When you become a parent, you instantly assume immense responsibility. When you are a parent in a household where a gun is stored, that responsibility meshes with heavy risk.
It’s up to parents to mitigate that risk, which boils down to a simple mandate. Make sure your child or teen cannot get to that gun, so that no harm can come to them or anyone else.
Based on the case being forged against James and Jennifer Crumbley, the couple failed horribly, tragically in that crucial mandate.
The 9 mm Sig Sauer semi-automatic handgun that authorities say Ethan Crumbley, 15, brandished when he shot to death four students at his Oxford, Michigan, high school was stored in an unlocked drawer in the bedroom of his parents. They had bought their son the gun on Black Friday as a Christmas gift, a weapon the teen called “My new beauty.”
The day before the shooting, when Jennifer Crumbley learned that a teacher saw Ethan searching online for ammunition, the 43-year-old mother seemed to react with indifference. “LOL I’m not mad at you,” she texted her son. Then, on the morning of the shooting, his parents were summoned to the high school. A teacher found a note Ethan Crumbley had drawn, with images of a gun, a person shot, a laughing emoji and the words, “Blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
When school officials showed the Crumbleys the note and requested that the parents take Ethan home for the day, the couple refused and returned to work. That afternoon, authorities say the 15-year-old went into a school bathroom with his backpack, took out the handgun, walked out and embarked on America’s latest school shooting horror.
Oakland County, Michigan, authorities have charged the Crumbleys with involuntary manslaughter for their alleged role in the deaths of the four students. They both have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Charging parents for the mayhem their child inflicted during a school shooting is virtually unheard of. It’s safe to say that prosecutors face an uphill climb convincing a jury that the Crumbleys are more than just bad parents — that their inaction rises to the level of criminal culpability. Not only will gross negligence have to be proved, but prosecutors will have to make the case that the Crumbleys’ negligence in permitting Ethan to have unfettered access to the gun directly led to the students’ deaths.
The strength of the case matters. But so does the impact the decision to charge has on all parents — especially those that store firearms in their homes.
Pursuing the case against the Crumbleys sends a powerful message to a country deeply frustrated by the never-ending nexus between children and guns. There’s nothing wrong with gun-owning parents, but there’s everything wrong with gun-owning parents who recklessly allow their children unsupervised access to guns at home.
One in three homes with children and teens contain firearms. Half of those households contain at least one firearm that is stored unlocked, and one out of five of those homes have a firearm that is both unlocked and loaded, according to survey results published in the Journal of Urban Health. That’s 4.6 million children living in homes in which at least one gun is stored loaded and unlocked.
America’s tragic legacy of school shootings is etched in our minds, from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado (1999, 15 dead), and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (2012, 27 dead), to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (2018, 17 dead), and Oxford High School today. But the toll inflicted by children’s access to guns stretches far beyond school settings.
Suicides have gone up by more than 80% among children and teens over the past decade, and 40% of those deaths involved firearms, according to the Society for Research in Child Development. When a child or teen has killed themselves with a gun, nine out of 10 times it has involved a gun from that youth’s home or a relative’s household. And consider this: In homes with firearms, the likelihood of death by shooting is four times higher, according to HealthyChildren.org. In the U.S. in 2020, there were at least 369 unintentional shootings by children, leading to 142 deaths and 242 injuries.
Such statistics should be enough to convince gun-owning parents to store firearms safely in their homes. They should also be enough to push lawmakers to enact tougher laws on gun storage and children’s access to firearms.
According to the gun safety advocacy group Giffords.org, 29 states, including Illinois, have so-called child-access prevention laws that impose liability on adults who allow children to have unsupervised access to guns. But the strength of those laws varies widely. California’s law, for example, criminally charges adults when a minor is likely to gain access to a gun negligently stored, even if the minor never picks up the gun. Illinois makes it illegal to store a firearm unlocked and accessible to a child under 14 if the gun owner knows that the child is likely to obtain the gun and kills or injures someone with the firearm. Michigan has no child-access prevention law of any kind.
For motivation to act, lawmakers in states with weak child access prevention laws, or no such law at all, can look to the unfathomable grief Ethan Crumbley caused among the students, staff and parents at Oxford High School. So can gun-owning parents who recklessly store in their homes guns not locked away, or that are loaded, or both. They can remind themselves of the names of the teenagers authorities say Ethan gunned down: Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14.
Those names alone should be reason enough for lawmakers and gun-owning parents to do the right thing.
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