Those Koreans couldn’t get away with that today.
But they could do it in Detroit which is one reason I’m more optimistic than most about Detroit.
“Those Koreans couldn’t get away with that today.”
Eric Holder would prosecute them for hate crimes, and Marion Barry would hold a press conference: “We gotta get rid of these Asians!”
I’m sure the Koreans wouldn’t care. They were some of the most feared troops in Vietnam for a reason.
I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes minority groups can get away with things “conservative old white guys” can't.
It's pretty hard to effectively prosecute a minority guy who is standing on the roof of his business shooting people threatening to throw Molotov cocktails into his business, or even to smash the front window and steal all his inventory. Even if the prosecutor wins in the court of law, he's going to lose in the court of public opinion. Most prosecutors will find a way to avoid taking a case like that to a jury trial with media in the courtroom and Koreans all over the area taking up collections to pay the best attorney around, and then to aggressively contribute money to the campaign of whoever is running against the prosecutor in the next election.
It also doesn't hurt that virtually every able-bodied Korean man has served in the Korean military. Koreans don't have the Second Amendment (which is a serious problem with South Korean law) but they do have near-universal military training for men and that has advantages for Korean immigrant business owners living in inner-city American cities.
M1903A1 is right that Koreans “were some of the most feared troops in Vietnam for a reason.” The Korean pastor of our local Korean PCA congregation was one of those Korean soldiers assigned to Vietnam, and after seeing the all-too-common lack of discipline, drug use, and immorality of American soldiers in Vietnam, he went to seminary and came to the United States as a Presbyterian missionary to Korean wives of American soldiers outside Fort Leonard Wood. I'm all for supporting the troops, especially Vietnam veterans, but it's a simple fact that Koreans were feared by the Vietnamese for a reason. It's also a fact that unlike our modern all-volunteer military, some of the American soldiers who served in Vietnam didn't want to be in the military and acted accordingly. (Don't jump me for attacking vets -- I said "some," not all, and it was only a few bad apples that created a bad reputation.) By contrast, when Korean soldiers acted bad in Vietnam, it was usually because they did something horrible to the enemy that terrified the enemy because they knew Americans wouldn't do such things, and at most would get a wrist-slap from Korean commanders as long as their actions resulted in dead enemy soldiers.
For those who don't know, I'm married to a Korean whose brother was in the South Korean Special Forces. I might know more than a little bit about what Koreans will do to defend their families and their businesses — shoot first and ask questions later applies when wives and kids are targets. The phrase “kimchi temper” was created for a reason. You don't want to get between a Korean and his family any more than you want to get between a grizzly bear and its cubs.