Wait--what?

The latest easily-foreseeable gun death in the United States took place in Arizona at a family-targeted (pun intended) facility called “Burgers and Bullets.” The idea, I suppose, is that families, adults and their children, would spend the day out in the open eating kid-friendly food and having a wonderful time learning to shoot guns. I read about this in the Los Angeles Times, saw references to it also in the New York Times and the Guardian.

Apparently the fond parents shot a video of their 9-year-old daughter having her first encounter with an Uzi. An Uzi. An instructor had set her up with protective ear mufflers, and can be heard encouraging her enthusiastically after her first single shot. He warns her about the recoil from a repeated-shot firing of the Uzi. Some people, like me, might say that he can warn her all he likes, because 1) she’s only 9, so probably won’t quite understand what ‘recoil’ is, and 2) she’s only 9, and won’t be strong enough to manage the recoil.

My husband was drafted into the Army and sent over to Korea. He tells me that he and the other soldiers (young men in their late teens and early twenties) were all astounded by the power of the recoil from their repeat-fire automatic weapons, and needed to practice bracing against it when shooting. (FYI, he could read and write, and volunteered for company clerk, thus getting pulled from the front lines, protecting his life and taking him out of the position of trying to kill others.)

So, the instructor warns the 9-year-old girl, hands her the Uzi, shows her how to fire. Predictably and horribly, the barrel of the gun arcs up as the recoil pushes the girl back, and the instructor is shot in the head. Mercifully, the video stops before that point. I am utterly at a loss for an adequate comment on this event, except to say that my friends in Europe will no doubt learn of this incident and think, once and yet again, “Are they nuts?”