What do the Virginia Tech slayings say about South Koreans?

What do we make of the revelation that the man responsible for the largest mass gun rampage in U.S. history was a 23-year-old student from South Korea named Cho Seung-Hui?

Blogger Michael Hurt, an American photographer living in Seoul who tends to be highly critical of South Korean culture, notes the odd coincidence that the world record holder for shooting sprees is Woo Bum-Kon, a South Korean police officer who slaughtered 56 and wounded 37 in an 8-hour, booze-soaked rampage through three South Korean villages back in 1982. The incident prompted South Korea's interior minister to resign.

So is there something wrong with South Korean males? What does this shooting say about Korean culture? Hurt is of two minds:

On the one hand, I feel like this incident makes it worth looking at some of the social factors that very well could have helped determine one man's actions; on the other, we have to remember that Cho was an individual, and that the faulty logic that "Korea" is the bearer of collective guilt over this incident is just as flawed as Korea taking full responsibility for a member of its "own" who had been socially cast aside.

Robert Koehler, who blogs on South Korea at The Marmot's Hole, has a lengthy roundup of Korean and Korean-American reactions to the shooting. Koehler pooh-poohs the culturalist explanation that keeps popping up:

There are 100,000 Koreans studying in the United States, and except for Cho, none of them—as far as I know—have shot up their schools.

That sounds about right to me.