Commercial ranges that rent machine guns do the same thing, they always have a range safety behind the shooter who rents a machine gun

This has not been my experience, but I also rent from that range off my VA ID.

The person shooting it is the ship's CO, who almost certainly doesn't own his own firearms, and is possibly qualified to shoot it, but is not trained

I'm just going to stop that sentence right there and add that most people don't realize that higher ranking commissioned officers generally don't know how to operate small arms anymore.

At the really high levels they stop being military and become politicians.