By Selwyn Duke

Must every tragic and unusual gun death be accompanied by irrational calls for more government intrusion into our lives? Virtually all of us have heard about Arizona firearms instructor Charles Vacca, who was accidentally shot and killed Monday at the Last Stop gun range by a nine-year-old girl he was teaching to shoot a fully automatic Uzi. The incident was caught on video and, not surprisingly, has caught the nation’s attention. Unfortunately, though, it’s reason and reality that are caught in the crosshairs.

Many Internet commenters have seized the opportunity to place blame for this unfortunate accident on who they call “gun nuts”: NRA members and Second Amendment defenders in general. They also frequently place undue onus on the young girl’s parents, perhaps not considering that the couple was at a gun range that offered machine gun rentals (with supervision) — in much the same way that people can pay to race cars on a closed track — and that the parents had the expectation that this professional recreational facility was safe. And this expectation was not unrealistic. As the New York Times itself reported, quoting Last Stop gun range owner Sam Scarmado, “‘In the last 14 years, we’ve probably had 100,000 people shoot five million rounds of ammunition, and of those, a thousand to two thousand of them were children,’ he said. ‘We’ve never given out a Band-Aid — no one’s never even got a scratch.’” The paper added further perspective, writing, “Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said that what happened at Last Stop was ‘an outlier.’ Shooting ranges are generally regarded as safe places, where guns are fired in a controlled setting and under the supervision of trained instructors.”

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