Some writers are weighing in on the fact that the murderer in Aurora is a white guy, arguing that if he weren’t, we’d be hearing all about how his culture made him do it, and arguing that indeed his culture did make him do it because white guys are so privileged that they think that other people’s spaces and even lives belong to them.
Whether most mass murderers are white men is up for debate. Certainly in the United States, you can think of a lot of random murderers who were white, but that may reflect news coverage and police work. (How many senseless killings by black and Latino men have been reported as robberies, drug deals, and gang violence?) More importantly, two thirds of the men in this country are white guys (even more if you count white Hispanics), so one would expect twice as many white mass murderers as non-white. As for paranoid and psychopathic killings outside the U.S., one has only to look to Africa to get a sense that a lot of non-white men are also killing people to restore face or for fun.
Where race most comes into play in this story is in the color of the victims. I have no doubt that shooting up a theater in a black neighborhood would have made big headlines, but I also wonder about the extent of the coverage and the sense of tragedy associated with white victims. When a black or Hispanic child is killed in a drive-by shooting in a major American city, her parents feel as devastated, helplessly angry, spiritually confused, and bitter as the families of victims of mass killings feel. But they don’t get a visit from the President.
If the killer’s race has anything to do with it, in my opinion, it’s that middle-class men of color have learned to deal with humiliation much more proficiently than white guys. Oh, don’t get me wrong: being a white guy is also an exercise in humiliation—with all the messages we get from our culture to stand up for what’s right and to defend ourselves and those dear to us, our lives are one failure after another to embody the Dirty Harry ideal. The men in that theater need a special kind of attention right now, because many of them are plagued by the thought that they didn’t see it coming and attack the shooter themselves. It’s a “special” kind of attention because if you try to help them with that, you are contributing to the undermining of the masculine ideal by defining them as needing help. But even though all men are plagued by the risk of humiliation, men of color in America get a lot more used to dealing with it non-violently because they get a lot more of it out on most streets and in many of our institutions.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
When Seung Hui Cho, an Asian (duh) committed the Virginia Tech Massacre, it didn’t spark any questions from the media about being a victim of his culture, like the example you gave with blacks. I feel like the media and American society as a whole looked at Cho and Holmes in the same way, which is copping out with an explanation that “something went wrong in their life and they snapped.” Am I wrong in thinking that Cho and Holmes’ behavior got assessed similarly? If so, wouldn’t that negate the race argument?
I don’t have empirical data, but my memory is that a great deal was written about Cho’s nationality and culture.
I don’t think there was a lot of reporting on nationality as Cho was American born (I think?). Maybe an article or two about his strict upbringing. But mostly, people were looking at his disturbing pieces written in class and his downward spiral that came from bullying.