AN ANTI-ASIAN BACKLASH has already begun in response to yesterday’s Virginia Tech massacre, which police say was the work of South Korean immigrant Cho Seung-Hui. Soon after the shooting, an Internet lynch mob mistakenly identified the shooter as Virginia Tech student Wayne Chiang, a Chinese-American with a penchant for guns and dark and twisted Web prose.

As soon as bloggers began pointing their links—and their fingers—at him, his site was up to 117,000 page views by Monday afternoon and was quickly filled with such comments as: “so u are the asisan that shot up the school. i hate u and your people.”

Of course, it didn’t help that his blog and Facebook page featured photos of him posing with his small arsenal of firearms and comments such as: “Personally, i don’t find [the CX4 semiautomatic carbine] effective as a efficient manslaughtering tool, which definitely does not fit my needs.”

Responding to the virtual conviction, Chiang posted this reply: “I am not the shooter. Through this experience, I have received numerous death threats, slanderous accusations, and my phone is out of charge from the barrage of calls.”

[At TMM, we want to give the American people the benefit of the doubt. Until proven otherwise, we’re working on the assumption that all of those death threats and calls were really meant for Wang Chung, the ’80s British New Wave band.]

Chiang does concede, however, that his profile eerily matched the actual shooter, who at that point had only been identified as a young Asian male. “It was five for five,” Chiang told TV station KNXV. “I was Asian, I lived in [the dorm where the first shooting took place], I go to V Tech, I recently broke up with my girlfriend and I collect guns.”

As the target of a rush to judgment, he had our sympathies—until he went on and on about his right to bear arms, including concealed weapons. “I am a firm believer that if Virginia Tech students were allowed to conceal carry [sic], this situation could have ended sooner.” •