Vietnamese man kills 13 at immigrant centre

UNITED STATES - The small upstate New York town of Binghamton became the latest community to suffer the horror of gun rampage in America when a man yesterday killed 13 people at an immigrant counseling centre where many of his victims were studying to become American citizens.

The gunman was 42-year-old Jiverly Voong (aka Jiverly Wong), who had recently been laid off from an assembly plant during the American recession.

The carnage at the American Civic Association, a language and help centre for immigrants from all over the world settled in New York state, had all the hallmarks of being premeditated. The gunman, an immigrant from Vietnam, drove his car to the back of the building and parked it tight against the rear door – preventing those inside from escaping.

He then went around to the front door armed with two handguns and shot both receptionists, one fatally.

Despite a serious wound to the stomach, the wounded receptionist managed to sound the alarm by mobile phone at 10:31 AM, and spent the next 90 minutes hiding under a desk while she fed information to the police. Officers were at the scene within two minutes, and SWAT teams arrived four minutes later, but by then it was too late to prevent the death toll from rising to horrifying levels.

The gunman walked from the reception area to a classroom where immigrants were studying for their citizenship exams. Twelve of the people in that room were to join the list of the gunman's victims, and only four others were alive last night in hospital in critical condition.

It took police three hours to clear the building, a low-rise concrete structure in a quiet side street in the centre of town. Twenty-six people were cowering in the basement, many crammed in a boiler room, and were so traumatized they refused to come out even when police told them it was safe to finally leave.

Zhanar Tokhtabayeva, a 30-year-old from Kazakhstan, said she was in an English class when she heard a shot and her teacher screamed for everyone to go to the storage room.

"I heard the shots, every shot. I heard no screams, just silence, shooting," said Zhanar. "I heard shooting, very long time ... and I was thinking, when will this stop? I was thinking that my life was finished."

Right: A Beretta 92 FS pistol similar to the one used in the shooting.

Jiverly Voong's body was found among the dead, with a satchel full of ammunition around his neck and the two semi-automatic pistols, a .45-caliber Beretta and a 9 millimeter Beretta, beside him. ID on him identified him as Jiverly Voong and the handguns were registered under the name of Jiverly Wong.

Today, Binghamton's mayor said the man was depressed after recently losing his job. "He had lost a job recently and was somewhat angry," says Mayor Matthew Ryan. "He had language issues, didn't speak English that well, and was really concerned about his employment situation."

This morning, the Pakistani Taliban leader Baituallah Mehsud claimed responsibility for the shooting, saying that it was revenge for US drone attacks in Pakistan, but the FBI ruled out his involvement as a complete lie to get attention.

Binghamton, a university town of 45,000, has a long lineage of immigrant populations, attracted to its industries since the 1920s. The Binghamton civic association helps many of those immigrants to learn English upon arrival in America.

"How could he do this to them? The people who work here are our friends," says Peter Lu, standing down the street from the centre. He came to the US from China 20 years ago and his wife learned English there too.

Last night relatives of the dead were being briefed and comforted at a church meeting house a mile away from the scene. The nationality of those assembled suggested that the victims came from all over the world: China, Laos, South Korea and Slovakia.

Marsha Maroney, who works for the church charities group which provided the facilities, said that the atmosphere among the relatives was heavy. "It's worry, and shock, and now fatigue. It's terribly hard to watch."

The shooting is the latest in a seemingly never-ending stream of incidents of mass murder in the US, which many observers ascribe to the country's gun laws which are the most lax in the developed world. The United States is the only country with 'the right to bear arms'.

Last week, a gunman killed eight people in a North Carolina nursing home. Last month, an Alabama man killed 10 people, including several members of his family, before turning the gun on himself. The largest mass shooting in American history occurred in April 2007, when a mentally ill student at Virginia Tech University killed 32 people and wounded many others before killing himself. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the killing of 13 at Columbine high school in Colorado by two disgruntled students.

Many states have few laws on gun ownership beyond barring immigrants, convicted felons and the severely mentally ill from possessing firearms, which means immigrants, criminals and insane people can own guns just as easily as law-abiding sane American citizens.

The news of yet another gun tragedy may bring the issue of controls back into the political debate, though since Virginia Tech it had receded into the background again under the ever-present pressure of the gun lobby.

The Obama administration has indicated that it supports the renewal of an expired federal ban on assault rifles.

In Europe for G-20 meetings, Barack Obama said last night that he was shocked and saddened to hear of the shooting, which he called an "act of senseless violence".

On Friday, the federal government announced that 663,000 Americans lost their jobs in March. What's truly unsettling in America's new era of gloom and dead ends is wondering how many of those 663,000 might be deeply, irrevocably angry about it — and might have a gun. No wonder the crime rate is going up.

"Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type," a man named Charles Whitman wrote one day in 1966. Then he ascended a tower at the University of Texas, looked out over the campus, pulled out a shotgun, three rifles and three pistols and killed 16 people.

Shocking? No. Whitman had received a court martial as a United States Marine and lost his job, which combined with poor family life and declining health led him to want to go out with a bang.

During a recession, it really should not be considered a surprise.