The United States has more firearms than citizens, and increasingly those weapons end up in the hands of disturbed youth determined to carry out deadly rampages. It doesn’t have to be that way.
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The United States has more firearms than citizens, and increasingly those weapons end up in the hands of disturbed youth determined to carry out deadly rampages. It doesn’t have to be that way.
It is a story that has become tragically familiar in the United States: On November 30, Ethan Crumbley, a 15-year-old student, opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan. Four of his classmates were killed and several others were critically and seriously injured, making it the deadliest shooting of the year to date, and Michigan’s deadliest of all time.
While Crumbley was charged with one count of terrorism and four counts of first-degree murder, guaranteeing the young man a lifetime behind bars, the case was different in that prosecutors went one step further – they decided to file involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents. In November, James and Jennifer Crumbley purchased the semiautomatic handgun that their son used in the deadly shooting spree as “an early Christmas gift.”
Many clues indicating that the boy was considering carrying out an act of violence went unheeded.
According to the authorities, when the mother was informed by the school administration that her son was searching on the internet for ammunition, she sent a text message to him that read: “LOL, I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”
On the very day of the massacre, school officials told the suspect’s parents that they were required to seek counseling for their son. However, the teenager’s parents refused to have their son removed from school on the day of the carnage, and failed to inquire whether he had the gun with him.
“The notion that a parent [knew that] their son had access to a deadly weapon, that they gave him, is unconscionable and I think it’s criminal,” remarked local prosecutor Karen D. McDonald, as quoted by The New York Times.
James and Jennifer Crumbley have both been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter charges, an offense that carries a prison sentence of up to 15 years.
Some people may find that harsh, but the punishment pales in comparison with the anguish that comes from losing a child in an act of senseless violence. While parents should assume some moral and legal responsibility for the criminal behavior of the children, there is still much more that needs to be done to prevent these outrageous crimes from happening in the first place. But the political battlefield has made finding a solution very difficult.
Gun violence has become an ugly fixture of American life, and one that is politically charged with anti-gun advocates squaring off against people who are fiercely protective of the Second Amendment. Last year, 48 percent of Republicans reported that they owned at least one gun, and 66 percent said that they lived in a household with a gun. In comparison, only 20 percent of Democrats owned at least one gun, and 31 percent lived a gun household.
Meanwhile, last year alone, there were 650 mass shootings across the U.S., according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are wounded or killed. Their figures include shootings that occur in private residences and in public places.
The deadliest such carnage, which occurred in Las Vegas in 2017 during a concert, left more than 50 people dead and 500 wounded. The majority of mass shootings, however, leave fewer than 10 people dead.
How to stop the bloodshed? Making parents pay a legal price for the murderous behavior of their children is a step in the right direction, but much more needs to be done.
Where to begin? Mandatory mental examinations before purchasing a firearm seems logical, and should include any children living in the home. Unsurprisingly, a 2021 study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology found that many mass shooters in the United States were living with an untreated mental illness at the time they committed their crime.
The paper showed that people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses are actually less violent than the rest of the population – except when they’re unmedicated. Mass shooters are oftentimes people with psychiatric illnesses who are in need of treatment. This simple fact, however, conflicts with the legacy media narrative that the majority of mass shooters are instead zealots who are deeply devoted to some political screed, like White supremacism, which inspires the shooters to carry out their massacres. Thus, mental illness is rarely brought into the national conversation.
Seeing past our political prejudices will be a necessary part of getting the United States to keep the safety lock on its vast trove of firearms. In the meantime, the legal system should continue to penalize parents over their children’s criminal behavior.
