An entrance to the Last Stop outdoor shooting range in White Hills, Ariz. was closed off on Aug. 27, two days after an instructor there was accidentally shot by a 9-year-old girl. Credit John Locher/Associated Press
Her parents did not immediately realize what had happened after the automatic machine gun recoiled in the girl’s hands, shooting wildly on the morning of Aug. 25. The couple, visiting a recreational shooting range on a family vacation, rushed over to comfort their daughter as she complained that “the gun was too much for her and it hurt her shoulder,” according to new details of the shooting released by the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office.
Only after another instructor rushed to the victim, Charles Vacca, did the parents realize that he had been shot in the head, according to the report, which was based on statements by the parents and witnesses. At that point, the parents took the girl and her siblings — a brother and a sister — away from the scene, heading to a cafeteria upstairs, the father told deputies.
Mr. Vacca, 39, was airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas, where he died later that night. He was the range master at the shooting range, the Last Stop resort, in White Hills, Ariz. The police report provided a chilling portrait of a family initially unaware of what it had just witnessed, and showed how quickly a vacation outing turned to tragedy.
The father, in his statement to a deputy sheriff, according to the report, said that his family had caught a shuttle from their hotel in Las Vegas to the Last Stop, also known as Bullets and Burgers, across the border in Arizona, at approximately 9:45 a.m. He said they took a ride on a monster truck before arriving at the shooting range.
The father was the first to shoot, followed by his 9-year-old daughter, by his account. The mother, who was taping the girl on a cellphone, told the deputies that she watched as the gun recoiled and her daughter dropped it.
The police report includes the names of the parents, but the girl’s name is blacked out. The New York Times is not publishing the parents’ names so as not to identify the girl.
The father “stated his family is in shock and just wants to leave the area and go back to Las Vegas,” one of the deputies said in the police report. The deputy said he had asked to speak to his daughter, but the father said “he would prefer if no one talked to his children as they are going through a lot.”
Ross Miller, the other range instructor, said he realized something was wrong when he saw Mr. Vacca slumped on a table and “saw a lot of blood coming from Charles’s head area and on to the table,” according to his statement to the police. As the family pulled their children away, Mr. Miller laid Mr. Vacca on the ground and started applying pressure to the wound.
A transcript of the 911 calls released by the sheriff’s office showed how dire the situation was. “We need a helicopter,” the caller from the shooting range said. “An ambulance ain’t gonna work.”
The police said that it had asked the shooting range staff for copies of the release waivers the family had signed, but that staff members said the papers had been blown away by the wind and could not be recovered.
The sheriff’s office also said that no charges would be filed in the case.
While there is no age limit for firing guns in Arizona, some have questioned the wisdom of putting such a powerful weapon into the hands of children.
A lawyer for the family, Kevin G. Walsh, said in a statement that the family was “devastated by this accident that turned what was supposed to be a unique and brief excursion from their summer vacation into a life-changing tragedy.”
He said the family asked “all compassionate Americans to pray for their children and the entire Vacca family,” rather than “use this tragedy for their own partisan purposes and agendas.”
Painted signs at the range where an instructor was accidentally killed by a nine-year-old with an Uzi, August 27th. Credit Photograph by John Locher / AP
By Amy Davidson September 2, 2014
The Arizona Last Stop, where a nine-year-old girl accidentally shot her instructor with an Uzi last Monday, has already reopened. It was “booked pretty solid [ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-shooting-arizona-20140826-story.html ]” for the Labor Day weekend, Sam Scarmardo, the owner, told Reuters. The sheriff of Mohave County described a video of the shooting—recorded by the girl’s parents, who were tourists from New Jersey—as “grisly,” and has filed his report. He found that there is no cause for any criminal charges, not against whoever put together the range’s Bullets and Burgers Adventure [ http://bulletsandburgers.com/ ], designed to put automatic military weapons in the hands of children as young as eight, or against anyone else. Instead, the sheriff referred the case to the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health, because, he said, it was “being viewed as an industrial accident.”
“An industrial accident”: that phrase raises the question of what industry we are talking about. The hospitality business? The attraction of Bullets and Burgers, in part, is its guarantee of the best burgers in the world. Gun safety? Scarmardo was quick to point out that the girl’s parents had signed a waiver and were at her side. In the video, only part of which has been released, the instructor, Chris Vacca, is wearing camouflage, a choice that seems to have little to do with the proper civilian use of firearms and much to do with the range’s Desert Storm theme. (The girl is wearing pink shorts and a T-shirt, which is exactly the kind of outfit a nine-year-old should be wearing.) Pop culture? Entertainment? The range tells customers that they can select the same guns that they’ve seen in movies like “Terminator.” The girl was allowed to choose an Uzi, a weapon whose lightness she may have found appealing, but, for that very reason, as the Times pointed out [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/us/arizona-firing-range-instructor-killed-by-girl-9-in-accident.html ], recoils in a way that can be hard to control. The industry of manufacturing, marketing, and firing guns whose main purpose is to tear human bodies apart? The target that Vacca directed the girl to shoot at with her Uzi, first with just a single bullet, was the silhouette of a person. Among his last words were, “O.K., full auto,” which he said as he leaned over to change the weapon’s settings. The section of the video that’s been released ends there. What happened next, according to the official report, is that she pulled the trigger and the gun discharged again and again; the recoil caused the machine to swing up, and a single bullet went into Vacca’s head.
There are many businesses that make up the gun industry, including the buying and selling of political influence. In Arizona and many other states, the realm of firearms is poorly regulated, from gun stores and fairs to tourist traps like Last Stop. As the Arizona Republic wrote [ http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/08/29/arizona-uzi-shooting-firing-range-regulations/14783031/ ], “Arizona statutes do address firing ranges, but the laws primarily deal with noise levels. No laws govern any training protocols for firearms instructors, safety guidelines or age restrictions. But even if there were, there is no regulatory authority to enforce them.” A former Last Stop employee described the range, to the Republic, as a “shake and bake [ http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/08/28/arizona-uzi-shooting-range-bullets-burgers-concerns/14723289/ ]” operation, but, for what it’s worth, its enforcement record was clean. Setting a minimum age of eight to use a gun on a range has been described, since Vacca’s death, as something of an industry standard in many states. There is still an overhanging injunction that workplaces be generally safe, and maybe the Arizona authorities can do something with that, but there is not much cause for optimism.
This shouldn’t be surprising; it is not accidental. The same political forces that gather around gun rights are those railing against government in any form, even the kind that involves keeping children and their gun instructors, or other teachers, safe. We are left not only with lax gun laws but shake-and-bake shooting ranges. This is part of the explanation for why talking to the gun lobby about “common-sense regulations” never seems to go well. They are drawing on, and stoking, a view that presumes the foolishness of regulations. It is sad and telling that the only department left to look into Vacca’s death is the state equivalent of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—regularly derided by Republicans [ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/mar/21/ted-cruz/sen-ted-cruz-says-federal-government-thinks-it-has/ ]—and that it’s unlikely to be able to do much at all.
A possible question for a 2016 Republican Party debate is whether the candidates think that nine-year-olds should ever be permitted to fire automatic weapons. In today’s Republican Party, though, what it would most likely yield is misty reminiscences about hunting trips with grandchildren. (The answers to any questions about the need for better workplace-safety laws are even more predictable.) Perhaps, when pressed on safety, the candidates might throw in vague invocations of “parental responsibility.” Within the logic of the gun culture, this has come to mean a responsibility to train children in the “proper” use and handling of guns. Does anyone think that a session with an instructor and an Uzi at a place like Arizona Last Stop counts? A child might, and she might walk away with the idea that she now knows all about guns.
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