Gun control, according to the bumper stickers and GOP presidential candidates, is using both hands. Tell that to the nine-year-old girl who killed Charles Vacca in August 2014. Vacca, a gun range instructor in Arizona, was helping the girl fire an Uzi at the Arizona Last Stop Gun Range; after a few rounds, he let the girl hold the gun herself. But even with two hands, the recoil on the fully automatic weapon was too much for her, and the first shots jerked her hands upward, raising the barrel towards Vacca, who was shot once in the head.

How to control a thing that spits fire and jerks with such tremendous ferocity? It was not the time then, nor is it now, to ask how such an accident could have been prevented—whether a nine-year-old should have been given access to an Uzi, for example. This accident was unforeseeable, completely random, seemingly destined to occur. It was a time to mourn, a time to reflect on the preciousness of a life, gone in an instant. But it was also, apparently, not a time to change our behaviors, our regulations, or our laws. The children of Charles Vacca, in a letter they subsequently released to the unidentified girl, were clear that they harbored no ill will. “You’re only 9-years-old,” they wrote. “We think about you. We are worried about you. We pray for you, and we wish you peace.” Everyone’s sad, everyone’s broken up about this. Accidents happen.

As the political debate over gun control stagnates and stalemates, sadness is all we have left. White men will continue to display AR-15s openly and brazenly, threatening mosques and people they don’t like in the name of the Second Amendment, like the slave patrols of the Antebellum South. Mass shooters will continue to walk around with guns drawn, law enforcement powerless to stop them until they start firing. Black men and women and young children will continue to be shot on sight for holding pellet guns, or for any vague movement that might be later classified as “reaching for a waistband.”

There is still a fight to be fought, still letters to be written and petitions to be signed, still legislators to support, still elections to turn out for, but it’s clear that in the coming years nothing will change, and toddlers will still kill more Americans than terrorists do. Out of respect for the victims, we must be sure to do nothing. It’s okay to be sad, but it’s disrespectful to politicize the tragedy. Let us mourn and move on. These things happen everyday.



Peter Manseau’s latest book Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck, enters into this conversation to remind us not only how little has changed, but also how long we’ve been sad about guns. The book is a collection of news reports, from 1739 to 1916, all of which detail firearm accidents, most of which are fatal. The title comes from the most common description of these events, as in this piece from The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, dated September 12, 1790: