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A shooting instructor tested a machine gun at the Last Stop range in White Hills, Ariz., this month.Credit Brandon Magnus for The New York Times

WHITE HILLS, Ariz. — Antonio Nárdiz, a Spanish tourist from Bilbao, said he had chosen a family vacation to America for one specific reason: to fulfill his sons’ dreams of firing real machine guns. In Spain, he noted, 10-year-old Jon and 12-year-old Toni, like all other civilians, are forbidden to use automatic weapons.

Mr. Nárdiz, 47, had heard that a family trip to an American gun range turned tragic last year when a 9-year-old girl lost control of an Uzi submachine gun, killing her instructor. So when Mr. Nárdiz selected that same range for his family’s adventure — a place called Last Stop, just an hour’s drive from Las Vegas — he called ahead to ask about security. Someone told him, “It’s practically impossible for an accident to occur,” he said.

In the year since a New Jersey girl visited Last Stop and accidentally killed Charles Vacca, a 39-year-old father of four, little has changed in the nation’s tourist-oriented machine gun ranges. Last Stop’s range, which receives 100 to 200 visitors a week, is one of about a dozen places in the Las Vegas area that offer machine gun adventures.

Firing Range Accident Kills Instructor

“I promised that one day I would bring them to fire guns,” Mr. Nárdiz said just after his children had used automatic weapons to pound bullets into a dirt-packed berm. “So I looked on the Internet, and I found this place. Everyone spoke very highly of it. And the truth is that it’s fantastic.”

Mr. Vacca’s death on Aug. 25 prompted a brief but impassioned conversation: Should Arizona and other states continue to allow children to fire automatic weapons? A video of the girl and the gun in the moments before Mr. Vacca’s death — she wore pink shorts and a ponytail — helped fuel the debate.

This summer, the owner of Last Stop placed the blame squarely on his employee, saying that while Mr. Vacca had been a beloved instructor, he had died because he broke a company rule by standing next to the girl, not behind her. The power of the gun in the hands of a preteen, the owner said, was not to blame.

“We operate at the highest — a higher level of safety than most of the gun ranges I’ve visited all over the world,” said the owner, Sam Scarmardo, 63. Since Mr. Vacca’s death, he said, “there really wasn’t an awful lot of safety improvement.”

Workers at several Las Vegas ranges said they still allowed children to shoot, noting that they had long worked with young people and were well equipped to do so. The Range 702 in Las Vegas, for example, allows people ages 10 and up to shoot and has benches that instructors can adjust to different heights.

Last Stop is a gas station and burger joint near the Nevada border. Mr. Scarmardo added the range in 2013, and it is associated with a company called Bullets and Burgers that picks up families and party groups at Las Vegas hotels and brings them here to shoot guns and then enjoy a hamburger and a beer. The company promises visitors a “Desert Storm atmosphere” and the opportunity to shoot “the actual firearms” used in movies like “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

To many visitors, the experience is as quintessentially American as a roller-coaster ride at Disney World or a boat tour at Niagara Falls.

“This is the American dream, right?” said Daniel Calvo, 31, a Spanish tourist who had just sent a burst of bullets flying as five friends in flip-flops and shorts cheered him on. “The guns, the trip to the Grand Canyon, the trip to Las Vegas.”

After Mr. Vacca’s death, a sheriff’s investigation ruled the killing an accident, and an inspection of the range by the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health found only violations it deemed minor, like failing to train an employee in the safe use of work-related chemicals.

Mr. Scarmardo said he had decided after the accident to raise the age requirement for shooting to 12, from 9, though employees are allowed to waive that rule when they deem a child large and mature enough to handle a powerful weapon.

“If you’ve got a kid who is five feet tall and as mature as a 25-year-old, he can shoot,” Mr. Scarmardo said.

He added that children were typically restricted to using M16s or belt-fed guns that rest on a table or other surface, though a range employee later said he was unaware of that rule.

Nearly all instructors have military experience and receive two weeks of training before they can assist clients. Tourists receive a safety briefing of five to 10 minutes before they pull a trigger.

After Mr. Vacca’s death, legislators in at least two states, Arizona and Louisiana, tried to pass laws that would have set a minimum age for handling an automatic weapon. Both efforts failed. State Representative Victoria Steele, a Democrat who proposed the Arizona bill, said her colleagues would not consider supporting a bill that restricted gun use, fearing a backlash from the National Rifle Association.

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have laws that restrict firearm use by children in some way, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

In the days after Mr. Vacca’s death, his children released a video in which they forgave the girl, who had come here with her parents and brother. In their first statement since the video, the children — Ashley, 20, Elizabeth, 16, Tylor, 15, and Christopher, 12 — said through lawyers that they wanted legislation that would set age minimums for using automatic weapons.

“They say over and over again: We don’t want this to happen again,” said Marc Lamber, a lawyer for the Vacca family. “What do we need to do to stop this from happening again?”

The family has decided not to sue the range or the girl, he said, choosing to focus on changing the law. “Children shouldn’t be firing automatic weapons,” Mr. Lamber added. “It’s just a matter of common sense.” The parents of the girl, identified by police as the MacLachlans, declined to comment.

On a recent weekday, Mr. Calvo, one of the Spanish tourists, was surprised to learn from a reporter that Last Stop was the scene of the killing he had heard about last year. One of his friends, Samuel Pueyo, 29, said: “Shooting is fine as an experience, but for adults — not for children. It’s not ethical for a child.”

But Mr. Nárdiz said he felt very safe, and his children, Jon and Toni, agreed.

“Oh, my God,” Jon said, rattling off the names of the guns he had fired: the MP5, the M4. “At the beginning it was a little scary, but it was so much fun.”