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” 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, 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, 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, “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” 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—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.

“It’s not like we shoot people on a daily basis,” Scarmardo told the Daily News. He said that he would review his practices, as he does anyway from time to time; he’d fiddle with the weight and the age limits. “But I don’t expect all that much to change.” Vacca’s family, too, has talked about his death as, in the words of his daughter, Ashley, “a tragic accident,” as though he’d been carried away by a spate of bad weather—an uncontrollable part of the landscape. (“We really do want the prayers to be going out to the family of the little girl,” Ashley added. “We don’t want their life to revolve around this.”) The range where Vacca died is still drawing people in from the road with big signs that say, “Last chance to fire a machine gun” and “Ask about machine guns.” Where does one start with the questions?