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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   24453 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Ethan Crumbley Parents Found Guilty of Manslaughter

Ethan Crumbley is a school shooter who killed four people. This does not make him unique. What makes him unique is that his parents have been found guilty of manslaughter for it. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/16/us/james-jennifer-crumbley-trials-differences/index.html

The legal theory is that the parents were extraordinarily negligent- and, TBH, at least the mom seems to have been a shitty parent who ignored her son's obvious mental illness- and provided a firearm to their son despite clear evidence he was at least a potential danger to others. I don't think this legal theory is particularly novel even if it's rarely used; when I took my CHL class in much more firearms-friendly Texas I was told that if I provided a minor with a handgun, I could be held liable should they kill someone with it. But on to some article quotes:

That witness overlap reflects how similar the two trials were overall. Both parents were convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in their son’s mass shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan on November 30, 2021. They face up to 15 years in prison and are set to be sentenced next month.

Despite those similarities, the trials unfolded quite differently.

The case against Jennifer focused heavily on her personal life, digging into her voluminous text messages, her relationship with her son and even her extramarital affair. In contrast, the case against James largely avoided his private affairs but more closely examined how he secured the family’s firearms.

So his father was convicted under the idea that he had a positive responsibility to store firearms in a way inaccessible to a mentally ill teenaged boy. I'm not an expert on Michigan law, but I'm pretty sure that the letter of the law says something along those lines in most states, and it would be very difficult to argue that he doesn't have a moral responsibility. But maybe he was a responsible gun owner who took measures to keep his troubled son away from household guns that a reasonable person would expect to be sufficient:

In contrast, James Crumbley’s trial more closely focused on how he stored the three firearms in the home.

In August 2021, Ethan sent a video to his friend of him handling and loading a gun just after midnight. “My dad left it out so I thought. ‘Why not’ lol,” he wrote, according to messages shown in court. Both of his parents were at home around that time, forensic analyst Edward Wagrowski testified.

Further, James purchased the SIG Sauer 9mm firearm for his son on Black Friday 2021, and he later told investigators he hid it in a case in his armoire, with the bullets hidden in a different spot under some jeans. A detective said a cable lock sold with the SIG Sauer was found still in its plastic packaging.

Nevermind. While I'm leery of the precedent this sets for obvious reasons, I have no trouble acknowledging that James Crumbley deserves to go to prison and, were I a juror, I'd probably have voted to convict. On to the mom's case.

Another major difference between the two trials was that Jennifer provided a lengthy digital trail of her thoughts and feelings, while James did not. This contrast meant the jury heard more about her personal life than about his.

As revealed at her trial, Jennifer was in text conversations with several people before, during and after the shooting, providing a running commentary of her thoughts and actions.

She messaged her boss as she realized their gun was missing and her son was the shooter, then asked her boss not to fire her. “I need my job,” she wrote. “Please don’t judge me for what my son did.” Jennifer Crumbley appears in court on January 25 in Oxford, Michigan.

She texted the owner of a horse farm on the morning of the shooting that her son was “having a hard time” and “can’t be left alone,” and then later sent her reaction to the attack. “I wish we had warnings.. Something,” Jennifer Crumbley wrote.

She also messaged her extramarital lover after the shooting, reflecting on her own parenting skills. “I failed as a parent,” she wrote in a message. “I failed miserably.”

Other online posts of hers furthered the prosecution’s case. Days before the attack, she posted on her social media about her and Ethan’s trip to the gun range and his new SIG Sauer 9mm firearm. “Mom & son day testing out his new Xmas present,” she wrote in the post, alongside a photo of the gun.

Further, the day before the shooting, a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.

This does not paint a picture of good parenting. Furthermore,

The major difference in the trials was Jennifer Crumbley’s decision to testify in her own defense, while James Crumbley did not.

On the stand, Jennifer Crumbley pushed blame onto her son, her husband and the school, and she expressed no regret for her actions. “I’ve asked myself if I would have done anything differently, and I wouldn’t have,” she testified.

James Crumbley, meanwhile, declined to testify. “It is my decision to remain silent,” he said in court.

The two decisions were a reflection of their broader legal defense strategies.

A pretrial ruling in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial had barred both sides from bringing up anything about her extramarital affair with a local firefighter. But midway through her trial, Jennifer waived the ruling and agreed to allow that evidence, saying she trusted her attorney’s recommended strategy change.

IANAL, but Jennifer Crumbley's legal defense strategy sounds sufficiently suboptimal that she seems to just have generally very bad judgement, maybe the mental illness runs in the family. That being said, I'm a lot less comfortable with the legal logic here- being a generally shitty parent who has bad judgement and neglects her son's mental health problem isn't illegal. I'm comfortable calling her a shitty parent and saying she should be called out for it but it kinda seems like a novel legal theory of the sort that's generally bad.

