James and Jennifer Crumbley face four counts of involuntary manslaughter each after their son, Ethan, killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021.
Ethan Crumbley was 15 when he opened fire at his suburban Detroit high school in November 2021, armed with a semi-automatic handgun that his parents helped purchase as an early Christmas present.
The rampage left four students dead and several others injured, shattering the close-knit community of Oxford, Michigan, and resulting last month in a life sentence without parole for Crumbley, who was charged as an adult and pleaded guilty to two dozen counts, including for murder and terrorism.
Now, scrutiny falls on the teenager’s parents.
In a rare attempt to hold the parents of a school shooter criminally responsible, James Crumbley, 47, and his wife, Jennifer, 45, are each facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter and will be tried separately, with a trial set to open with jury selection in Oakland County on Tuesday.
Now I get that I’m a European and so my views on this are a little different than maybe the average American, but seriously what 15-year-old needs a semi automatic for their birthday?
Hell what 15-year-old needs a gun at all.
If I had a kid and they showed a genuine interest in guns, I’d surely start them off with something like a pistol, not go all the way up to military grade instantly.
semi-automatic doesn’t equate to military grade. It is a pistol. it just has the feature that chambers a bullet as the shell is expelled.
A pistol is much more highly regulated than a semi-automatic rifle in almost every country, and for good reason: a pistol is a semi automatic weapon that’s very easy to conceal.
Semi automatic means everytime you pull the trigger a bullet is fired. It’s very standard for hunting and target shooting. A pistol itself is a semi automatic weapon and much easier to conceal.
There are definitely large aesthetic differences between a basic hunting rifle and “militarized” semi automatic weapons, but the actual mechanism and result are fundamentally identical. I’m not saying aesthetics don’t matter though since it gives the gun a different “purpose”.
Other than semi automatic you have “single action” which is when you pull the trigger to shoot, but then you have to physically move a mechanism to reset the gun before you can shoot again. Mostly common in shotguns and some rifles. There is also fully automatic which fires multiple rounds as long as you hold the trigger down.
Pistol would be a tricky choice too, easier to conceal, and more than most pistols are also semi automatic. Bolt action small caliber would be a decent start I’d say.
I agree with you, but the logic (if you could call it that at this point) is that long guns are for hunting whereas pistols are much more concealable. Of course they didn’t feel the need to specify a difference between hunting rifles and 30-round semiauto so… Yeah. Murica I guess.
Just to be clear, nearly every (edit: modern) handgun you’ve ever seen, pistols included, is almost certainly a semi-automatic. I’m sure there are exceptions, but AFAIK, any (edit: modern) handgun that’s not a revolver (or something weird like a derringer) is going to be semi-auto.
As someone who grew up around guns (but is not currently a gun owner), and if I planned to buy my child a gun prior to adulthood, I probably would start my kid with a BB gun at a younger age, then likely a revolver before going to semi-auto, but I wouldn’t feel like either of those are choices that are the only safe ones. (If we’ve cleared the hurdle of considering a 15 year old owning a gun to be safe at all.)
Revolver: