The conservative narrative about the Virginia Tech massacre won't be limited to Glenn Reynolds's call for loosening gun control laws.
By late afternoon the Drudge Report was running a headline stating that the shooter was issued immigrant visas via Shanghai. That headline was pulled by Tuesday night, but the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting the following:
The 24-year-old man arrived in San Francisco on United Airlines on Aug. 7 on a visa issued in Shanghai, the source said. Investigators have not linked him to any terrorist groups, the source said.
As others have pointed out, this is no time to politicize the narrative. For a lot of us, one of our first thoughts was that the incident again underscores why our country's ongoing tolerance of gun sales needs to be confronted. I wouldn't classify this as a politicized reaction, but I'm sure plenty would. That's a discussion for another day -- pro-gun and anti-gun arguments will probably be all over CNN and MSNBC by the end of the week.
An argument about guns would be healthy, even if I think that the right answer is obvious.
But by late afternoon, it looked like Matt Drudge was planting seeds that would shift the debate to different ground.
By initially playing up the possibility that the shooter was a Chinese national in the U.S. on a student visa, the narrative indicated that the enemy wasn't going to be guns, but foreigners.
In a conservative, paranoid worldview, this explanation makes perfect sense. The trouble isn't the availability of guns, it's the flood of foreigners who we've permitted into the country. Someone with a Chinese student visa arrived to the U.S. and used our freedoms to kill red-blooded Americans. The argument won't be about sensible restrictions but about the peril of outsiders.
I'm worried that this kind of argument will find a willing audience. It taps into the worst veins of the anti-immigration impulses and the kind of xenophobia that bubbled to the surface after 9/11. For those of a certain mindset, the moral of this tragedy will be that Americans are going it alone in a world where outsiders want to kill us.
I did my undergraduate education at a Big 10 school and went to graduate school at a private university in the northeast. America's higher education system is a gift to the world. I'm too cynical to be idealistic about many things, but the experience of seeing and meeting people from all over the country and the world was invaluable. Like traveling abroad, you meet these people and the world seems demystified.
Tom Friedman wrote the following in a June 20, 2004 column:
If anti-Americanism is on the rise around the world, no one told the kids in the student visa line at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The quest among Chinese students for visas to study in America, say U.S. Embassy officials, has become so intense that it has spawned Internet chat rooms, where Chinese students swap stories about which arguments work best with which U.S. consular officials and even give them names like ''Amazon Goddess,'' ''Too Tall Baldy'' and ''Handsome Guy.''
Today, Kevin at Theory is the Reason wrote the following:
The Chinese population has typically been adverse to various forms of terrorism, until now. I have Asian friends who are now concerned of racial backlash in the States, while some are concerned about safety on campuses.
I am duly concerned that it wouldn’t be as easy returning to the States to continue my education, especially now that the climate of fear encompasses the Chinese as well. I just hope people understand that this shooting is an idiosyncratic case that should never be attributed to the rest of us enjoying the peace, and respecting it.
Hopefully my concern is premature.
Reports on the shooter's identity remain scattered. I spent most of the day thinking about how much I loved my college and my friends there, not pondering the broader implications of how the reaction to this is going to take shape.
But I worry that in the need to find a scapegoat and an explanation, no blow will be too low.