Tag: school shootings
Parents Who Arm Troubled Kids Finally Face Justice

Parents Who Arm Troubled Kids Finally Face Justice

Her blank face in court spoke volumes. Jennifer Crumbley saw no problem handing her severely depressed 15-year-old a semiautomatic handgun as a Christmas present. Ethan soon after turned the gun on the student body of Oxford High, killing four.

What makes this case both chilling and sickening is that Ethan had telegraphed his rapid unravelling, and his mother ignored it. He told her there was a demon in the house. He sent her desperate text messages that she did not address: Jennifer was reportedly off tending to her horses and a secretive six-month affair.

The school called in both parents to discuss a violent drawing Ethan had made in math class. It showed a bleeding person and a gun and the words "blood everywhere" and "the thoughts won't stop" and "help me" on a math sheet.

The parents failed to tell the school he had a gun. And they refused to take him home. They had jobs, you know.

When the school told the parents that Ethan was found searching online for ammunition, Jennifer sent her boy a supportive text. It read: "LOL (laughing out loud), I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught."

Jennifer failed to impress the jury with praise of her parenting skills and her sweet descriptions of family Thanksgiving dinners. She blamed Ethan's father for not properly storing the weapon, but that also didn't get her off the hook.

Jennifer was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison. Her husband will soon be tried.

What is going on? Americans have always owned guns for hunting, sport or self-defense. But today's politicized gun mania has turned deadly firearms into toys for children or fashion accessories.

There was that famous case of the 6-year-old who shot his elementary school teacher in Newport News, Virginia. His mother was sentenced to two years in prison for child neglect. How on earth did a first grader get access to a loaded gun? It was lying around the house.

The gun obsession played a part in the horrific 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 27 innocents dead. The killer's divorced mother, Nancy Lanza, would go to bars at night bragging to the guys about her guns. Despite son Adam's history of serious mental illness, she left the firearms strewn around their house. Today a jury probably would have locked her up and thrown away the key — had Adam not murdered her first.

Other lonely women have been known to seek company by making common cause with the male-dominated gun fixation. In Oregon, Laurel Harper participated in gun forums, alternating her topics between descriptions of her son's mental illness and her gun collection.

She probably expected pats on the head when she told the fellas, "I keep two full mags in my Glock case. And the ARs and AKs (semiautomatics) all have loaded mags." Wildly clueless, she criticized "lame states" that put limits on loaded firearms in the home.

Her son Christopher Harper-Mercer had been involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. He brought six guns to Umpqua Community College in Roseburg and slaughtered 10 people. After the massacre, Laurel told detectives that Christopher was "mad at the world."

Are parents who keep unsecured loaded weapons in homes shared with disturbed or very young children themselves mentally off? The argument can be made. But if police removed arms from adults without criminal records, the gun lobby would go crazy.

Legal experts see the Crumbley case as the first to directly hold parents culpable for giving a child who turns guns on others access to weapons. But where did these parents come from?

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Do Republicans Really Want To End School Shootings? Not That Much

Do Republicans Really Want To End School Shootings? Not That Much

Before the next mass shooting, which is likely to occur tomorrow, someone should mention what is most obvious and disturbing about America's endless gun safety debate. Congressional Republicans are unwilling to restrict their constituents' access to assault weapons, even though they know that means many more innocent children (and adults) will die.

Or to put it even more bluntly, Republicans block sensible gun legislation because they are perfectly willing to sacrifice little kids in order to protect the most extreme interpretation of "Second Amendment rights." When Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). asked at a recent hearing whether his Republican colleagues were there to protect "the kids or the killers," they fumed in outrage. But they had no honest answer to his question.

Instead, Republicans offer a continuous stream of irrelevant and pointless "solutions" that will do nothing to stem the tidal wave of bloodshed. They yammer about mental health, as if they've ever been willing to fund adequate access to psychological services — and as if the mentally ill are a principal source of gun violence, which is assuredly untrue. They vow to "harden schools," and to check the locks on school doors every week, as if that would prevent a shooter from getting inside — or stop a shooter who lurks outside a school building when classes end.

They will pontificate ad nauseam about anything and everything except the kind of gun laws that could mitigate the slaughter.

While the Republicans and their sponsors in the gun lobby try to distract us from plain facts, the prevention of mass shootings is not mysterious or arcane. Exceptionally clear data show that banning the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines tends to prevent mass shootings.

When President Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats passed an assault-weapons ban in 1994, mass shootings declined; when that ban expired 10 years later, mass shootings increased. Millions of those weapons of war were already in private hands when the ban commenced, so the decline in mass shootings was gradual — but when the ban ended, skyrocketing sales of the AR-15 and similar rifles initiated a very robust resumption of carnage.

