America’s editors and news directors voted on the year’s top ten list of most important stories, with the terrible campus murders at Virginia Tech getting the top slot. Also noted (with insufficient enthusiasm) was the amazing grassroots victory against of Bush’s amnesty monstrosity.

1. VIRGINIA TECH KILLINGS: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, who had avoided court-ordered mental health treatment despite a history of psychiatric problems, killed two fellow students in a dormitory on April 16, detoured to mail a hate-filled video of himself to NBC News, then shot dead 30 students and professors in a classroom building before killing himself. It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

9. IMMIGRATION DEBATE: A compromise immigration plan, backed by President Bush and Democratic leaders, collapsed in Congress due to Republican opposition. The plan would have enabled millions of illegal immigrants to move toward citizenship, while also bolstering border security. The issues remained alive in the presidential campaign.
[Virginia Tech Massacre Voted Top Story , San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 28, 2007]

Of course, VDARE.com readers know full well that the Virginia Tech mass murder was absolutely about immigration: the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was a Korean legal immigrant with severe assimilation problems, who expressed his fury about being unable to adjust socially in the most horrific way.

The Virginia Tech case additionally showed just how politically correct the educational establishment has become. Cho was a psychologically disturbed and dangerous young man, but no teacher or administrator was willing to insist that he be held to account for criminal actions like stalking co-eds. He was cut far more slack than an American kid would have been for similar behavior, apparently out of misplaced tolerance toward an immigrant.

The peak of the “baby boom”, was 1955. Folks born between 1933-1955 came of age in a situation in which there were consistently more younger people than older people in communities in America as a whole.

By 1977, this changed on college campuses in the US, Canada and Australia. All but a few of those born before the peak of the boom were gone from campuses. In this situation, we saw a new type of crime emerge: the campus killing.

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8 of these 15 killers were immigrants. One of the exceptions was the son on a Algerian immigrant who spent most of his early childhood outside of Canada. About 6 of these shooters were Asian men-the exceptions were either from Montreal(an unusual city compared to the rest of the English speaking world and an older, African immigrant, another was from Russia).The Wikipedia list included two other killings that were outside the English Speaking world-but it isn’t clear this is a comprehensive list.

This raises the question of what was going on here? The question most likely lies in economics.Specifically the economics that are of directly concern to college students. Few college students have huge levels of discretionary income-many are dependent on families or grants to get through school.However, demographics have a profound difference in what their social opportunities are like. Since 1955, we saw a situation in which social pressures changed.Specifically after 1977. we saw a situation in which there were generally more older students relative to younger students in the campus. Is the rise of campus shootings during that period a coincidence or is it related to that demographic shift?

Why is it that we see immigrants and Asian men so highly represented among campus killers?

In “What makes a Mass Killer” two psychiatrist discuss how isolation and alienation are major contributing factors in triggering
homicides. It is easy to expect that immigrants might be selected from a population of those most unhappy with their original homes. Why are Asians so heavily represented here? On the whole, Asians are a fairly “successful” and law-abiding group by most superficial standards. However, when we look at statistics of inter-racial marriages and births, we tend to see that Asian men are less likely to inter-marry than Asian women. That suggests that we have a population of relatively isolated Asian men in the US.

Now, there are probably reasons why campus killings are different than the killings in other parts of society. On the whole, college campuses are still remarkably safe. Still, tendency of one group to be more likely to be “driven over the edge” suggests that the “politically correct” culture of academe isn’t as racially neutral as its participants would like to represent themselves as being.

I would also suggest that these statistics negatively reflect on the selection process currently being used to screen US immigrants. On the whole,the US needs fewer immigrants and there should be better protections in place to make sure that those immigrants that are admitted are the ones the US needs–and can be provided a decent life once they are here.

Columnist Pat Buchanan has now joined VDARE.COM’s Peter Brimelow in suggesting that some attention ought to be paid to the Virginia Tech shooter’s immigrant status as well as, you know, gun control.

