Meanwhile, in Iowa ….

a Chinese student posts to his Chinese Weibo (Twitter-like thing) a photo of himself brandishing a firearm and threatening a professor, and promptly gets expelled and sent home to Hangzhou.

Says the student in a later Weibo post:

In fact I didn’t even know exactly what that [Gang Lu] was about. The point is, the post was in Chinese, because I didn’t hope there would be misunderstanding. And I thought the “normal people” should have known that my point was just trying to tell people I study very hard.

shanghaiist.com

In other words, “When I said I was going to ‘take out’ that professor, I didn’t mean shoot him. You people are just not clever enough to understand my meaning!”

Law enforcement types in Iowa also say “quirks” in the system permitted the student, a foreign national, to buy the guns and get permits for them.