Matt Valentine teaches writing and photography at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written about gun violence policy for the Atlantic and Salon.

About 80 people die by gunshot in the United States every day, but most of those incidents don’t register even a blip in the national media. What’s different about the accidental death Monday of a firearms instructor at a gun range in Arizona—shot by a nine-year-old girl who lost control of an Uzi submachine gun—is that it was so obviously preventable. Could this change the way we think about gun safety for children?

Millions of Americans—myself included—grew up shooting guns long before we could drive a car or vote. I can remember ogling the glossy .22-caliber rifles advertised in Boy’s Life magazine and begging my parents every year to let me have one. Eventually they consented. What they didn’t know, though, was that I’d already been shooting. Without telling them, my uncle took me to a gun range when I was eight years old, and let me fire his .45-caliber semiautomatic. Other kids learn to handle guns even earlier, like Shyanne Roberts, a competitive shooter who started at age 4 and now, at 10 years old, has corporate sponsors and several weapons customized just for her.


The gun industry has been courting the youth demographic for decades. As the population became increasingly urbanized, gun and ammunition manufacturers couldn’t take it for granted that American children would continue the same hunting and shooting traditions of earlier generations. So, in 1961, the industry created the National Shooting Sports Foundation, with a mission to “promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports.” One NSSF program is the Families Afield initiative, which aims to lower minimum age requirements for young hunters, and to allow children to hunt before completing prerequisite hunter safety classes. The National Rifle Association has likewise developed several youth programs, such as their Junior Shooting Camps and Youth Education Summit, a weeklong conference on gun rights issues for high school students.

But even on rightwing TV shows and in conservative publications, gun rights advocates have this week expressed some discomfort with the idea of a young child handling an automatic weapon. “I’m all for teaching children about firearms at a young age,” wrote Charles Cooke in the National Review a day after the news broke. “But there is a good way to do this and a bad way to do this. We shouldn’t be giving nine-year-old girls automatic weapons.”

Here’s the catch: When Cooke says a nine year old “shouldn’t” handle an Uzi, he doesn’t mean that she should be prevented by law, but that he wishes someone—her parents or the gun range management—had used better judgment. (“I don’t think [this incident] tells us too much about the law,” he clarifies.) And in the pro-gun community, this reaction is pretty typical: It’s easy to find gun owners ready to criticize the Last Stop gun range, located an hour outside of Las Vegas, for putting a submachine gun in the hands of a slight nine year old, or to blame the instructor for standing in the wrong spot, or the girl’s parents for misjudging her preparedness.

But I’ve yet to hear any prominent gun rights advocates call for a change to the law—even to prohibit behavior they consider foolish and dangerous. To suggest a new regulation, no matter how reasonable, would be wholesale defection from the party line. The NRA tells us that gun laws are worse than useless. Criminals won’t obey them, so new laws “only punish lawful gun owners,” according to Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

Which regulations is he talking about? Take your pick—the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs uses that language, “punishment for law-abiding gun owners,” to describe dozens of proposed state and federal laws, from background checks to magazine capacity restrictions to safe storage laws—even to laws banning the transfer of ammunition to people who aren’t authorized to have guns. The same rhetoric has been used by gun-friendly politicians and pundits for years. “Bad guys don’t follow the laws,” Sarah Palin said after the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. “Restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer.”

That line of argument has always been a tautological black hole, but it seems an especially inadequate rationale for opposing a law prohibiting children from using fully automatic weapons. If such a law was passed, gun ranges would follow it. And “self-defense” is completely irrelevant here—even the Last Stop gun range owner, Sam Scarmardo, describes his business as “part of the Las Vegas entertainment industry.”

Tone-deaf as usual, the NRA tweeted Wednesday about “7 Ways Children Can Have Fun at the Shooting Range,” with a link to an article about fancy, colorful targets to “change things up” in case shooting at a traditional bull’s-eye gets old. As always after a tragedy, the gun lobby is downplaying the severity of the problem by pointing to the millions of shooters of all ages who haven’t killed anybody.

Dan Schott, a marketing consultant for the firearms industry, said this week, “I see nothing wrong with giving people the opportunity to experience firing these weapons. I’ve seen thousands of people come away from that experience with a heightened respect for firearms.”

It’s a fair point—however tragic, accidents like the one at Last Stop shooting range are rare. The vast majority of gun tourists have fun, and nobody gets hurt. The last time a child was involved in a fatal shooting with an Uzi was six years ago, when an eight-year-old boy shot himself in the head at a gun show in Massachusetts while his father recorded a video. (The boy’s home state of Connecticut subsequently passed a law prohibiting children under the age of 16 from firing fully-automatic weapons, regardless of parental permission or supervision. There is no age limit under federal law.)

But interestingly, the real reason that fatal accidents with fully automatic weapons are rare is that gun control has been effective—federal regulations have made these particular guns inconvenient to acquire as a private individual. Unlike semiautomatic weapons, fully automatic weapons must be registered with the federal government, and require special licensing. The registry has been closed since the 1980s, meaning no new machine guns can be added to it. With limited supply, the cost of fully automatic weapons has soared—which is part of the reason people will spend $200 to visit a gun range like Last Stop to shoot them.

Before the national outrage over the tragedy in Arizona dwindles, we might take a moment to consider the hundreds of Americans who die each year in shooting accidents that don’t involve exotic submachine guns. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were 851 fatal shooting accidents in 2011, up from 606 in 2010 (2012 data is expected to be released next month). A New York Times investigation suggests that the number of people accidentally shot to death might actually be twice as high as indicated by the CDC, due to inconsistent classification by local authorities.

Meanwhile, Last Stop shooting range has announced that they are raising the minimum age to fire fully automatic weapons to 12, and instituting a minimum height requirement. That will likely satisfy some critics. Unless a skinny 12-year-old has an accident.