Can Y ou "Stand Your Ground" If You Are Hmong? Revisiting Wisconsin v. Vang In Light of Florida v. Zimmerman
AbstractThe 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin is widely seen as an unintended outcome of prejudice and misperception and therefore frequently is called a That is also the interpretation that the Hmong American media had of events in Wisconsin in 2004 when Chai Vang shot eight white hunters who surrounded, taunted, and blocked his path as he attempted to walk away. This article analyzes 96 St. Paul Pioneer Press articles on the Wisconsin hunting shootings to evaluate how key words in headlines defined the event for readers. results show that within the first nine days of coverage the newspaper developed a contradictory vocabulary that included the terms dispute, rampage, tragedy, and homicide. After creating this lexicon the newspaper then introduced the highly sensationalized terms massacre and slayings. article concludes that the Hmong American media had the correct interpretation and that mainstream media bias prevented the deeper message of the Wisconsin hunting shootings from being learned: guns + prejudice = tragic violence.Keywords: Hmong, media bias, gun violence, Trayvon MartinIntroductionOn July 13, 2013, a jury found George Zimmerman not guilty of second degree murder and manslaughter for the shooting death of unarmed Trayvon Martin. jury used Florida's Stand Your Ground law to determine that Zimmerman had a reasonable fear for his own safety and acted in self-defense. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch coordinator. On the night of February 26, 2012, he spotted an African American male wearing a hooded sweatshirt, concluded he was a burglar, and began following him. In fact, Martin was a 17-year-old returning to a friend's residence with a bag of candy. When Martin confronted (and possibly hit) his pursuer, Zimmerman shot him through the heart. Because the violence was due to prejudice and misperception, and thus avoidable, the media frequently called it a tragedy (Horsey 2013; New York Times 2012). In his comments after the verdict, President Obama stated: The death of Trayvon Martin was a tragedy. Not just for his family, or for any one community, but for America (quoted in Knickerbocker 2013)This article uses Zimmerman's shooting of Martin to re-examine media coverage of Wisconsin v. Vang, another case that captured national attention because it involved interpretations of self-defense in the context of racial prejudice. On November 21, 2004, a resident of St. Paul named Chai Soua Vang went deer hunting in Wisconsin and unintentionally trespassed onto unmarked private property. One of the landowners was out hunting, spotted him, and called a hunting party at a nearby cabin who quickly arrived on several all terrain vehicles and surrounded Vang. Soon six hunters were dead and two wounded. At his trial Vang claimed that they called him racist names, prevented him from walking away, fired a shot at him, and fearing for his life he shot back. One of the survivors agreed that Vang was angrily confronted, that Vang tried to walk away, that one hunter blocked his path, but that Vang fired first. On September 19, 2005, after only three hours of deliberation, an all white jury found Vang guilty of six counts of first degree intentional homicide and three counts of attempted homicide.Wisconsin v. Vang caused a wide range of reactions in St. Paul's Hmong American community (Hein 2006; Vang 2010). General Vang Pao, who was residing there at the time, denounced Chai Vang at a news conference for harming the community's reputation. influential clan leaders of the Hmong 18 Council established a fund for the dead hunters' families. Hmong American media described the event as a tragedy to convey the series of human errors and mistakes that caused the shootings (Moua 2004; Xiong 2004; Yang 2004; Doeun 2010). Some Hmong Americans formed the Coalition for Community Relations and implemented the court watch model to monitor the fairness of Vang's trial. …