When Ethan Crumbley, a troubled 15-year-old, shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in Oxford, Michigan, he was charged with terrorism and murder. In an unprecedented step, the prosecutor, Karen McDonald, also indicted Crumbley’s parents for involuntary manslaughter, arguing that they should have known their son was a danger to his school and should have revealed that he had access to a handgun that was an early Christmas gift from them and stored in an unlocked locker in their bedroom.
Just days after the shooting, Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, posted a photo with each of his seven-person family brandishing a firearm. The caption ended with: “P.S. Santa, please bring ammo.” The congressman assumed that celebrating Christmas — literally, the mass celebrating the birth of Christ — with this macho display would surely bolster his political prospects.
The Michigan indictments challenge what has become a gun-slinging culture. We’ve gone from a constitutional amendment protecting the rights of an “organized militia” to bear arms, to a gun lobby pushing to dismantle any limits on gun ownership. Children are being raised in homes like Massie’s, where guns are not just owned to hunt animals but collected, stored and celebrated as protection against the “other.”
The Oxford attack was the deadliest U.S. school shooting since May 2018, when eight students and two teachers were shot at Santa Fe High School in Texas. According to CNN, there have been 48 school shootings this year.
Should we hold parents responsible for the terrorist acts of their children? Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, carried an AR-15 — a weapon of war — to protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, without being held responsible. Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. The gun was purchased for him by a 20-year-old friend. His mother took her son to a bar, where he was photographed with members of the right-wing Proud Boys. Despite reports to the contrary, she apparently didn’t know that her son had gone to Kenosha.
Gregory McMichael enlisted his 35-year-old son, Travis McMichael, to hunt down and murder Ahmaud Arbery for the crime of jogging through their neighborhood while Black. The father wasn’t a constraint on the son; he was the instigator of the chase. But, of course, Travis, at 35, was an adult able to make his own decisions.
In the Oxford case, the prosecutor indicted the parents because “the facts of this case are so egregious.” Ethan’s parents were called to the school when a teacher found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot, a laughing emoji and the words “Blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
His parents dismissed any concern that their son might be a danger to his classmates. They did not reveal that he had access to a gun that they had just given him. They refused to take him out of school. They didn’t ask their son if he had the gun on him and didn’t search his backpack. A few hours later, he took his gun from that backpack and started shooting.
I have no idea if the parent’s will be found guilty. A jury will sort it out.
What I do know is that homes are where values are forged. Children are not born racist. They are taught those values. The children of southern plantation owners weren’t born to assume that children with dark skin were less than human. They had to be taught those values and the accompanying behavior.
Children who assume guns can be the answer to their pain aren’t born with that assumption. The culture, and most of all the lessons they learn at home, teach them that.
We need to challenge the celebration of vigilantes and gun-slinging, the laws that allow people to march with weapons of war down the street, and the culture that worships guns even in the hands of children. The unspeakable deaths of children won’t stop unless we crack down on those responsible for providing them with guns.
That’s true in our cities, where gangs, guns and drugs make simply going to school a life-and-death risk. It is true in rural communities and affluent suburbs, where alienated or troubled children, often acting alone, have easy access to guns. Sensible gun laws can help. Communities can mobilize to teach. Most of all, however, we need parents and families to teach values and reinforce behavior that challenges the gun-slinger culture.
We started with a romantic image of a man teaching his son how to hunt. We’ve ended with legislators sending out Christmas cards displaying their whole family armed with weapons. And with a troubled 15-year-old using a handgun to kill four classmates and wound seven.
Parents are responsible for the example they set and for what they teach their children.
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
