concerns of South Koreans. It included this teaser:

And will there be a backlash against Korean Americans? Some Virginia Tech parents are telling their sons and daughters, come home now.

That struck me as incredibly overbaked thinking on someone’s part, and so intrigued, I went to the transcript of the show which I found at the CNN website, and it is the source of virtually all of the excerpted comments below.

ZAHN: And as Matthew Chance reported a little bit earlier tonight, many South Koreans consider the massacre to be a national disgrace. They are shocked and ashamed because the gunman, Cho Seung- Hui, was born there. And today, a South Korean diplomat told CNN that the Korean community is extremely worried about a possible backlash right here in the U.S. It’s very much on the minds of Korean Americans on the Virginia Tech campus.

I have trouble understanding why the South Koreans would consider the massacre to be a national disgrace, or more properly, why they would think that it is a national disgrace for South Korea. There are elements of the story that could lead the excitable to think it a national disgrace for the US (more on that in a bit), but Cho’s actions were his alone, and not those of his country of birth, or its other citizens and expatriates. He was a psychotic, disaffected loser, one who should have been institutionalized for his own and society’s good, if there had been a legal basis to have done so.

The concern mentioned near the top of her show, the fear of backlash against Koreans…

No, not “Korean Americans”. Cho was demonstrably not a Korean American, he was a Korean with a green card. And not all of the people of Korean extraction interviewed in the show were necessarily anything other than Korean Visa Holders, and calling them “Korean Americans” is as politically correct, meaningless, and silly as going to Zimbabwe and, for fear of offending someone by innocuously and logically referring to them by a physical trait or nationality, reflexively calling them African Americans, to peals of laughter from anyone paying actual attention.

…seems as equally ill-founded as the South Korean feeling this tragedy is a national disgrace to their country. Cho, a resident alien, had moved to the US at the age of 8. His afflictions don’t seem to have had anything to do with his South Korean-ness, his overall Korean-ness, or even his ultimate Asian-ness. And the possibility that they did would never have even occurred to me until it was brought up on Ms. Zahn’s show.

Perhaps (no offense intended, honestly), this is something that’s part of that entire “Inscrutable Asian Mystique”.

ANDREW LAM, VIETNAMESE AMERICAN WRITER {…} Well, right after the shooting, there was only one designation, and that was Asian. Everybody called me, Chinese, Korean, Pakistani, and they were all saying the same thing. Please, please, let it not be one of us.

Perhaps I missed it, but back in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, I don’t recall anyone from Ohio (my home at the time) saying “Gosh, I hope it’s not an Ohioan who did this!” Geography has nothing to do with insane acts (except perhaps in North Korea), and no rational non-Asian person would think to blame Asians as a group, or of any group, for the actions of one insane man. I hope that the only reason CNN covered the story as they did was out of concern for the backlash fears related to them by Asians.

The alternative, by my argument, would be that CNN and Ms. Zahn are irrational, which might be true, but which I don’t assert. If such a backlash occurs, I will be equally shocked and almost as sickened by it as I was the news of the massacre itself. I think such concerns are utterly misplaced, and that the members of the Korean community should allow themselves to calm down and get on with their lives and educations.

Though there have been concerns brought to light about Cho’s mental health since his mass-murder & subsequent suicide, apparently there weren’t enough warning lights going off to permit committing him to involuntary psychiatric care.

ZAHN: And, today, for the first time, we’re getting a significant amount of information about Cho’s family. One of his relatives says he had mental problems even as a boy in South Korea, one of his relatives today calling him an idiot.
{…}
Tonight, in hindsight, it seems glaringly obvious that Cho Seung-Hui was severely disturbed and dangerous. Fellow students, teachers, police, and mental health experts all saw the signs. So, why did mental health professionals let Cho out of their hands?
{…}
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Paula, this gets very tricky. Doctors I talked to today said that, unless a patient has a history of violence or directly tells you that he’s thinking about doing something violent, it can be very hard to tell if he’s going to be a threat.
…
COHEN (voice-over): Cho Seung-Hui was no stranger to mental health professionals. In fact, about a year-and-a-half ago, he was evaluated at a mental health facility. So, why didn’t anybody figure out that he was capable of such horrific carnage?

I suppose it’s possible to claim (though I am not well-informed enough to do so, and thus don’t) that the mental health professionals who had cared for him should have been more aggressive in their care.

JOHN T. MONAHAN, PSYCHOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF LAW: Well, studies have shown for a long time that psychiatrists and psychologists are not very good at predicting violence in the future. They’re better than chance, but they’re not much better than chance.
{…}
In some ways, predicting harmful behavior is like predicting harmful weather. If an inaccurate prediction is made, that doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody has missed anything.

MELANIE ADKINS, MENTAL HEALTH COUNSELOR: {…} It sometimes seems like folks think we have a crystal ball, and that we can really look into the future and see what will happen with a particular individual. But it’s not an exact science, and we’re just not that good at predicting long-term risk of violence.

