Breaking down a post at ABC.com:

A senior law enforcement official told ABC News that 13 people were shot dead and 26 wounded.

Voong, 41, also known as Linh Phat Voong, was from Johnson City, N.Y. He burst into the civic center wearing a bright green nylon jacket and dark-rimmed glasses. Voong’s body was found on first floor with a hunting knife jammed into the waistband of his pants.

Officials said Voong backed his car up to the rear door of the building to block any escape before he went to the front of the building and started to execute people…

“He shot those people? No. No.” said a women who identified herself as Voong’s sister, but would not give her name when reached by ABC News.com.

She said her brother went to take classes today at the civic association and that she had not heard from him since. She said she did not know that he was involved in the shooting.

“I’m going to pass out” she said.

She wouldn’t say more and hung up.

Eye witness Nick Masucci, a community college student and Binghamton resident, said he watched as many as 20 people exit the building and get patted down by police.

“They look like immigrants, lots of different cultures coming out of there. Some people are getting patted down. The police are taking a lot of precautions, they’re still taking cover,” he said.

Every immigrant in America has the same thought at this moment: The killer and his victims came all the way to America for this. The long flight, the heaps of documents, the processing fees, the lawyers, the hours learning a strange tongue, the visits to the INS center, the waiting in long lines—all of this came to nothing. An immigrant killing immigrants at a center that helps immigrants. What kind hatred is this? We would not be puzzled by this crime if the killer was white and came from the far-right of the American political spectrum. That form of hatred is easy to read. But a Vietnamese man killing people who are like him, an immigrant, that situation is very hard to read or translate.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

24 replies on “The American Nightmare”

  2. you can’t read of translate this. don’t look for logic in untreated mental illness. it’s an all-american tragedy, and its the 2nd or 3rd this week.

  3. I have to admit, when I first heard that this happened at an immigration services center (before learning of the attacker’s background), I assumed the killer was a far right cracker. You’re right; that he too was an immigrant makes this much harder to understand (if this can ever be “understood”).

  4. The guy from Virgina Tech was also Asian, right? They better watch out or they’re going to start getting a reputation for this type of thing. Bad drivers and blood-thirsty killers? Yikes.

  5. Maybe now we can recognize that, throughout all the stats and societal tweaking of figures, people can and will kill if they choose to do so, regardless of color or gender.

  10. Couple months ago my far-right raving conservative soon-to-be-brother-in-law was crowing about some gun-totin’ looney who foiled a bank robbery in his cracker hometown:

    “Guy says ‘this is a stickup’, and guy behind him in line pulls out his gun and blows him away! Blam! Har, har, har! Wasted him right there! Bank manager says that guy is always welcome in his bank from now on!”

    I didn’t know what to say.

    How do you respond to lunacy like that? How do you point out the needless violence that occurs every freakin’ day? How do you tell crackers like that that if we had reasonable health care and gun laws that we wouldn’t have the carnage we have every day and every week?

    Since his outburst there’s been some article in the news every single week about some nutcase with guns shooting people: The Alabama guy who shot up his job and killed his family. The guy who shot up the church and killed what, three or four people, and on and on. And now this.

    Seriously, what do you say to the hardcase NRA nuts who really do cling to their small towns, their guns, and their ‘kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out’ mentality?

  11. @10 Getting blown away while committing a crime is hilarity, not lunacy. You might think its OK to play the role of victim during a crime, others, including myself, do not. Better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. I would buy that guy a beer.

  12. Bt we won’t put stricter limits on Guns? Won’t put stricter requirements on who can buy a gun? The NRA is so responsible for the proliferations of guns which contributes to our culture of violence. When will we learn? Making murder more possible is NOT a right, NRA or not! We have got to learn. We are all responsible if we don’t!

  14. @12

    I just guess we are willing to deal with the random bullshit that stems from living in our nutty gun loving society, rather than allow the government, police, and military be the only guys with guns. Imagine the shit they would pull if the people were unarmed. Now I don’t support Glenn Beck “let’s surround the Cityhall ” style shenanigans, but it seems pretty obvious that a well armed citizenry keeps uncle Sam in check.

