[This was originally a Marmot's Hole post, but I saw too late that my news was already running behind. I post it here while I write something more substantive. I've been thinking about this issue for years.]
[Update #1: My more recent post, representative of my opinions, is here, to those being linked in from my immediate reaction to the revelation of the shooter's ethnicity, which I did suspect was Korean as soon as I heard he was Asian. The cultural contextualization is just that; it's not a causal argument, as you'll see in my full post. But I always leave my posts and comments as is, even when I sometimes post rashly or in a flurry of fingers on the keyboard. Thanks for reading.]
[Update #2: I'm closing comments for this page, because people seem to be skipping over these updates and going off before even reading the full post. So if you'd like to respond, do so at the link indicated above, which is the very next post after this one. I guess my mistake here is not erasing my posts or comments, even if I didn't contextualize things adequately, or even when I make a mistake. What I write stays up. That's my policy. I'd appreciate a little leeway in the fact that my reaction to this incident is poured out all over the Internet. At least take the time to read my complete thoughts on the matter, as opposed to a placeholder post that contains only a fraction of my thoughts on the matter.]
The original post:
I'd been waiting for it.
The shooter is South Korean.
I'd been suspecting it all day, for a lot of reasons, which is why I was sitting by the computer. Not the least of which was because a group of American university administrators whom Fulbright hosted nearly 10 years ago, when being a tour of Korean universities, asked the staff, "Why is it that out of all our international students, Korean males have so much trouble?"
To my surprise, all of the university officials cited incident after incident of Korean male graduate students who seemed to have trouble adjusting, often got into fights with other students in the living spaces, and were often the source of trouble in dealing with romantic relationships gone bad or women in general, especially when they involved Korean females dating non-Koreans.
Anyway, my little bit of uninformed analysis will be just the beginning. I'm sure we'll see all sorts of explanations from the Korean media. And for what it's worth, perhaps now the South Korean media and people will be faced with the question of stereotyping, media, and how treating individual incidents as evidence of various "national characters" leads down roads we don't want to travel.
All in all, a tragic story. But the conversation will prove...interesting, I'm sure.
Let the shitstorm – and social experiment – begin.
There. If you want to yell at me, then do it after reading my complete post on the matter.
