I hope this girl learned a very important lesson at the gun range: adults are idiots!
A 9-year-old girl accidentally killed an Arizona shooting instructor as he was showing her how to use an automatic Uzi, authorities said Tuesday.
Charles Vacca, 39, of Lake Havasu City, died Monday shortly after being airlifted to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Mohave County sheriff’s officials said.
Vacca was standing next to the girl at the Last Stop outdoor shooting range in White Hills when she pulled the trigger and the recoil sent the gun over her head, investigators said.
I got to shoot a 38 caliber handgun when I was 11, and the first time I fired I hit myself in the head from the recoil. But at least my instructor was smart enough to only put a single round in the chamber. So I’m having trouble mustering up sympathy for the instructor. The poor girl, on the other hand, how could she not be scarred for life?
So chalk this up as two more victims of America’s insane gun culture.
There was this little kid in Texas that did something like this a few years ago at some super-shoot thing, where folks can rent and fire any weapon you could think of including .30 caliber miniguns and .50 Brownings and such. He was something like 8 years old. Same type weapon, a 9mm Uzi. Only he pulled the trigger on full auto, and the recoil flipped the rifle over in his hands and literally blew the top of his head off. The vid was circulating around for a while. Daddy was standing right there on one side, and the range supervisor was on the other. The kid stood there, with a rifle he could barely lift to eye level and let ‘er rip.
They let a little kid fire a horribly unbalanced automatic rifle without even so much as letting him rest it on a sandbag or being held by a Ransom Rest.
Gun nuts are morons.
@2 “the first time I fired I hit myself in the head from the recoil”
Geez, Goldy, maybe you should stick with slinging insults and leave slinging lead to us war fighters. When I was in basic training a D.I. (drill instructor) placed the butt of an M-14 firmly against his unprotected chin and proceeded to fire off 20 rounds. The idea was to teach our crowd of recruits (a) not to be afraid of the U.S. Army’s then-standard infantry weapon’s recoil, and (b) the right way to manage recoil. (If there had been a space between the rifle butt and his jaw, and butt would have kicked back and broken his jaw. The key is to rest the butt firmly against your body. Handguns are a different story.)
@1 “Gun nuts are morons.”
Ain’t that the truth. And you know what? A lot of cops don’t know much about gunfighting. Most of them have never taken more than basic police training. Their departments won’t pay for private combat shooting courses, which are expensive, so they never get advanced training. Maybe that’s why they empty their guns at suspects. (That also might explain why so many of them are lousy shots.) I almost expect to see them throw their empty gun at the suspect like in the old-time cowboy shoot-’em-up flicks.
Another gun tragedy that won’t be cited by gunners in defense of the 2nd Amendment, or in opposition to any and every form of gun control.
Shame on you, Goldy, for politicizing this completely unpredictable and unprecedented tragedy.
@5 shame on you for ignoring such a tragedy, sweeping it under the rug.
Does Mr. Vacca have children of his own? If not, he may just have won himself a beautiful, gun-nut edition of The Darwin Award.
Back in the day, Bellevue’s own Wade’s Gun Nuts had a shooting like this: http://community.seattletimes......ug=2540601