Laurie Roberts

The Republic | azcentral.com

Attention all tourists: come to Arizona where your kids can experience the majesty of the Grand Canyon, the beauty of a desert, the recoil of a fully-automated machine gun.

No, really.

Tragically, really.

On Monday, a 9-year-old New Jersey girl was brought to Bullets and Burgers, a northern Arizona tourist stop where kids can shoot a submachine gun in the Mohave Desert then enjoy an All-American burger inside the World Famous Arizona Last Stop restaurant.

"At our range, you can shoot FULL auto on our machine guns," the website advertises. "Let 'em Rip!"

Prices start at $199 – the cost of years of therapy presumably not included if you happen to take the head off of one of the instructors.

As happened on Monday to a fourth grader wearing pink shorts and a braided ponytail. It seems the child could not hold the gun steady as bullets came flying out of the Uzi she was shooting, at a rate of 10 rounds a second.

The child's instructor, Charles Vaca, an Army veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, died 11 hours later, having been shot in the head.

Only in Arizona, right?

Almost immediately came the inevitable calls for new laws.

"Should it be fun to shoot a gun?" one horrified commentator asked, as if the fun police could somehow come in and haul you away for having the audacity to enjoy target shooting.

"Should a fourth-grader be legally allowed to shoot an Uzi?," wrote another. "The only answer to that question is: Hell fricking NO -- it should be against the law."

Me? I'm thinking that it's ridiculous that we have to make it against the law for a 9-year-old to pick up an automatic weapon capable of pumping out 600 bullets a minute.

We don't need a law. We need parents who have common sense and it wouldn't hurt if the owners of gun ranges grew a brain cell or two either.

"This is just another example of people coming to Arizona, thinking that it's OK to shoot guns," one reader told me. "I am so sorry for the instructor but I cannot believe that this family let this little girl come here, like going to Disneyland. Instead of riding Magic Mountain or whatever, we're bringing them here to shoot guns. This is just totally outrageous and I hope you mention it in the paper."

Oh I'll mention it. It goes without saying that it's outrageous to give a child an Uzi. Just don't look to the Arizona Legislature to change things.

Remember 2011, when a crazed gunman opened fire in a Safeway parking lot north of Tucson, killing six people and injuring 13 others including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Jared Loughner fired 31 bullets in 15 seconds that morning, thanks to a high-capacity magazine. The shooting only stopped because he was forced to reload, giving bystanders the chance to wrestle him to the ground.

Clearly, things would have to change.

After the tragedy, there were calls to limit the size of magazines and to do more to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. Instead, our leaders declared the Colt Single-Action Army revolver the official firearm of Arizona.

Now comes a man dead and a child, scarred for life. The kid, our leaders would tell us, had a Second Amendment right to pick up that Uzi and blast away as long as she was at a gun range and her parents were there.

It's unthinkable and it's tragic and it won't change a thing around here.

But honestly, I do wonder. Do we really need another law or just better parents?