A handout image from video released as part of an investigation by the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office yesterday shows a nine-year-old girl with shooting instructor Charles Vacca as he teaches her to shoot an Uzi automatic weapon at the Bullets and Burgers Last Stop shooting range near White Hills, Arizona, on Monday.
Agencies/Washington
A nine-year-old girl learning to fire an Uzi submachine gun was unable to control the weapon, accidentally killing her instructor, news reports said yesterday.
The tragedy occurred on Monday at the Last Stop gun range in the western US state of Arizona, where the girl had been taken by her parents for firearms lesson, US news reports said.
Officials said the girl had successfully managed to control the weapon in the “single shot” mode.
But when shooting instructor Charles Vacca, 39, switched the Uzi into the fully automatic setting, the force of the gunfire caused the weapon to rebound upward, and an errant bullet fired by the child struck him in the head.
Vacca died in hospital a short time later, officials said.
Authorities later released a video, editing out the fatal shot, of the tragic shooting lesson, which had been filmed by the girl’s parents.
A manager at the firing range told NBC News that firearms training at the Last Stop can begin as young as eight years old.
Firearms instruction at other shooting ranges in the US, which has the world’s highest per capita number of guns, can start as early as seven years old.
The video showing a shooting range instructor seconds before he was fatally shot topped the most-viewed at many social media sites yesterday.
The video only reached social media on Tuesday. It had been viewed tens of thousands of times by yesterday, according to YouTube, and a story about the shooting was the top article yesterday at the Washington Post website’s Most Read column.
“WARNING: Some of you may find this video disturbing. A 9-year-old girl accidentally shot her instructor with an Uzi,” is how a California television station prefaced a link to the video on Twitter.
People who reacted on social media were predictably shocked.
“You teach a child to shoot with an Uzi? That’s what you deserve, American idiot!¿” one YouTube user posting from Italy wrote.
The sheriff’s department in Mohave County posted a 27-second clip, which cuts off just before Vacca was struck. Longer versions posted at YouTube provide more details. At least one claims to be the full video.
The video posted by the sheriff’s department shows the back of the girl, who was visiting Arizona from her home in New Jersey. Dressed in pink shorts with a long dark ponytail hanging down her back over a grey T-shirt, she approaches the shooting range and Vacca places the Uzi in her hands. She takes a single shot at a target in the distance with the instructor on her left.