Last year, a team of researchers at Northwestern University's School of Medicine again examined the history of the assault-weapons ban. They eliminated a source of confusion about the law by looking only at mass shootings — incidents resulting in the deaths of four or more people — rather than all gun deaths, as prior studies had done.

According to Dr. Lori Ann Post, who led that 2021 study (and who happens to belong to the National Rifle Association), their review found that "if you prevent the access to assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and semi-automatic or rapid-fire guns, it prevents the actual incident itself... people don't even go out and do a mass shooting in the absence of an assault rifle."

The study found that during the ban, its provisions prevented at least 11 mass shootings and that had it continued, another 30 such incidents would have been prevented. Post also remarked that "purchase of the assault weapon is often the final step in the preparation and execution of a mass shooting," an observation confirmed again this week when a perp bought his AR-15 just hours before going into a Tulsa hospital to kill his doctor and three others.

The Republican deniers may scoff at the 1994 ban, citing cherry-picked data to claim it didn't work. They may point out, correctly, that mass shootings represent a very small percentage of gun deaths. But in the meantime, we have seen several major industrial countries that legislated weapons bans after horrific school shootings and similar bloody tragedies.

The results of that gigantic, worldwide social experiment are undeniable: Those countries suffer a tiny fraction of the mass shootings that now occur here constantly.

Bear in mind that other industrialized nations endure all the same conflicts that afflict us. Their populations include platoons of alienated boys, frustrated men, hateful racists and seething lunatics of all sorts. Yet in those places, dangerous men don't have easy access to weapons that kill many people very quickly.

So, let's stop pretending that we don't know how to stop mass shootings — and let's also stop pretending that Republican legislators who oppose gun regulation actually care about saving our kids from those atrocities. They don't.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

joe biden guns

Biden: School Shooting Victims Deserve More Than 'Thoughts and Prayers'

In a video on Dec. 14, President Joe Biden spoke directly to the families of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School nine years ago, saying the nation owed families of mass shootings "more than our prayers. We owe them action."

"No matter how long it's been, every one of those families relives the news they got that day," Biden said in the video. "Twenty precious first-graders, six heroic educators, a lone gunman, and an unconscionable act of violence. Everything changed that morning for you. And the nation was shocked."

A gunman killed 20 first-grade students and six educators inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012. The 20-year-old shooter, Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their Newtown home before the massacre, then killed himself as police arrived at the school.

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called for flags to be lowered to half-staff across the state Tuesday in remembrance of the 26 people killed inside the school.

"We will never forget the twenty innocent children and six devoted educators whose lives were taken all too soon that terrible morning," said Lamont, a Democrat.

Biden said it was one of the "saddest days" he and former President Barack Obama had in office. Biden said he found hope in the strength of the families and felt they could pass meaningful reform, but it came up frustratingly short."

And it's still frustrating now, for you and me and so many others," he said, citing other mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and recently in Oxford, Michigan. "In countless communities across the country there's these horrific shootings and make national headlines and embarrass us as a nation."

He said such shootings happen all the time, particularly in communities of color, and there is no mention in the news.

"As a nation, we owe all these families more than our prayers, we owe them action," he said.

Biden pointed to executive action he's taken to stop the spread of so-called ghost guns and promote safe firearms storage. He also hopes communities use some of the money from the massive spending plan to help end gun violence.

A senior White House official said Biden shared frustrations expressed by many gun violence prevention groups that Congress is acting too slowly to implement new gun legislation. The official also pointed to the administration's multifaceted approach to preventing gun violence from enforcement to addressing systemic and root causes.

So far, Justice Department strike forces focusing on gun trafficking corridors in several cities — part of the administration's comprehensive approach to combat surging gun violence — have led to the recovery of about 2,000 crime guns, the official said.

The White House withdrew its nomination in September of gun-control advocate David Chipman to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after he ran into bipartisan opposition in the Senate. His nomination had stalled for months and he was widely seen as one of the administration's most contentious nominees.

The official said the administration is also working to identify another "highly qualified nominee" to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

But the official said the Biden administration was still doing all it can, even without a confirmed ATF director, to reduce gun violence. The official wasn't authorized to speak publicly and spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also spoke of the measures Congress is trying to enact.

"Nearly a decade after Newtown, an average of over 100 Americans are being killed by gun violence every day, shattering families and terrorizing communities across the country," she said.

"In the memory of all those we have lost, and strengthened by our survivors' hopeful spirit, let us renew our resolve to build a world free from gun violence, so that every child may grow up safe, secure and able to reach their fulfillment."

Article reprinted with permission from The American Independent