  15. What do you want to bet he hated them because they were taking their citizenship test and becoming citizens and he had been denied? Isn’t it usually the way of losers to blame others for their failings? I mean, I bet he whined to somebody “It’s not fair! I’m better than them! Why are they getting in? I bet they cheated!” What do you want to bet?

  16. Cracker? NRA nuts? Reasonable gun laws? Your brand of ignorance only fuels these senseless attacks. If guns were outlawed what do you think would happen, Dorothy, do you think you can click your heels three times and all the bad things will just go away? The plain truth is that thugs will get guns – laws or no laws. Coccaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamines are all illegal and outlawed in the US yet we still have a drug epidemic in this country. How can this be if your logic is sound? The drugs are banned…period. Yet they are everywhere. Gun laws only affect those who follow them. If you were to go so far as to ban all guns you would see crime rates skyrocket because the criminals would be armed while the vast majority of the populace would be unarmed and unprotected. Are you so ignorant to think that you will be safe from the criminals who will have little standing in the way of their desires knowing that you are unable to defend yourself? Call 9-1-1 and more times than not they’ll be there to investigate the aftermath but that won’t do your corpse any good now will it? After decades of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer while politicians sit by cashing in, the new reality is there are more desperate people in our society than ever before. This is the new way to give up – take out a bunch of people and then kill yourself like a coward instead of coping with your life and working to make it better. Taking away guns from responsible people only serves to worsen the situation. If there had been one person carrying a gun in that building he/she could have saved many lives. Get your head out of your ass and do a few hours worth of unbiased research instead of just accepting somebody else’s opinion as fact…including my opinion. Go get the facts for yourself and start feeding that brain. Oh, and I got your cracker right here.

  18. Binghamton is a terrible place, “old Testament smited,” as a friend says. It used to be the corporate dream: IBM, Endicott Johnson shoes, Kodak had a big factory there, and it had a booming local economy. Now it looks like Belfast; half the stores downtown are boarded up, 95% of the kids in the public school system are on the federal breakfast program, the old Kodak factory is a Superfund site. Every spring it floods with polluted waters. It’s the true end point of late capitalism. The white people there are ferociously, crazily racist, and blame all the immigrants who came up from New York City “to live off welfare” for the city’s downturn. It is a sad, smited place indeed.

  19. Mr Ignorant People Suck: So if guns are keeping us so goddamn safe, howcome there’s been some looney on a killing spree every other week, for, oh, a really long time now?

    Huh? Howcome none of the recent looneys on rampages have been stopped by all the uh, legal gun owners?

    How come? Have any looneys with guns ever, ever been stopped?

    How do you tell the looneys with guns from the supposed clear-thinking protecting-us-all sane ones?

    Would you have said that Tacoma sheriff Brame was a sane-thinking protector-of-us-all? Up until he killed his wife, that is? An extreme situation, but there’s no way to screen the looneys from the people you think are making us safer. How about the guy at the King County courthouse who killed his ex and her two friends while she was filing a restraining order a few years back?

    My point: Your theory that more guns make us safer is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Guns also aren’t keeping you safe from the evil scary Government you seem to fear, either. The army has tanks, the air force has bombs. Whatever guns you have stashed in your garage won’t help.

  20. Oh, and Mister Looney With Guns: How about that looney with a gun who thought he’d be a hero during the Tacoma Mall shooting a few years ago?

    He got shot, and is paralyzed.

    Fuckin’ idiot, thinking he’ll blaze away IN A CROWDED MALL and save the fuckin’ day.

    I tell you, when some self-appointed gun nut thinks he can whip his peni, er, gun out and “save us all” from a bad guy, I want to be nowhere near. The fewer bullets whizzing around, especially from well-meaning but utterly unskilled novices, the better.

  23. As your favorite author Ayn Rand once said, you need to check that premise that’s causing you to expect people to kill less of their own kind rather than more.

    Count up all the dead bodies of all of this country’s wars and look which war dwarfs all others.

    It’s even more interesting if you look at the history of Chinese wars. Consider how many Chinese were killed in the Japanese occupation versus the great leap forward. Look at all of the wars in China’s history and add up the number of war dead killed by non-chinese, compare it to the total.

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