This 9 y/o just killed someone. And she’ll live with that fact for the rest of her life.

 Update:

The children of the shooting instructor killed by a nine-year-old girl have penned an emotional letter to her — and have taken turns reading their pledge of forgiveness on a video.

Personal injury lawyer Marc Lamber, who represents the Vacca family, uploaded the video onto his firm’s website, the Daily Mail reports.

In it, Christopher Vacca, 11; Tylor Vacca, 14; Elizabeth Vacca, 15, and Ashley Moser, 19, address the camera saying: “You’re only 9 years old… We think about you.”

“We are worried about you. We pray for you, and we wish you peace,” they say. “Our dad would want the same thing.”

Elizabeth added that her father would have wanted the little girl to move on.

“You should not let that define you. You should love yourself and love your family,” she said.

A still from the video.

America’s ABC News reports that a member of Lamber Goodnow, James Goodnow, said it was the children’s idea to write the letter.

“I was touched when they told me they wanted to do this,” Goodnow said. “It’s rare to see something so human in a legal situation like this.”

“This is about extending out, reaching out to someone who was hurt by this, and saying it’s OK,” he said.

The Vacca family has previously said their prayers are with the little girl and her family.

Speaking on the Today show late last month, Ashley said her father’s death was something they were “all going to have to live with”.

“We know it was a tragic accident and that it’s something that we’re all going to have to live with,” she said.

“We really do want the prayers to be going out to the family of the little girl.

“Our thoughts and our prayers are with them. We don’t want their life to revolve around this.”

Mamamia previously reported…

By KATE LEAVER

A nine year old girl has killed a man with a machine gun.

The young girl was standing in the desert, armed with a gun thicker than her own arm. She was learning to aim and shoot at a target roughly 15m away. A male instructor was gently teaching her to handle the lethal weapon.

When the girl’s parents started filming her target practice, they thought they were capturing the proud moment their child learned the American tradition of shooting an automatic weapon.

Instead, they captured the moment their daughter killed a man.

The incident happened at a shooting range just outside of Las Vegas, where 39-year-old father and war veteran Charles Vacca worked as an instructor. On Monday, Vacca was helping this nine-year-old girl learn to shoot an automatic Uzi with her pre-adolescent hands. She shot once, and was adjusting the weapon when it accidentally went off a second time, sending the girl backwards and the bullet straight into Charles Vacca’s flesh. He died a few hours later.

Welcome to America.

This video was filmed by the girl’s parents and released by Arizona police. It has been edited so that it doesn’t show the moment Charles Vacca was killed, but it is still the last moments of someone’s life and may be distressing. Please take that into account when deciding whether to watch it. 

Welcome. To America. Where someone’s father and husband is dead, and a little girl has to live with the fact that she killed a man. For the rest of her life.

She may grow up to campaign against the epidemic of personal gun use in the United States. She may choose to teach her own children not to fire deadly weapons.

Whatever she does, this girl will become a woman with the knowledge that she took a life. It might have been an accident. But how much of an accident is it really, when the cause of death is a gun shot wound to the head at a shooting range?

Clearly, the images of this girl are blurred and her identity has been protected. But look how little she is, wearing little bright pink shorts and sneakers. She’s so short that Charles Vacca had to crouch down to position the gun on her left shoulder. The girl doesn’t appear to be wearing any protective clothing, and neither was Vacca.

Why should a child under the age of 10 be shouldered with an automatic weapon? Gun rights activists in America will quote the right to bear arms, and say she was being taught to protect herself in an increasingly volatile world, in a country where there are more guns than people. They might even go as far as to suggest that a child like this could have saved the day at Sandy Hook Elementary, where 28 people including children died.

But really, this child was being trained to kill.

This is a tragedy with two casualties. Charles Vacca lost his life, and this girl just lost the rest of hers.