WHO SHOT FIRST?

buck buck

It's only a matter of time before all hell breaks loose in Wisconsin. As has already been widely reported, Chai Vang, a 36 year old hunter, has been arrested for shooting six other hunters and wounding two in what seems to be an inexplicable series of events that are, of course, in contention.

What is known, presumably, is that a group of hunters, on their own private property, found Vang in a tree shelter, asked him to leave, and Vang unloaded a semi-auto rifle on the group. The hunters who got shot say that Vang walked off and then popped off without warning. Vang, in a recently released statement, claims that the hunters threw racial slurs at him and then shot at him. Even if that were to be true, that doesn't quite explain how Vang, in "defending" himself managed to shoot eight different people who, according to reports, only had one gun between them. And oh yeah, in case we didn't mention, Vang is a Hmong immigrant from Laos, all the other hunters were white.

Hello, powder keg.

For those not up on their Southeast Asian refugee resettlement patterns, states like Wisconsin and Minneosta have some of the highest percentages of Hmong immigrants, not because the chilly Northern climate reminds them of their tropical homes in Asia but that's how the U.S. gov't decided to disperse them as they arrived throughout the 1970s and '80s. According to the news reports coming out, there's been a history of conflict between white and Hmong hunters though, as State Senator Mee Moua (a Hmong politician in MN) pointed out, just because there's racism being directed towards Hmongs, "that doesn't mean you kill people."