@91:

In this day and age, any parent who DOESN'T read the back of the label - because, you know, it's not like they hid that information - has no excuse; in fact, that's why the baby food manufacturers put that information there in the first place, so some idiot parent who didn't read the ingredients information before throwing the jar into their cart can't sue them for false advertising, or whatever.

Same with an automatic weapon: if a child is handed something capable of killing, be it a gun, a knife, acid, nuclear detonator, etc., etc., no one should be in the least bit surprised when the child ends up utilizing the object to fulfill the function for which it was intended.

OOMTE @105,

No, they do it because they are required to by law. Just as legally they may not call the product “strained blueberries” but “strained blueberry dessert.” Similarly, fruit juice, fruit beverage and fruit drink are all legally defined. Milk is legally defined. People can be good parents and not know the legal definitions of everything they consume.

Shopping is hard.

republican parents? gun advocates? Let's buy one for the kids so they can show off to their friends. Guns are fun!

@99 did this tiny little girl even WANT to shoot an Uzi?

Why are you so locked into gender stereotypes ? We live in an age of Kill Bill, every Joss Whedon thing ever, and plenty of females (including children) engaging in gun-play like their male action counterparts (Salt, The Professional, etc). Young girls should and hopefully do have every chance of wanting to gunplay like little boys do.

The only thing that can stop a bad 9-year old girl with an Uzi is a good 9-year old girl with an Uzi.

I admit that this is the kind of thing that just shows me that the gun nut perspective is completely beyond my comprehension. Some commenters here have already pointed out that there were things this instructor/gun range could've done to prevent this, the most obvious being not giving the girl an uzi, but securing the gun to a post, having the instructor hold the gun down, and keeping the uzi out of automatic mode are all possibilities that have been pointed out in this section already. And yet extreme gun advocates don't want more regulation because of this incident? Are they insane?

Roller coasters vs. Machine guns:

One of these is designed to be scary but not actually cause harm. The other is designed to turn living things into hamburger meat.

How are we even having this discussion?

@108. You may have a point. I was just going off my personal experience, as well as the youtube videos above, as well as the known play patterns of girls versus boys. I certainly enjoy shooting skeet as an adult, but my brothers and male cousins were always more enthusiastic about guns when we were younger, and I was raised by my single-parent USMarine father in a very egalitarian household . I know that if my father had pressured me even a little bit to shoot that gun, I would have done it, I just didn't want to. Does that make sense?

I concur that sgt. doom's post @95 is worth studying. Thank you, sir.

Nice kill, Caitlin!
Now, point your Uzi right at the NRA headquarters.

@25--
Totally freak accident. She got that first shot off fine. No one could have predicted something bad would happen. Shame on Dan for politicizing this completely unforeseeable tragedy.
========================

It's not an accident. An accident would be if someone tripped and spilled their coffee. This was negligence.

Couldn't be predicted?
The interchangeable terms muzzle rise, muzzle flip and muzzle climb refer to the tendency of firearms or pneumatic arms front end (muzzle end of the barrel) to rise up after firing.[1]

so yeah, it's a known consequence. Not only was it foreseeable, it should have been expected.

@114: If you'd read the rest of the comments, you'd have noticed Allison pointing out that there is fuck all to do in that part of the country (I can confirm that). Horseback riding and rafting aren't really options in the middle of the desert. I agree with the rest of your post though.

And honestly, these days, if you're driving through the desert with a nine-year-old, give them a DS or something to do in the back seat! It's not that hard.

My first gun was a Red Ryder BB gun I got from my old man when I was nine. it was single pump, and could barely break skin. "You just need something powerful enough to plink cans" my dad told me.

After learning how to hande a firearm with that simple machine, I fired .22 rifles in the cub scouts, and began shooting skeet with 12 gauge shotguns and long distance target shooting/deer hunting with a Remington 700 while in the boy scouts.

My god I could not imagine holding an Uzi when I was that nine year old kid plinking soda cans and shooting apart plastic army men in the woods with that Red Ryder.

I blame the range for thinking this was ok more so than the parents. The parents should have known better, but they had "experts" telling them it was safe. Fucking morons.

@95: WHAT THE FUCK MAN
You posted something intelligible and sensible! I honestly believe that is the first time I've seen that from you.
Congratulations on your moment of lucidity.

I wouldn't be putting much blame on the wife - I have never seen much parity in parental roles when the husband is a gun guy. I doubt there ever was a discussion about whether the daughter should be doing this by the parents, except Dad's desire to see his little girl shooting an Uzi.

@106:

Hence, the inclusion of nutritional labeling and ingredients listings. It may be legally mandated, but it's there as much for the benefit of the manufacturer as it is for the purchaser. If it's there and the parent doesn't read it, it's their fault, period.

This is the 21st freaking Century, if someone doesn't know how to accomplish something as basic as reading a nutritional label on a product, there are literally a myriad of ways to find out.

@119 is spot on. It's the range's fault for claiming that this activity was perfectly safe for children.

@123 - there's plenty of fault to go around. It's not either/or. Parents, stupid. Range, stupid.

The 9-yr old 2nd Amended her instructor to death.