The Dork and the Glock

 by Takuan Seiyo  

| View comments |  Print This Post

If you study the posted pictures of Cho Seung-Hui, you will see a young man lost in a strange world: a geeky, alienated loser.

From where I am today, in Japan, the Drudge Report webpage for April 17, 2007 looks like this:

At the top, there is a banner ad in bad Japanese, selling access to the American green card via the Immigration Lottery — surely, one of the greatest bone-headed stupidities ever conceived by man. Thank you, Senator Kennedy.

Underneath, there is a photo of a young Asian man, over the caption, "You caused me to do this." Above the photo, a line of print discloses: "Investigators believe Cho at some point had been taking meds for depression . . ." Further news tags read:

POLICE: Campus killer is Cho Seung-Hui, 23, native of South Korea….
Lived in dorm…
'He was my roommate'
LEFT BEHIND NOTE
Writings Were Disturbing
Was Cho crazed over Emily?

And, of course, there are the relevant utterances of the clueless: from the inchoate pap of Senator Obama, who "compares Va. Tech Tragedy to Verbal Violence of Imus," to the concentrated poison of the ususal suspects: "European press blame Charleton Heston for shooting . . ."

The agora of mediated voices is roiling with agitated verbiage. One of the cogent voices belongs to James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. In an opinion piece entitled "Why they kill" in the Los Angeles Times, Professor Fox enumerates the common denominators of serial killers:

"(P)erpetrators have a long history of frustration and failure and a diminished ability to cope with life's disappointments. (T)hey externalize blame, frequently complaining that others didn't give them a chance. Sometimes they argue that their ethnic or racial group or gender isn't getting the breaks that others are." He posits further that the mass killers are loners, and often are people who have "picked up roots and moved."

Typically for an academic (or a European), Professor Fox misfires when he handles guns. Among the mass kill-enhancing changes from days of yore, he contends, "semiautomatics are all too easily accessible" nowadays, whereas before 1966 only "pistols, rifles, maybe a shotgun" were available to the would-be killer. Well, pistols have been "semiautomatic" since 1896, as have many commonly available rifles. It is from 1994, not before, that many semiautomatic rifles were banned, courtesy of the Clinton-era Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Just another bone-headed stupidity that our betters in Washington, DC specialize in.

Incidentally, on the same day when our media were all over the Virginia Tech killings, the Mayor of Nagasaki in Japan was gunned down by a gangster. The gangster was upset over damage to his car by a pothole he drove into next to a construction site in the city of Nagasaki. In a country where the population has been totally disarmed and is fed regular anti-gun propaganda, only the 85,000 members of the official crime gangs have access to guns, not counting the 5-shot antique revolvers used by the Japanese police. So much for gun prohibition as a panacea that will rid us of evil.

But Professor Fox is on to something. For if you study the posted pictures of Cho Seung-Hui, you will see a young man lost in a strange world: a geeky, alienated loser. A short, unattractive, introverted, unsmiling dork, lips puckered to prevent the bursting of bottled-up sexual frustration. A picture of grudge on Drudge, his pain of rejection encrusted into ethnic hatred ending in dementia.

This miserable, celibate-by-necessity man, a Korean English major among techies of English stock, was living in a milieu of tall, streamlined, smiling, extroverted people with good teeth and oft-exercised libidos. A repulsive outlier among the alpha men of Virginia Tech, competing unsuccessfully for the favors of young Virginia women. A low-status immigrant from a rigidly stratified and prudish country where the worker bees are of equal size and the queen bees are few and hereditary. Moving to a country of unlimited opportunity and surrounded at Virginia Tech by the hedonistic progeny of the many queen bees that America affords.

And therein lies the insanity. For the Immigration Lottery — and the circus of retards who conceived the 1965 Immigration Act – is grounded in a deliberate denial or reality. The reality of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences.

An immigrant of West-European stock, escaping statism and national disintegration, represents a higher potential of productive assimilation than an Asian immigrant does who is looking for Eldorado and cannot help but bring his cultural shackles in his baggage. The American and Korean cultures are so very different that even their Christianity is hardly of the same meaning. The South Koreans understand this, for they refuse non-Korean immigration.

If severe acclimatization problems may plague a native of South Korea, a modern and predominantly Christian country, it is hard to imagine what they are for the Muslim Bantu or the hill tribesman from Yemen or Laos. For that is an immigrant not only from a different creed and culture, but also from a different century. And diversity is not beautiful when different civilizations and centuries collide.

The dissonance inherent in America's current "invite-the-world" demographics makes mockery of the 1965 Immigration Act's assumption that it makes no difference what is the nationality, race, creed, education and emigration motivation of the prospective immigrant. The mugging that reality unleashes on fools who scorn her is reflected, inter alia, in David Frum's commentary on the Virginia Tech massacre:

Aliens increasingly drive the US crime problem: about one-third of California's prison population is first- or second-generation immigrant, as is 29 per cent of the federal prison population. Salvadoran and other Central American gangs commit the worst violence in many American cities.

In 1989, Marc Lepine, the worst mass murderer in Canada's history, killed 14 women and wounded 10 women and four men at a Montreal university equivalent to Virginia Tech. I didn't know until reading Mark Steyn's recent comment, that Lepine was born "Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage."

In 1991, Gang Lu, a Beijing native and PhD student in physics at the University of Iowa, punished his faculty advisors for having failed to recommend his doctoral dissertation for an academic honor. Wielding two handguns, Lu shot and killed five faculty professors and graduate students, paralyzed another, and then committed suicide. He had written five letters explaining his "reasons" for the planned mass murder. Among the quotes that transpired: "It is believed that there exists no justice for little people in this world, extraordinary action has to be taken to preserve this world as a better place to live."  But there was no issue of justice for little people here; just another little dork with a gun, exploiting freedoms he had not been raised  to handle.

