Extraterrestrial gunman

As always, I've been watching a bit of Fox News this week (I need my regular fix of fast-paced, polemical and loosely informed news coverage), and specifically the coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. The terminology they're using on there is quite noticeable. They make a point of referring to the killer, Cho Seung-Hui, as a 'resident alien'.

I knew they had a problem with their illegal aliens in the US, but if there are resident ones too then that's quite an insurrection they have going on. I've always found their use of the word 'alien' quite funny, and I assumed it was just the lexical choice of Fox News to fit their anit-immigration agenda in general. But it turns out it's actually a widely used, official, politically neutral term, and thus isn't necessarily intended to stigmatise immigrants in a way that I thought it was.

But still, the fact the news networks are at pains to repeatedly cite the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was a resident alien speaks volumes. It's a bit more convenient if they can find some distance to the perpetrator of such an atrocious act of mass murder. It was a South Korean who shot 32 people you know, not an American. I might be misunderstanding it all, but it looks like a bad case of denial to me. In reality, Seung-Hui moved to the US win 1992 when he was eight years old. He grew up in America, was no doubt shaped by its culture, ended up deeply unhappy, and lashed out his frustrations in the most American of ways. Just like the Columbine killers and the assorted others. As long as guns are so freely available (even to those not legally eligible) and the 'right' to bear arms is so resolutely defended along a twisted rationale, the problem can never be removed. Listening to the owner of the shop where Seung-Hui bought the guns on the radio the other day, all he could say was that there was no reason not to sell him them. "He seemed fine. It's the human that does the killing, not the gun". They genuinely just don't get it.