Keep Guns Away From Troubled Teens

Two years ago 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley shot and killed four students in his Michigan high school. He’s serving a life sentence without parole and now Jennifer Crumbley, his mother,  is also headed to prison for involuntary manslaughter. She’s reportedly the first parent held criminally responsible for a minor child’s mass shooting.

Good.

Parents like Ethan Crumbley’s are enemies of the Second Amendment. Gun grabbers use every mass shooting as an excuse to call for legal gun owners to lose their weapons, when so often negligent parents are the problem.

This mother not only neglected her mentally ill son, but she did so while she was engaging in an extra-marital affair. Yes, I am passing moral judgment. You get married, you fix your troubled marriage. You don’t go looking for side pieces. It never works out well and it requires the sort of energy that should best be spent on the nuclear family that you’re harming with your alley cat behavior.

While Mrs. Crumbley was preoccupied with affairs of the heart - or some other organ - her son sent powerful signals that he was struggling with schizophrenia and other mental disturbances.

What did his parents do? They tried to cheer him up. 

By buying him a gun.

Yes, Daddy Crumbley no doubt bears some of the blame for this too. His trial is next month. He could be getting a cell as well.

As a supporter of the 2nd Amendment, I am delighted by these prosecutions. I am irate every time I read about clueless parents supplying troubled teens with weapons or with failing to secure their own.

Anyone else remember the Richneck Elementary School shooting in Newport News two years ago? That made international news when a troubled first grader grabbed his mother’s handgun, brought it to school and shot his teacher. This kid was such a discipline problem  that adults had been required until just before the shooting to sit with him in class. After the shooting, his mother insisted her gun had been secured with a trigger lock.

Clearly, it wasn’t.

Deja Taylor, the mother of that 6-year-old, is in prison. She’s there not because she was responsible for the shooting, but for violating federal laws when she lied about being a drug user when buying  her handgun.

The horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut, where 26 people were shot and killed in 2012, was carried out by Adam Lanza, yet another mentally ill young man who’d suffered from anxiety, OCD, Asperger’s syndrome and assorted other mental disorders from a very young age. The shooter was not getting any mental health care at the time of his rampage.

Lanza’s  mother was a gun enthusiast who did not keep her weapons locked up or away from her deeply troubled son. She couldn’t be prosecuted for her role in the slaughter of innocents because Nancy Lanza was her son’s first victim.

Choosing to own a firearm comes with a responsibility to keep guns away from children and far, far away from the mentally ill.

The prosecution of the Crumbley parents won’t bring back the four innocent kids their son shot to death but it spreads blame for the murders to the people who set it in motion.

They need to be held accountable to preserve the gun rights of law-abiding gun owners.