Monthly Gun Debate Update - April 2024
Parents, Did You Know...
I went to The Los Angeles Times Book Festival this past weekend at USC here in LA.
The 10:30 AM graphic novel event with Sammy Harkham (Blood of the Virgin), EM Carroll (A Guest In The House), and Katie Skelly (The Agency) was at capacity.
But the 10:30 AM panel that same day about books about the gun debate was open.
I went last year and greatly enjoyed hearing and then reading and having my graphic novel SHOULD WE BUY A GUN? influenced by books by Ryan Busse (Gunfight), Jennifer Carlson (Merchants of the Right), and Mark Follman (Trigger Points).
This year I had already read one of the two books on the panel, American Gun, by Cameron McWhirter (and Zusha Elinson), about the AR-15, while Exit Wounds, by leva Jusionyte, about the effect of American guns on Central America, had just come out.
But I was also intrigued to see that the third panelist was Rob Bonta who is the California State Attorney General.
And even more intrigued when during the Q+A, a guest asked a question about the subject I planned to write about for this month’s gun debate update, which is that…
Parents, Did You Know…
On April 9th, 2024.
For the first time in the country.
Parents were tried and convicted over the deaths caused by their child in a mass shooting.
Jennifer and James Crumbley’s involuntary manslaughter convictions set a new legal precedent for failing to prevent their teenage son from killing four fellow students in the deadliest school shooting in Michigan’s history, and they were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison, respectively.
“Parents are not expected to be psychic,” Judge Cheryl Matthews of the Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac, Mich., said about the sentence.
“But these convictions are not about poor parenting. These convictions confirm repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train — repeatedly ignoring things that would make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up.”
In the trials of both parents, prosecutors focused in part on their failure to remove their son from school after he made a violent drawing on the morning of the shooting. It included a written plea for help.
They also emphasized Ethan’s access to a handgun that Mr. Crumbley had purchased. And they said that Ms. Crumbley had missed signs that her son was struggling with his mental health, adding that she took him to a gun range just days before the shooting.
When I read the news my overactive imagination immediately thought of the plot of the movie We Need To Talk About Kevin?
It starred Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller in 2011 and was based on a book about what to do if your child grows up to be a sociopath you can’t stop?
I could be wrong.
I’m not a parent.
But currently…
Every parent’s worst nightmare might be that their child is killed in a mass shooting.
Their even worse nightmare perhaps is that it is their child that does the killing.
And it is now perhaps an even worse nightmare that they will also be convicted for such a thing.
As The New York Times reports, for Matthew Schneider, a former United States attorney in Michigan, what makes this case so different from many others is that most criminal sentences are related to the actions of a defendant, rather than being “about inactions, and how the inactions of a person result in a criminal sentence.”
For their part, one of the parents said: “I cannot express how much I wish that I had known what was going on with him or what was going to happen, because I absolutely would have done a lot of things differently.”
And defense lawyers for both parents said they could not have foreseen the unspeakable violence their son would commit.
Ekow Yankah, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said the effect of the ruling on Tuesday might be felt beyond the state.
“This is going to be precedent, most obviously in Michigan and its home jurisdiction, but prosecutors all over the country will see this as a new and viable form of liability,” Mr. Yankah said. “I think we should not underestimate the precedential power of this case, even as we recognize that the facts were quite extraordinary.”
And the guest at the LA Times Book Festival event who asked the California State Attorney General whether California would also be adopting similar legal precedents seemed to have a similar concern.
I filmed and posted Bonta’s response:
Bonta essentially said he believes there should be some limits on this new precedent.
There shouldn’t be complete liability for parents.
But there should also be some standards parents have to meet.
And he does think it’s a pathway for a helpful approach to curbing mass shootings.
Who Else *is* Liable?…schools?
What’s also interesting about this case is who is not held liable.
And who else could be as well.
For one, the school and its administrators.
The reporting portrays the case as a situation where the school reported to the parents that their child was troubled.
On the morning of the Nov. 30 shooting, she said, the suspect’s parents were urgently called into the high school after one of his teachers found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot and a laughing emoji, and the words, “Blood everywhere,” and, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
But the school appears to not have insisted on removing the child against the parents’ wishes either.
And its administrators did not use any legal tactics like “red flag” laws to try to immediately remove weapons from the family environment.
(Partly because they were unable to until 2023/2024 when Michigan became the 21st state to pass and then effect them).
In this extraordinary case.
It seems the family’s gun was already at school on the day the school asked the parents to remove their child.
But the school and its administrators missed that too.
Which could make them liable as well…???
Who Else *is* Liable? …gun manufacturers?
And yet, you could argue, the most egregious responsible party left unaccountable for negligence in this situation, as well as so many others, are the gun manufacturers themselves.
Which often have liability protections in many states.
However, there are now court cases progressing and new precedent settings that aim to change that lack of liability.
And this may be a topic of a separate monthly gun debate update soon…
Liable, Etymology of
Some people know that I’m incredibly fascinated by etymology and have been planning to write a book The Spirituality and Comedy of Etymology.
I find etymology helps when I get to a sticking point in thinking through something.
I often look at a word involved.
Its etymology sometimes loosens up associations of new ways of thinking about it all.
For this situation, one word is Liable.
mid-15c., "bound or obliged by law," from Old French lier, liier "to bind, tie up, fasten, tether; bind by obligation" (12c.), from Latin ligare "to bind, to tie" (from PIE root *leig- "to tie, bind"). With -able.
Another word related is Judgement.
Alejandro Jodorowsky points out that in French.
When you separate the two words juge and ment.
You get in that language the “judge” “lies”.
As if to say any judgment of humans by humans is false.
And only really up to God.
Another proposed etymology for the word liable says it is Anglo-French that in a general sense means “exposed to (something undesirable).”
As if to say all rulings of liability are also false.
Because we have all decided to “expose ourselves to something undesirable.”
To “bind” or “obligate” ourselves to live in a society with these weapons.
That both.
Make us the most protected and empowered country in the world.
And.
Also make us and others potential victims to ourselves and others.
In other words/no words…
And in other/more fun news…
Thank you to Dan Lerman and Kim Solow for hosting a reading of my The Yada Yada Haggadah this week for their Passover Seder!
They also host a Backyard Comedy Series every last Thursday of the month in Larchmont including tonight, Thursday, April 25th at 7:30 PM!
Thanks for reading April’s Monthly Gun Debate Update!
