It might be tempting to ­portray Blacksburg, Virginia – the scene of the worst shooting rampage in modern US history – as a red-neck backwater deep in the Appalachian mountains where devoutly religious people carry guns and regularly vote Republican.

But, as police on Tuesday released the name of the 23-year-old Cho Seung Hui, a South Korean student, who shot dead 32 people on campus and then himself, professors and ­students at Virginia Tech university pointed out that stereotype could not be further from the truth.