Mr. Vacca – bad decision!
But on Monday, one family’s adventure went horribly wrong. A 9-year-old girl from New Jersey accidentally shot and killed her instructor with an Uzi submachine gun while he stood to her left side, trying to guide her. A video of the shooting, which her parents recorded on a cellphone, suggests that the girl, in pink shorts and with a braided ponytail, was unable to control the gun’s recoil; the instructor, Charles Vacca, 39, was rushed to a hospital in Las Vegas, where he died Monday night.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Sunday that lawmakers need to keep an open mind when discussing gun control and that having more guns, rather than fewer, would help protect citizens in future situations like the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.
"Every mass killing of more than three people in recent history has been in a place where guns were prohibited," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "They choose this place, they know no one will be armed."
“I’ve been trying to wake people up,” he lamented.
Reynolds’ approach is like a bucket of ice water, rather than a diplomatic nudge, however. The sign posted in the door of his shop says it all:
On October 31, 2009, special agents working in the Phoenix office of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) received
information from a local gun store about the recent purchases of multiple AK-
47 style rifles by four individuals. Agents began investigating the purchases
and soon came to believe that the men were so-called “straw purchasers”
involved in a large-scale gun trafficking organization responsible for buying
guns for transport to violent Mexican drug trafficking organizations. This
investigation was later named “Operation Fast and Furious.”1
I've heard it said that, if you take a walk around Waikiki, it's only a matter of time until someone hands you a flyer of scantily clad women clutching handguns, overlaid with English and maybe Japanese text advertising one of the many local shooting ranges. The city's largest, the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club, advertises instructors fluent in Japanese, which is also the default language of its website. For years, this peculiar Hawaiian industry has explicitly targeted Japanese tourists, drawing them away from beaches and resorts into shopping malls, to do things that are forbidden in their own country.
Chicago is in the grips of a deadly gang war. At least 275 people have been killed in the city so far this year and many more have been shot, many of them innocent bystanders to the gang violence. Among the latest victims were 12- and 13-year-old girls shot Tuesday night. They survived.
Sgt. Matt Little leads one of the teams in Chicago's Gang Enforcement Unit. There are about 200 such officers in the city-- versus 100,000 gang members.