Personally I doubt this case will be widely replicated; the Crumbleys seem to have had much-more-damning-than-average facts. But let's go to the general principle; parents sometimes being held responsible when their minor child kills someone doesn't seem terribly controversial, no doubt had they left out a gun and their five year old killed someone using it to play cowboys and indians this would be a rare scenario but not a case that grabbed much attention. And it doesn't seem controversial either that Ethan Crumbley was sufficiently crazy to be less than 100% responsible for his actions. On the other hand, parents of teen murderers getting tried for manslaughter is definitely abnormal; teen murderers almost certainly suffer from distinctly below average parenting, too, although I would expect that in the median case that's due to a single mother's weird work schedule or poverty rather than a wealthy woman neglecting her kid. I think the difference is that these parents had, at least materially, the ability to do better. His mom obviously knew her son was showing signs of being crazy but preferred horses, extramarital affairs, and booze, his dad had a gun safe but didn't store the murder weapon in it(and when I was a teen with my own guns they were required to be stored in my dad's gun safe, which seems like the reasonable policy for your teen owning guns). This wasn't a single mom working a shift that made it hard to pay much attention to her kid, which is a lot closer to the family scenario for most minor criminals and for most mass shooters.

Quite literally millions of Black parents have had kids arrested, killed, wounded, or who killed or wounded others in their gun offenses... and not even legally held guns.

meanwhile they do this to one white family, with not even a hint that this would ever be applied evenly to a black parents who do the same.

Pure anarcho-tyrrany and ethnic hatred of the flyover Amerikaner.

Few of those black parents themselves provided the murder weapon for their kid, which is the relevant difference.

A lot of the girlfriends did though, through straw purchases that are triple-illegal but never prosecuted, because the women are usually black college educated professionals with scumbag bfs.

Got any stats for that?

Well yes, straw purchases should be prosecuted. I’m in 100% agreement- as is every gun rights advocate I’ve ever heard of. For some reason the biggest way to actually crack down on gun violence is not very popular with the gun control crowd.

QuantumFreakonomics's comment did the most to influence my thinking. The car analogy is a good one to ponder.

Implement of mayhem aside, the issue of concern in my book is another small step forward to "lock up the crazies fast" but now expanding to the indirectly crazy - the parents.

Ever since the Virginia Tech shooting (possibly earlier) a steady mid-brow point has been "people with, ya know, really bad mental health problems, shouldn't have firearms ... and maybe knives ... cars could be bad too ... maybe we should commit them." The obvious slippery slope there is (a) There are plenty of well adjusted people who have mental health histories - what's to stop the state from arbitrarily deciding they are now a threat and (b) The obvious market adjustment that those with new mental health problems will simply conceal them and not seek help because of the risk of deprivation of basic rights. Where this gets especially dystopian is when known associates of any individual start to use "hey, you know he/she is really crazy right!" in vindictive personal lawfare. The best existing example of this is the weaponization of mutual restraining orders in divorce proceedings to try and secure an advantage in custody. I can see an easy early version of this in parents who, exasperated with a rebellious child, decide to inform "the authorities" that their angsty teen is, in fact, super coconuts and should be sent to one of those padded wall spots (while Mom and Dad enjoy some childless stay-cation time).

With this case, the message has been sent to parents of "troubled teens" that they might want to consider severely restricting their child's access to myriad things/activities/privacy/independence and, perhaps, even to begin involving "counselors" and other semi-state apparatchiks all to avoid personal liability in the event something drastic happens.

OR

The message has been sent to parents to not at all engage with their child's problems, and essentially hope they go away. But its important to maintain that plausible ignorance - again - to avoid personal culpability.

Being shitty parents has to absolutely remain 100% legal. If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad, we're directly on the road to State-As-Parent, the elimination of privacy, and the enforcement of current political majoritarian monoculture at the nuclear family level.

The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.

And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar.

Yes, but this is not something a safetyist culture is equipped in any way to constructively deal with (as a bonus, whenever this happens, it gives them more justification/fervor to ban and confiscate their outgroup- or in other words, "the demand for violence in society vastly exceeds its supply"- so it's only neutral at best).

Naturally, every other approach tacitly posits accepting a base rate of abuse of rights for the existence of rights themselves; that is why the Dead Kids South Park episode is the way that it is [but it only really works if you understand that viewpoint, since they don't actually go out of their way to fill in that blank].

If it becomes illegal to be a bad mom or dad

No, I'd say that being a bad mom or dad is actually required by the law. And... uh, it's required already in a good few places with CPS visits for the crime of letting your kids play outside and felony charges for having them walk half a mile, refusing to call them a girl even though they insist they are, etc. Basic 1984 stuff, internalized oppression begins at home after all.

As far as the gun thing goes... private firearms ownership by the 10-18 crowd was higher (and trivial to accomplish, just send the cash in the mail) 60 years ago yet the murder rate (and the rate at which they ran amok) was far lower, and I think the way society treats that crowd now (as opposed to what you were allowed to do in those years) has a lot to do with them deciding to act like this. They used to just bring their guns to school to go hunting afterwards in areas that weren't even that rural, but then again, you treat them more like adults when their biology demands it and you'll see better behavior.

Parents [and by extension, their kids] have been continually losing this battle for the last 40 years (with no indication yet they'll stop losing); it's not a surprise that prospective parents just adopt pets rather than have to fight the State and the demos tooth and nail for the right to parent correctly. Probably worse for the birth rates than the car seat thing, though data on how much isn't exactly easy to come by.

