The Wisconsin Hunting Murders

This week, we all heard about the horrific murders in Wisconsin. It was opening day of deer season.  Wisconsin has a tradition of deer camps. Where large groups of hunters will spend several days together in a cabin during deer season. These deer camps are often multigenerational family affairs.

In this case two hunters from a deer camp came across someone in a tree stand on private land without permission. When they asked him to leave, he shot both of them. When one of the wounded radioed for help the rest of the party showed up and eight of them were shot. Six of the eight  have died. The dead include a father and his 20 year old son. The shooter also injured another man and killed his 27 year old daughter. According to a Deputy Sheriff, the party of hunters had only one rifle between them.

According to Robert Imrie of AP, the shooter used an assault rifle.

Once again the media has chosen to mis-characterize this tragedy and blame the gun. I would like to take a look at two issues in this tragedy: the gun and the man.

As for the gun, according to the same AP piece, the gun in question is a semiautomatic assault rifle. In the Madison Capital Times, Joshua Freed recounts the statement of Sheriff's Deputy Ziegele, writing:

Zeigle said the suspect was "chasing after them and killing them" with a SKS 7.62 caliber semiautomatic, a common hunting weapon.

Wait a minute — a common hunting weapon?  I thought the murders were committed with an assault rifle. Proponents of the recently lifted Assault Rifle Ban always said that there was no legitimate use for these weapons. The SKS is a common eastern (read Soviet) bloc military weapon. It is produced in multiple variation in several countries. Blogger Kim du Toit has detailed information on the SKS on his site. This is a picture of the SKS:

According to the Federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (Assault Rifle Ban) the SKS (in most configurations is not an assault rifle. In order to be an assault rifle a weapon had to be semi-automatic, have a removable magazine and two of the following: a folding or telescopic stock; a pistol grip; a bayonet mount; a flash suppressor (or threads for one) or a grenade launcher.

The SKS is a semi-automatic. It has a removable magazine. (According to an early AP article, since removed from their site, the killer had a 20 round removable magazine.) The SKS has an integral bayonet mount but that is the only item from the list above. Unless this was a folding stock version, it was not an assault rifle under the ban definition.

One of the common misconceptions is the definition of semi-automatic. A semi-automatic rifle (or pistol) might be better called self-cocking or autoloading. In these weapons, the recoil from firing is used to eject the spent shell and load the next. Therefore the shooter can simply pull the trigger multiple times and get multiple shots. These are not machine guns where holding down the trigger results in a burst of bullets. Semi-automatic rifles and shotguns are commonly used in hunting. Remington's classic 1100 shotgun and the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) are just two examples.

So the gun was just a gun. A military weapon commonly used as a hunting rifle — not an assault weapon under the ban.

What about the man? The shooter has been identified as Chai Vang, a Hmong immigrant to the US living in the Twin Cities area. While Vang has no criminal record, police had been called to his residence previously for domestic disturbances. On one occasion, according to the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin: 

Minneapolis police said they arrested Chai Vang on Christmas Eve 2001 after he waved a gun and threatened to kill his wife. No charge was filed because she didn't cooperate with authorities, spokesman Ron Reier said. St. Paul police said there had been two domestic violence calls to his home in the past year, but both were resolved without incident.

Apparently Chai Vang was a man prone to violence. He had committed a crime with a handgun—threatening his wife. This is man who by his behavior had forfeited his right to bear arms. With multiple domestic violence reports and use of a handgun in a crime, Vang should have been in prison, not on the street, much less in a tree stand with a weapon. Of course today, CNN Online reports that Vang claims he was fired upon first. 

Regardless who fired first, this was an unstable individual who had slipped through the cracks in the system.