Support for Buchanan and Brimelow has come from an unexpected source: an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Maggie Olona, the director of the student counseling service at Texas A&M University says, “Writing scary stories is not against the law…Odd behavior is not a crime. Not talking to people is not a crime. … You have to wait for someone to do something, and sometimes the first step can be a murder.” (Counselors Say Cases Like Cho’s Are Hard to Spot as Students’ Behavior Becomes More Extreme, by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4-23-07)

But it’s not simply a matter of “scary writing” or “odd behavior“:

Indeed, college counselors say that this generation of students seems particularly troubled, and the problems they bring to counseling centers are worse than those of past years. “College counseling centers are very aware of the increasing pathology coming through our doors,” Ms. Olona says.

“…Is there a profile of people who do this? Of course,” says [the director of counseling services Cornell University] Mr. Eells.

Without again mentioning “profiling,” the article goes on to mention briefly that:

At Cornell, the counseling center has made a special effort to reach out to minority and international students, who suffer from extra levels of stress and are less likely to reach out to counselors. Satellite counseling offices have been set up in buildings on the campus that are regularly used by international and minority students.

In other words, more international students = more stress = (at least arguably) more Chos.

BTW, VDARE.COM ran a letter suggesting “A Million International Students Are A Time Bomb“ because of a bomb threat incident a month before Cho’s rampage.

The Korea Times, meanwhile, reported that about 460 students from Korea are studying at Virginia Tech, along with an estimated 500 students of Korean descent. Cho, living in the US since 1993, was still carrying a Korean passport. (Why hadn’t he applied for American citizenship? Why hasn’t the MSAM asked?)

Well, I’m glad that’s cleared up. They were actually killed by …guns. And American fundamental rights.

Tom Plate [send him mail] writes

So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.Plate: Let’s lay down our right to bear arms - CNN.com

Earlier in the article, Plate had written “Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun…” (but had a engineered some kind of bogus peace plan for Sudan, blah blah blah.)

I don’t see how a guy who spends as much time writing about Asia as Plate does could avoid knowing that all Koreans are required by law to do military service.

That being the case, I’d like to see some evidence that Ban-Ki Moon has never fired a gun.

It’s true that South Korea has gun control as well as universal conscription. That may have been a factor in the one of the worst mass killings in history, the 57 people killed by Woo Bum Kon, a South Korean policeman who had taken guns from a police armory.

As for “all the hoopla about the race” and more important, the immigrant status, of Cho Seung Hui, there hasn’t been any, except for a few people like us and Pat Buchanan. It’s not allowed, remember?

This comes under the heading of “I told you so” and it’s very rude to say “I told you so,” but since I’m saying it to John Podhoretz among others, I’ll make an exception. Here’s the story, material in square brackets is what the press and the Asian American Journalists Association don’t feel like telling you.

[Asian]USC student charged with assault in handgun case

police say Zao Xing Yang, 19, threatened a woman at a party early Sunday.
By Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times
April 25, 2007

A 19-year-old [Asian] USC student was charged Tuesday with making criminal threats and committing an assault with a handgun at a weekend party near campus.

Zao Xing Yang, an undergraduate, was arrested early Sunday morning after fellow students wrestled him to the ground when they saw him holding a .25-caliber handgun.

Police later searched Yang’s apartment and discovered packages of methamphetamine, a .44-caliber revolver, several hundred dollars in cash and “threatening materials,” police said.

Yang, who is being held without bail at Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles, was charged with two counts of making criminal threats and two counts of assault with a firearm. [He may be here on a student visa, which makes him deportable. Inquiring minds want to know. But not at the LA Times]

His arraignment was postponed until May 3.

His arrest comes a week after a [Korean] Virginia Tech student fatally shot 32 people at the school, raising concerns about security on college campuses across the country.

“USC school police responded quickly, as did the Los Angeles Police Department,” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a news conference Tuesday.

