"The child’s very first firing of a live Uzi submachine gun"

August 31, 2014 5:44 PM

NYT: "Starting at $200 a person, a bus will pick up visitors at their hotel in Las Vegas, 25 miles to the north, show them Hoover Dam and bring them to a recreational shooting range called Last Stop, where they can fire the weapons of their dreams: automatic machine guns, sniper rifles, grenade launchers. But on Monday, one family’s adventure went horribly wrong. A 9-year-old girl from New Jersey accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun while he stood to her left side, trying to guide her. A video of the shooting, which her parents recorded on a cellphone, suggests that the girl, in pink shorts and with a braided ponytail, was unable to control the gun’s recoil; the instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, was rushed to a hospital in Las Vegas, where he died Monday night."

NYT Editorial: "What encourages an entrepreneur to welcome children as young as 8 onto his firing range as part of the unfortunately booming “gun tourism” business? The very name of the tour group that delivered the family to the Last Stop firing range — Bullets and Burgers — seems the stuff of Jonathan Swift’s dark ruminations about human madness."

posted by porn in the woods (3 comments total)

This is a great time to bring up the incident where a parent was thrown in jail for letting a 9-year-old play alone in the park.
posted by Behemoth at 5:50 PM on August 31, 2014 [10 favorites]

This would be the perfect setup for the little girl to become a dark and edgy comic book character 10 years later if it wasn't, like, all depressingly real and shit.
posted by localroger at 5:51 PM on August 31, 2014 [3 favorites]

How messed up is it if a child's deepest desire is to fire an Uzi in Las Vegas?
posted by sammyo at 5:56 PM on August 31, 2014