JUST before Christmas, 1992, 18-year-old Wayne Lo strolled into a gun dealer in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and pointed to what he wanted - a US$150 SKS, a Chinese semi-automatic assault rifle.
By state law, Lo would normally have had to wait 30 days during a background check. But under a loophole that speaks volumes about the anomalies of American gun law, the local student walked straight out of the shop with his purchase. He hailed from Montana, and as a non-local had managed to bypass the rules.
The next morning, Lo was standing before a judge. With his new gun, he had returned to his college and shot to death a fellow student and a professor, and seriously wounded four other people. Emblazoned across his sweatshirt was the name of an underground rock band, perhaps the only clue to emerge so far as to why he did it. It read: Sick Of It All.
Perhaps because of Lorena Bobbitt fever, or probably more likely because the country is becoming immune to the echo of gunfire, Lo's trial opened last week in Massachusetts to little national publicity. However, the small, taciturn defendant, with his military-style cropped hair, presents one of the most puzzling cases of random shooting, even in America's encyclopaedic history of the genre.
Lo is thought to be the first ethnic Chinese immigrant to join the growing ranks of random shooting assailants. His closest criminal cousin may be Colin Ferguson, another immigrant (from Jamaica), who like Lo, seemed to harbour a paranoid resentment about racism in his new country, and who went on the recent bloody shooting spree on a Long Island commuter train, near New York. Both came from privileged backgrounds in their countries of origin, only to somehow get swept away in America's undercurrent of tension and violence - with easy access to the hardware to give vent to whatever hatred was eating them up.
Lo was born in Tainan, Taiwan, to a military officer father and music teacher mother. The family spent a short time in Washington DC in 1981 when the father took a diplomatic posting, then returned to the US for good in 1987 when they settled in rural Montana to run a Chinese restaurant.