And if the students hadn’t fought back themselves, the police might have been investigating a murder, or two murders. So congratulations to the students for fighting back. Below, the mentions another threat, not by an Asian, but if the writer of the story, Richard Winton, [Send him mail] couldn’t figure out that a guy named Zao Yang was an Asian, what are the chance that he could figure out who an unnamed student at Bishop Mora Salesian High School is?

Meanwhile, Los Angeles police said Tuesday that a 17-year-old student at Bishop Mora Salesian High School in Los Angeles was arrested for allegedly making criminal threats.

The arrest came after a student at the Catholic school found a letter Thursday threatening “violent acts against students and teachers,” authorities said.

However, thanks to the Internet, I can say with some confidence that the student at Bishop Mora who was threatening violence was not Asian. Not likely to be Irish or Italian, either, which is what someone of my generation thinks of when we hear “Catholic School.” Here’s a report from an private school website.

You do the math.

In the New York Times article “Before Deadly Rage, A Life Consumed By A Troubling Silence,” [By N. R. Kleinfeld, April 22, 2007] which is of course All The News Fit To Print, they write the following about the inscription on Cho’s arm:

“On one arm was inscribed Ax Ismael, a name whose significance has not been determined but might be a Biblical allusion.”

A “BIBLICAL ALLUSION”? The biblical spelling, as we all know, is “Ishmael” and not the Q’URANIC form of the name that they quoted. Even allowing the possibility that the killer couldn’t spell, sweeping this fact under the rug as a biblical reference is surely a noteworthy and unfortunate omission.

Given all of this mentally-ill killer’s ramblings about “martyrs” and so forth, it’s very likely that he identified to some extent with Islamist terrorists and killers. But given his Korean Christian background and well-documented lack of pretty much any social activity, it’s extremely unlikely that he had anything at all to do with Muslims, the Q’uran, or Islam. The name could be an oblique reference to something Islamic, but it also sounds a lot like a username online or in a video game, and we know Cho spent a lot of time on his computer. “Ismail Ax” sounds threatening in and of itself.

Why not mention a few more likely explanations for “Ismael Ax” on his arm? It’s possible that the New York Times is reluctant to have not one but two of its much-touted minorities in their diversity agenda, Koreans and Muslims, associated with this horrific crime. Maybe they were trying to forestall, in this age of mostly-Islamic terrorism, any chance that someone somewhere might link this case to Muslims or Islam, with which it is basically not connected. It may be a noble goal, but a newspaper should not choose its facts based on what some hypothetical idiot somewhere might misinterpret–they’re supposed to be working for the rest of us! They should print the facts, regardless of their palatability or (slight) potential to be misinterpreted.

Here we are–incomplete, anecdotal, and unscientific, but an antidote to someone who says that this this is the first time an immigrant has done something like this.

Omitted are a number of terrorist mass murders, including 9/11 and Egypt Air Flight 990.

Also omitted are a lot of single murders by immigrants, gang violence, and so on. This is a particular kind of crime.

Oh, and Naveed Haq, the Seattle Gunman, and Robert Flores a Hispanic who killed 4 people at the University of Arizona are also not on the list. They were technically Americans.

Email me if I’ve left anyone out.

UPDATE: A reader pointed out that I left Peter Odighizuwa off the list; he’s been added.

Via the Knickerblogger, who linked to an earlier article of mine,I found this chilling comment posted by an anonymous Asian commenter on the New York Times blog. Obviously, this is a case of blaming Americans for the actions of immigrants–the Knickerblogger’s post is titled as predicted - blame the shootings on Americans and highlights a story on the killer having been picked on at school.

This post from an anonymous Asian student is chilling because he represents, traditionally, the best kind of immigrant–hardworking, successful, high IQ. But see how he hates you and me!

