Perhaps the only thing dumber than letting a nine year-old girl fire a gun on full auto is the idea that a ludicrously ill-considered training accident will lead Americans to embrace gun control:
A nine-year-old girl has accidentally shot dead a shooting instructor who was teaching her how to use a powerful Uzi submachine gun. Charles Vacca was showing the unnamed youngster how to fire the weapon at the Last Stop outdoor shooting range in the Mohave Desert in White Hills, Arizona, when the gun recoiled as she pulled the trigger.
In a statement, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said the 39-year-old was hit in the head by a stray bullet as the Israeli-made Uzi kicked back. He was airlifted to the University Medical Centre in Las Vegas, where he was later pronounced dead.
A video released by the police showed the slender girl with a ponytail and wearing pink shorts being instructed in how to aim the gun by Vacca.
I’m just glad that it was the idiot instructor who was killed and not the girl, as was the case in a similar incident a few years ago. I’m not a professional firearms instructor and I understand that guns kick. No one with zero to moderate firearms experience should fire a weapon on full auto, and certainly no child who isn’t going to be physically able to control the tendency of the weapon to rise.
Weapons deserve respect and demand common sense. And handing a loaded, fully automatic Uzi to a little girl demonstrates the precise opposite of both. It’s a remarkably stupid and unnecessary tragedy.