lol not mad at you
We’re way more like the Axis than we are like the Allies.
The parents of Michigan school shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley have each been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter connected to the horrific Nov. 30 attack that left four teens dead and seven people injured, including a teacher.
It’s unusual to hold parents of “school shooters” (how lovely that we have a file name for it) responsible; there are reasons.
“Any individual that had the opportunity to stop this tragedy should have done so. The question is what did they know, and when did they know it,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said Friday.
McDonald said that on Nov. 21, a teacher at Oxford High observed Ethan searching for ammunition on his cell phone during class, and reported it to school officials. Administrators left a voicemail for Jennifer Crumbley and followed up with an email, but received no response. Jennifer then texted Ethan, saying, “lol I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,” McDonald said.
On the morning of the shooting, Ethan’s teacher was “alarmed” by a drawing he made of a handgun, with the text: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” He had also had drawn a bullet with the words: “Blood everywhere.”
When alerts went out about a possible active shooter at Oxford High School, Jennifer texted her son, “Ethan, don’t do it,” McDonald said.
“Upon hearing there was an active shooter that day, James Crumbley went straight to his home to look for his gun,” she explained.
He didn’t find it, so he called 911 to say his son could be the shooter.
James Crumbley purchased the 9mm Sig Sauer handgun on Black Friday, four days before the shooting, and Ethan had flaunted it on his social media profiles, authorities said.
As if “Black Friday” were some official or meaningful label as opposed to a marketing ploy. Eat that turkey, spend that money, shoot that gun.
The police found two videos in which the kid talked about shooting up the school, and a journal in which he wrote about it. Organized and helpful.
He pleaded not guilty though.
Sure, Black Friday started ot as a marketing ploy, but by now it’s surely a cultural significant day — as you say, “a meaningful label”. A day to worship at the altar of the gods of consumerism. No? Though it would be interesting if it would further evolve into a day to buy firearms and then commit school shootings the next week.
Here in Washington state, it is now (FINALLY) the law that if one owns a gun but does not secure it (with such a thing as a trigger lock or in a safe), and if someone takes it and uses it to commit a crime, then the gun owner is criminally liable if the absence of the gun is not reported to the police within five days of it being taken. The idea is that the gun owners have to try to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And that is actually a novel enough thing that it is essentially brand new, having been passed into law as a citizen’s initiative* only three years ago after years of trying to get the legislature to do the same thing.
*I-1639, for anyone wishing to go a-googling for the actual provisions. “If your firearm is not in secure storage, and you knew or reasonably should have known that the firearm could be accessed by someone who is prohibited from possessing a firearm, such as a child, under some circumstances you may be charged with a crime.”
So it seems that the parents had some inkling that their son might go off and shoot up the school, and yet the father bought the gun and either gave it to his son, or left it somewhere where his son could easily find it.
Either way, the parents ought to bear at least as much, if not more, of the guilt.
…and this is exactly the sort of thinking that ought to apply to something like the Rittenhouse case (going forward).
5 DAYS to report a missing weapon? FFS, what’s the point in that law?
Parents are now on the lam. Not a good move.
Roj@5:
A lot of people don’t use their guns very often; it’s not like they are checking on them every day. The idea was if one was robbed by strangers, then there is a grace period to take inventory and see what is actually missing. However, the five-day limit wouldn’t apply in this case, had it happened here in Washington. If one knows that a child in the home a danger to themselves or others or has a reasonable belief, as the parents did in this case obviously did, then the firearm has to be locked down and not accessible to the child at all and there is no grace period, for reasons that are all too obvious.
James Garnett, my father kept his guns locked in a gun cabinet to which only he and my mother had a key. Since he hid his key somewhere in the house (we all figured out where), it wasn’t too big a deal for my brother to get one of his guns. My father spotted it that day because the gun cabinet was where he would see it every day, and he had them put in there in such a way that one missing would be noticed. He did not keep them loaded, and he kept them locked up. Neither situation ever put us in danger from outsiders, and there was no extreme amount of work on his part.
If a person is going to own guns, they need to check on them, and know where they are. They need to know that their problem teenager does not have access to them. They need to know when one is missing. In five days, a lot of damage can be done with that missing gun, and a lot of people killed. I agree with Roj; whats the point of that law? It’s posturing without doing anything substantive.
iknklast@8:
So you never took family vacations? Never left the home for, say, a long weekend?
This “posturing”, “unsubstantive” law has already had positive results in the state. The “problem teenager” in this story would not have triggered the five-day clause, as I previously mentioned. The parents would have been charged with a felony.
Just to clarify: the point of the law that I mentioned was not to prevent every school shooting and gun murder that might happen. The point was to encourage secure storage, and the hope is that if more guns are securely stored, then fewer will be stolen (since thieves are opportunistic), and hence fewer stolen guns will be used to commit crimes. From that standpoint, the law has been very successful, because educational programs are now teaching people not only that they must store their guns securely, but also exactly how to do that, and secure storage is increasing. The five-day reporting rule for stolen guns is there for the reason I mentioned: because not everyone is going to notice right away when one has been stolen. Maybe you took a long-deserved vacation and weren’t in town for nearly a week and someone broke in. Maybe you were away, caring for an elder (I was just away from home for four days, caring for an elder). Maybe you just don’t go into that downstairs room every day and didn’t notice that someone had pried open the garden-level window there. The five-day rule is meant to give well-meaning individuals a chance to make the report when they do realize it, without instantly being charged with a crime for an oversight that any normal person might make. What the rule doesn’t cover is if you know that you have a disturbed child who might misuse the gun and you leave them alone with it in a way that they can get to it. The instant they commit a crime with it, no matter how long between the time they stole the gun and committed the crime, you (the parent) would be guilty of a crime yourself (here in Washington). So it’s imperative that you keep them away from it.
Iknklast, I don’t know the exact situation of your childhood and how your parents stored the guns that they had. Your description sounds to me like you think they stored them carefully. However (and IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt), it is possible–perhaps even likely–that if you or your brother had taken one of those guns and committed a crime with it, then under current Washington law, your parents could have been criminally liable because they were _not_ stored securely. Hiding a key in a way that the kids all know how to get to it is not secure.
This is one way in which the law here is achieving good things: it’s teaching people what “secure” actually means, and that’s not obvious. Just because something uses a key to unlock it, for example, does not make it secure. Even certain steel safes that use keys or combinations are not secure; try a youtube search for “how easy it is breaking into a safe” and see what you find. An average person (man or woman) with a crowbar and an accomplice can get into most large un-anchored safes in about 90 seconds. This sort of stuff is taught to people here who take gun safety courses (as a result of the law mentioned), and those courses are recommended to anyone buying a gun.