In 1992, Wayne Lo, then 18 years old, shot six people, killing two, at Simon's Rock Bard College in Massachusetts. Lo, a gifted son of caring and cultured parents, was born in Taiwan, went to high school in Montana, and to college in Massachusetts. According to court testimony, Lo didn't fit socially at the liberal college, felt like an outsider, and talked sometimes about wanting to kill large numbers of people.
 
On January 16, 2002, Peter Odighizuwa, a Nigerian immigrant, arrived at the Appalachian School of Law, from which he had recently flunked out. Odighizuwa then produced a pistol, shot and killed the Law School's dean, a professor, and a student. He wounded three other people. Two fellow law students, pointing their own guns, apprehended Odighizuwa upon his exit from the building. Odighizuwa was said to be an outlier at the school, with an abrasive personality and a language problem. Written accounts report his assertions that the FBI, the CIA, and the Law School's faculty members had it in for him.

The website LAW.COM analyzed the debate about the Odighizuwa killing spree. There were the anti-gun and pro-gun sides. But more interesting were the immigration related voices. LAW.COM quotes the anti-immigration organization VDARE, "which, on its Web site, says 'the white West welcomes losers and misfits like Mr. Odighizuwa into its midst, pretends they've assimilated, boasts about the 'diversity' we're creating and ignores any and every indication that they don't belong here and that their presence endangers others.'"  LAW.COM also cites Nigerian immigrants "closely examining the pressure and frustration that come hand-in-hand with the immigrant experience," and empathizing with their compatriot who, beset by his failures to cope with American reality, had snapped.

Huan Yun Xiang is the Australian Cho Seung-Hui. A Chinese student at Australia's Monash University, Xiang is an ugly, repulsive man with limited English skills. On October 21, 2002, Xiang jumped on his classroom desk, screaming, "You never understand me," and opened fire at his fellow students in an econometrics class. Armed with five handguns, Xiang killed two students and seriously wounded another five. He was then subdued.  For the crimes of a foreigner from a country where citizens have no access to either guns or liberty, the citizens of Victoria, Australia, were punished with a further tightening of Australia's already super-restrictive gun laws.

On September 13, 2006, Kimveer Gill, 25-years-old and son of Indian immigrants, had his moment of significance. A skinny, awkward loser, Gill walked into Montreal's Dawson College. Dressed entirely in black and carrying three firearms, he shot one woman to death and injured 19 people, six of them critically. He then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

Some blamed the discipline of Gill's Indian parents for the twisted gun freak Kimveer had become. He had left extensive posts of the ususal kind in the various Internet forums he frequented, e.g. "Work sucks…School sucks…Life sucks…I hate this world, I hate the people in it, I hate the way people live, I hate God." But one of the more telling notes he left prior to his rampage was a plaint that he'd not been out on a date for a month.

On November 21, 2004, Chai Soua Vang, a Hmong immigrant from Laos living in Wisconsin, trespassed onto private land while hunting deer. The landowners asked him to leave, allegedly using insulting language.  Walking away, Vang turned around with his rifle and opened fire, killing six men and wounding two. Vang had been arrested previously for threatening his wife with a gun.

A sane society, founded and still run largely by people of European stock, does not open its doors to Hmong or other time-travelers from a vastly different culture, in order to dump them insouciantly on the Germans of Wisconsin. Nor will it ignore that an Asian immigrant, an heir to an authoritarian, prudish tradition and untrained in the privileges and responsibilities of liberty, may lose his head in the cornucopia of Glocks and thongs in America.

A well-governed Western society will not ignore that its Muslim immigrant may explode, torn as he is between his lust for the long-legged teen "whore" flaunting her butt crack at the mall, and his rage at the contaminated culture that produced her. How many lives could have been spared if some pulse-quickening fräulein had not rejected Muhammad Atta's advances at some point in his life in Germany? 

East Asian immigrants, as a group, may be the most valuable human capital imported to the United States, perhaps on a par with the Europeans. Our moral and cerebral lassitude is such that if it weren't for the East Asians, the American pool of people with the IQ and discipline necessary to become an engineer, scientist or physician would decline precipitously.  But it won't do, not to notice that few Danish employees of the defense industry have been convicted of espionage on behalf of China. Or Denmark. Few Finnish businessmen have been caught exporting restricted technology to Helsinki. Few French immigrant entrepreneurs get a Stanford PhD and access to American capital and proprietary technology, in order to take all three back to Lyon.

The children of Italian immigrants have fewer social and psychological problems at Virginia Tech than children of Asian immigrants do. The children of Spanish immigrants do not fill California's prisons. Children of Czech immigrants do not acquire thousands of prepaid cell phone cards and send them to terrorists from their ummah, to better blow up Americans. And Swiss-born American university students do not unleash hails of bullets on other students, prior to liquidating their own, miserable selves. 

I doubt that evil had a purchase in Cho Seung-Hui's heart, until the day he realized he was a square peg who would never fit with the round holes. Square pegs are unavoidable; they are a product of the universal bell curve. America has had its domestic square pegs, from John Hinckley to Dylan Klebold. But for the political elite to foist additional millions of nascent or potential square pegs from abroad upon the nation, takes a special kind of unintentionally evil genius.

The Courts, Legal, Criminal Justice, Death Penalty

Read more articles by Takuan Seiyo