As disheartening as it is to realize how little control of our environment we really have, the statements of the two mental health practitioners above ring true. All it takes to recognize the potential problems attendant to making mental health personnel intervene more aggressively in such instances is the howling outrage I personally would feel to hear someone claim I needed to be locked up for evaluation.

Of course, just because that alternative seems clearly unworkable at any level greater than the closely circumscribed manner in which it’s already used in our liberal civil society’s justice system doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work to curb the occurrence of mentally ill people going off on those around them. It would most definitely work, but with what we deem an unacceptable downside.

That downside, and society’s abhorrence of it, has led to cries for another unpalatable change in the way we do things. The difference between these two unpalatable alternatives is that the alternative being discussed would flatly not work at all. Which one is that? Either “better” gun control (however that’s defined) or total abolition of private gun ownership, of course.

As seen in the poll results linked left (entire article at MSN available by clicking on picture), a clear majority of the poll respondents recognize this. The poll breaks down pretty much as one would expect, demographically and politically:

On the question of arming more Americans, political affiliation led to a stark contrast in opinions. Eighty-nine percent of Democrats do not think more guns would avert tragedies like at Virginia Tech, while only 24 percent of Republicans share that view. Independents are evenly split on that issue. Men are more likely than women to believe that more armed Americans is a viable deterrent. The divide between urban and rural America is large: 62 percent of city dwellers say that arming more Americans would not help prevent such tragedies, while nearly half of rural Americans, 49 percent, believe it would.

More men than women believe that gun control laws will not change in the aftermath of Monday’s murders. Political positions did not make much of a difference on this point: 47 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans say they do not believe the laws will change.

While most people in the poll seem to see things realistically, the political class isn’t quite as constrained by the logic. Well-meaning they might be, like Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), who lost her husband and had a son seriously wounded in a gun-related attack on the Long Island Railroad during the 1990s. They’re abetted in the chattering class by folks like Rosie O’Donnell, who can’t seem to muster a cogent argument to support her case, and instead prefers to sensationalize the matter with statements like:

O’Donnell says the NRA is “organized,” “scary” “they have guns” and, she says, it’s “impossible” to fight them.

Even though it won’t have any effect on the problem underlying the VaTech tragedy, the efforts to restrict gun availability have regained currency, as seen in the NY Times article from yesterday, entitled “Shooting Rekindles Issues of Gun Rights and Restrictions“. If legislative action follows the apparent course of public clearheadedness on the matter, such efforts will likely come to their logical end, no action. The Times article above makes clear that nothing out of the ordinary occurred in the acquisition of at least one of the guns Cho used:

As described by John Markell, the owner of the store, Roanoke Firearms, the purchase was a routine transaction. Virginia requires residents to present two forms of identification to buy a gun, as well pass a computerized background check, and Mr. Cho showed a salesman his driver’s license, a checkbook and his green card, because he had immigrated with his family from South Korea.

That doesn’t change the politicking, though:

But this unremarkable purchase by Mr. Cho is drawing attention to Virginia’s gun laws, which some gun-control advocates described as lax. The purchase has prompted calls from several Democrats and at least one leading presidential candidate, John Edwards, for measures to restrict gun sales, even as they proclaimed their support for the Second Amendment.

According to this article, found at the Aussie 9MSN site:

According to the Brady Campaign lobby for gun control, the state merits a C-minus on a scale of A to F for the strength of its gun control laws, with 32 of the 50 states ranked D or F.

At least relatively speaking, no, Virginia’s not lax. In an absolute sense, they’re living up to the rights enumerated in the second amendment. While there are common-sense enhancements to gun laws nationwide that could be discussed, abolition won’t happen, and shouldn’t. It’s not a solution, and not least because “If guns are outlawed…” I’ll let you fill in the rest from memory.

The final absurdity of the matter? The NBC handling of the videotape that Cho sent them before he went on his rampage. From the CNN transcript:

{Zahn} Let’s turn to Ted Rowlands. He’s been following the outrage over NBC’s decision to show them to the world, as well as to the authorities.

Ted, what have you found?

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Paula, first off, today, the governor of Virginia announced an independent review panel will be formed to look into the decisions made following this tragedy.

He says not to second-guess anybody, but just to make Virginia a safer state. As you alluded to, one decision that is being second- guessed, especially here on campus, was the decision by the media to show Cho’s video and writings and photographs. They believe that the media should not have done that, and some of these victims are suffering for a second time.

The best analogy I’ve seen to explain how badly NBC botched this one is this, by Jack at Ace of Spades:

Ever watched a baseball game on say, WTBS or WGN, when some asshat jumps on the field? What happens?

The producers of the game pull their cameras off the field. They focus on the broadcast booth. They focus on the dugouts. They focus on the bullpen. They keep attention on everything but the idiot running around in the outfield, to deny him the attention he so obviously craves. But NBC/MSNBC? Game on, brother! They might as well be inviting the rest of the idiots in the stands to take a lap around the basepaths.

Like so many parts of this tragedy, that, too, could have been handled much better, just by ensuring it was avoided.

(all ellipsis above, mine)