“If you’re a young man growing up in this culture … but you don’t have a lot of real power, one thing you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as someone who’s ‘worthy’ of respect,” Jackson Katz, an anti-sexism activist, says in the film.

“That’s what accounts for a lot of this hypermasculine posturing by young men of color,” he says. Then, as an image of Donald Trump flashes on the screen, he continues: “Men who have more power—men who have financial power and workplace power and other forms of abstract power like that—don’t have to be physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.”

Indeed, in Cho’s manifesto, he holds guns in both hands with arms outstretched, and then pointed at the camera, reminiscent of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Two years later, Jiverly Wong would also pose for photographs holding his gun and gun license before going on his murderous rampage.

Another thing all the aforementioned men share, other than being Asian American, is that they were all immigrants or refugees—some more recently arrived than others, but all hovering in some way between identities and homes.

Immigration—or even more so, the experience of being a refugee, which Wong was—makes most immigrants feel “low and small,” as Wong’s sister described to the New York Times. It is not uncommon for former doctors and lawyers to become janitors and busboys, and for high school- or university-educated men and women to have their communication abilities reduced to those of a small child, without the cute factor.

As many immigrants learn, a voice and the ability to communicate have as much power as a gun in this society. In fact, the voice may be the nation’s other most important phallic symbol.

Andrew Lam, an editor at New America Media, wrote in a post-Binghamton commentary, “For some who feel powerlessness and marginalized but desiring change, the gun can be seductive. It provides power. It speaks in a language everybody understands.” Whether with bullets, spoken words or—nowadays—multimedia manifestos sent to television stations, men who feel low and small desperately reach for their weapons to claim something for themselves. Only when we all, as Nadia Kim suggests, take media stereotypes seriously can we understand their damaging legacy. Armed with that awareness, we can hope that men of color will seize power in ways that do not lead to the annihilation of themselves and others.

Angie Chuang is an assistant professor of journalism at American University School of Communication.