Cheng Hu attends a vigil for the Virginia Tech shooting victims at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church. Hu's wife, pictured left, was teaching during the shooting.
It's been a long day, and everyone is still trying to sort out the tragedy: 32 Shot Dead on Virginia Tech Campus. My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by the violence. Details about the shooter have not been easy to come by. Police say they've identified the shooter, but won't be releasing his identity until tomorrow. We know the guy was Asian. Some are speculating the gunman might have been a young Chinese man who recently arrived in the United States. The usual debate about gun control will inevitably be on people's minds, but the fact that the guy might've been a Chinese national in the U.S. on a student visa will also enter the conversation. And it's not going to be a positive discussion. This Daily Kos entry expresses concerns about those those potential paranoid fears, and the irrational anti-immigrant spin: Viriginia Tech and the xenophobia narrative. Or maybe it'll just inspire idiotic racist bulls**t like this.
A leading criminologist suggests that the shootings might have been inspired by that mass shooting at a community college in Montreal a few months back: 'Premeditative and Selective'. His reasoning? The Virginia Tech killer was Asian. So was the Montreal killer. It's the copycat effect. What? I don't know. That doesn't exactly sound like a compelling connection to me. I'm starting to wonder how exactly this guy became known as a leading criminologist.
And in the weirdest twist of this whole thing, there's this guy Wayne Chiang. He is Asian, a student at Virginia Tech, lived in the dorm where the first shooting occurred, recently broke up with his girlfriend... and happens to be a gun enthusiast. But he's not the shooter: "I Want to Clear My Name." On his blog, he's got a whole bunch of photos of him posing with a ridiculous number of firearms—the perfect portrait of a rampage shooter. Except that it's not him. The problem is, everyone on the internet seems to think otherwise: Internet Names the Wrong Killer. His site apparently received over 117,000 page views today, and the guy has apparently had to deal with death threats. A quick posting along the lines of "Hey, I'm not the guy," probably would've alleviated the situation, since it's been confirmed that the shooter killed himself. He has since tried to amend the situation. That said, the people who sent the death threats can't be too bright either, since you can't kill a guy who has already reportedly killed himself...
More on this as it develops.