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. 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 their early Christmas gift to him.

The unspeakable deaths of children won’t stop unless we crack down on those responsible for providing them with guns, whether by commission or by negligence.

Just days after the school shooting, Rep Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, posted a family photo with each member of his seven-person family brandishing a rifle, with a caption ending in “p.s. Santa, please bring ammo.” The congressman must have assumed that celebrating Christmas—literally the mass celebrating the birth of Christ—by this macho display would bolster his political prospects.

The Michigan indictments challenge what has become a gun-slinging culture. Children are being raised in homes like Massie’s where guns are not simply owned to hunt animals but collected 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 the Santa Fe High School in Texas. According to CNN, there have been 48 K-12 shootings, 32 of them since August.

Should we hold parents responsible for the terrorist acts of their children? Kyle Rittenhouse, aged 17, carried an AR-15 with 30 rounds—a weapon of war—to the protests in Kenosha that turned violent after a white police officer shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, a Black man, without being held responsible. Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He was carrying a gun purchased for him by a 20-year-old friend. His mother, a single mother struggling to raise 3 children, took her son to a bar, where he was photographed with members of the right-wing Proud Boys. Despite internet reports to the contrary, she apparently didn’t know that her son had gone to Kenosha.

In the Oxford case, the prosecutor moved to indict the parents because “the facts of this case are so egregious.” On the day of the shooting, Ethan’s parents were called urgently to the school when one of his teachers 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 concerns 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 for the day. They didn’t ask their son if he had the gun on him and didn’t bother to 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. Michigan has no law requiring that guns be stored safely locked and with ammunition separated from the weapons. A jury will sort the facts out.

What I do know is that homes are where values are forged. Children are not born to be racist or nationalist. They are taught those values. The children of southern plantation owners weren’t born to assume that children with dark skins are less than human. They had to be taught those values. Children who assume guns can be the answer to their pain aren’t born with that assumption.

We need to challenge the celebration of vigilantes and gun-slinging, the laws that allow people to march with weapons of war down the streets of our communities, 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, whether by commission or by negligence. That’s true in our cities and in our rural communities and affluent suburbs. Sensible laws can help. Communities can mobilize to teach. Most of all, 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 and shoot a deer with a rifle. We’ve ended with legislators sending out Christmas cards displaying their whole family armed with everything from assault weapons to shotguns. And with a troubled 15-year-old, with a handgun holding 30 rounds, killing four and wounding 7 of his classmates. This murderous culture cannot be allowed to fester. And parents, whether held criminally responsible if an act of terror is committed or not, are responsible for the example they set and for what they teach their children at home.

Help keep the site running, consider supporting.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Thomas Massie had a larger gun than the typical assault rifle. It looked like a machine gun, possibly a .50 caliber. I don’t have a lot of words, besides the fact I think this article is spot-on the issue. Parents need to be responsible gun owners and teach their children the same. The problem is too many parents behave like children themselves.

  2. In the back of my head, I’m hearing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”: “When I was a baby, my mama told me ‘Son/Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.'” Damn shame how that applies more than ever.

  3. In both the Massie and Boebert Christmas photos, they are not holding rifles. They’re holding automatic weapons – weapons made for the sole purpose of killing humans. Sick, sick, sick.

  4. You know, all these articles moaning about Massie, Bobo, etc. using firearms as their xmas message are kind of weird. As someone on the outside, not x-tian, this is exactly what we’ve always seen from x-tians. Sure, the weapons used are more in line with the times but we’ve seen (and experienced) mostly violence from x-tians. In our minds, xmas pics with morons displaying guns is quite frankly what WE expect.

    Put simply, if there ever was a message of peace from the human x-tians call “messiah”, it was lost a very, very long time ago…almost 2,000 years ago in fact.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

The maximum upload file size: 128 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here