I understand why the the student turned into a gunman. I knew that something like this was going to happen, and this may be the beginning, unless Americans become more respectful to non-white people (both verbal and nonverbal). Racism is constant, mostly nonverbal. I came from a similar background, although not exactly the same. During the junior high school, I was one of the few Asians at the school. Many students are racists and people called me many names. I also spoke constantly about killing people. I started lifting weights, and at the end of that year, I was the strongest in my school. I played with lots of bb guns and paintball guns. I started playing various sports (fball, wrestling, etc). My parents were also poor. Many immigrants either join gangs or some people play sports to release their anger. Fortunately, I was able to overcome the environmental factors, became very popular in high school, and overcame the adversity. It is a special challenge for immigrants and non-caucasians in America. I have an incredibly strong will power and through the help of God, I overcame adversities and constant racism. Now, I am very successful. Many people will not overcome racial adversities and this shooting could just be the beginning… My advice to all Americans:
1. Be respectful to all people (both verbal and nonverbal), all the time.
2. I don’t understand the gunlaw(biggest problem)
3. American media is full of junk (violence(WWF), sex(OC), drugs, and violent music. Get rid of them, now.
4. Understand that many people from other countries that have poor english accents are better educated than many americans here, with masters and PhDs. Be respectful to people in all places, but most Americans will never know what it feels like to be non-white, because white people are nice to white people.
5. The gunman had personal problems, but it is the media, and the americans that influenced the gunman. Again, the gunlaw is also incomprehensible.

p.s. don’t reply or leave my email address. I will not be pleased. Also, I didn’t check the spelling and the grammar.

— Posted by Anonymous 1:22 PM Updates on Virginia Tech - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog

And comes out strongly in favor of helplessness and cowardice. This is a reflex in New York City–non-resistance to mugging is drummed into New Yorkers from their earliest years.

But check out the last line of his post:“Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

That’s from John Podhoretz, the most judgmental man in American public life.

I really, really, find it hard to believe that John Podhoretz, of all people, is actually saying “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Judge Judy isn’t as judgmental as Podhoretz. [Send JPod mail, but please, don't be judgmental.]

Judgmental update: Podhoretz on Hugh Hewitt, re NBC’s decision to showcase the killer’s video:“I don’t see how one can view their decision making or their choice as anything but strictly craven.” I agree with him here, “In the name of old-fashioned and time-honored forms of human behavior, “ but it obviously highlights his earlier hypocrisy.

In a Classroom WIth a Gunman
The Corner on National Review Online
[John Podhoretz]

I have to dissent, in the strongest possible terms, from John Derbyshire’s shocking posts on Virginia Tech. The notion that a human being or group of human beings holding no weapon whatever should somehow “fight back” against someone calmly executing other people right in front of their eyes is ludicrous beyond belief, irrational beyond bounds, and tasteless beyond the limits of reason.

“Why didn’t anyone rush the guy?” Derb asks. Gee, I don’t know. Because he was executing people? Because if you rush a guy with a gun, he shoots you in the head the way he executed the teachers in each classroom?

Derb claims proudly to be touching a “third rail” by raising something no one wants to talk about. The third rail is a metaphor for electrocution. What happened in those classrooms was no metaphor. It was a psychotic with a gun and a lot of people with no weaponry at their disposal. A few were astonishingly brave, and deserve to be considered heroes. Everybody else was just a person either in danger of being murdered, being mortally wounded, or being murdered.

In the name of old-fashioned and time-honored forms of human behavior, Derb has trampled on one of the oldest: Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Reason Mag’s David Weigel has a post called Who’s the Korean Tipper Gore? criticizing Steve Sailer for his shot-in-the-dark guess about a connection between the (Korean) killer and the (Korean) incredibly violent movie “Oldboy.”

Weigel [send him mail] said

Since no one can blame filthy Hollywood movies for the massacre, Steve Sailer picks up the baton and bashes Korean movies.

But Sailer may have been right. See the NY Times Blog by Mike Nizza: An Image’s Ties to a Dark Movie

The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004.

The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study.