It would have been better had we simply banned daycare when society had the justification to do so in the '80s. But they didn't, so here we are.

a teacher left Jennifer Crumbley a voicemail saying that her son had been looking at bullets on his phone in class. “Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,” she wrote to her son in a text.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Looking up ammunition on your cell phone is completely normal behavior, and I do so occasionally to keep an eye on prices. If I was somehow back in school, where administrators and teachers are stupid and afraid of all things firearm related, then the correct advice is absolutely "learn not to get caught". Why is everyone under the impression that this text message is damning?

This is one of those blue-tribe red-tribe divides that simply does not compute for people on either side of the divide. For the red tribe (i.e., you, me, others like us), looking up ammunition prices on your phone, or browsing /r/guns or whatever is totally normal behavior. It is a completely benign expression of a perfectly normal hobby held by millions of Americans. For members of the Blue Tribe this is a screaming bloody murder oh god we're all going to die giant neon "Victory Day Parade in Red Square" red flag, that requires reporting not only to the administration of the school but the FBI. That is not an exaggeration, that is a personal experience I have had.

The JTTF paid for my coffee, which was very nice of them.

Totally agreed, this seems like it would be any supportive mom's reaction if their son was into guns. Posting about the range trip to facebook checks out, not getting worked up he was looking at bullets checks out... This might seem weird to people not in the hobby and not around guns at all, I suppose, but obviously you can't really look at this family's dynamics from that kind of framing.

I don’t think looking at ammo online is ipso facto unreasonable, but given the blue tribe paranoia about school shootings it seems trivially obvious that in class is a time and place that is at the very least highly inappropriate.

Do you believe taking your children to the gun range to target practice is unreasonable or bad parenting?

Taking your children to a gun range is GOOD parenting in a country with more guns than people and high homocide rates.

Do you want your kids to be raped and murdered for want of any ability to defend themselves from black crime?

My backyard is the family gun range.

No, I’m willing to bet that no one wants such a thing. If you think it’s a good rhetorical question, then you need a little time to cool off.

One day ban.

Well that's a crazy response

How do you mean?

This has what to do with what I said?

You posted this excerpt:

Other online posts of hers furthered the prosecution’s case. Days before the attack, she posted on her social media about her and Ethan’s trip to the gun range and his new SIG Sauer 9mm firearm.

Under which you said:

This does not paint a picture of good parenting.

Another poster addressed that looking at bullets in class isn’t unreasonable nor does it suggest bad parenting, to which you qualified it as a “highly inappropriate” time and place, if not unreasonable.

I am asking a similar question pointed at by the other poster, about an imminently reasonable time and place - the gun range outing documented in your quoted section showing what you suggest(?) to be bad parenting.

There is nothing wrong with taking your child to the gun range, nor in supporting a firearms-involved hobby. One can perhaps say that this should go on hold when that child has a mental health issue- and it seems obvious that he did- but that wasn't my point. It does seem clear that she knew her son wasn't trustworthy with guns(she texted in that he can't be left alone), though.

I agree that you shouldn't get caught looking at ammo on your phone in class. But you know what the best way to not get caught looking at ammo on your phone in class is? Waiting until you're out of class to look at ammo on your phone. Yes the education system's hoplophobia is dumb. But it is a thing that is not changing and the rest of us just have to work around it, and sometimes dumb arbitrary things just have to be complied with and encouraging your kid to pitch a fit about it instead of knuckling under is at the very least questionable.

Hence, it's good advice to "learn not to get caught". I don't parents think telling High Schoolers not to do highly inappropriate stuff has a history of being effective.

It’s good for parents to have some fear that poor discipline on their part could possibly bite them in the ass. Sometimes children are just bad, in which case the authorities or healthcare system should be aware of the situation because an attempt at least should have been made to seek help.

But, in general, and barring extraordinary circumstances, parents are responsible for their children’s behavior under whatever age society deems appropriate for adulthood. They made him, they raised him, who else (other than the boy himself) could be more responsible?

I’ll agree that parents are responsible for their kids, and I’ll agree that in this case (as they bought the weapon and took him out target-shooting with it) they are responsible for enabling the shooting.

But I think as a blanket thing, I’m less convinced simply because preventing your kids, especially if they have ongoing mental health issues, from doing anything wrong is an impossible task. Once a kid has access to money and a vehicle, your ability to control them is pretty small. It would take an extreme level of helicopter parenting to prevent a teenager from doing this. He goes and steals a gun from somebody else, and you don’t know. He builds bombs out of household materials, and you don’t know. You’d have to track him to be sure, and watch his internet to be sure.

Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt — you know your kid has issues, and if they act out, well, you knew about it. The best defense is that the child isn’t diagnosed with anything.

They bought him a gun knowing he was crazy and then chose to store it unlocked despite having two locking mechanisms- a gun safe and a trigger lock.

knowing he was crazy

Seems like you're vindicating Maiq by holding this against them. If they had never seeked professional help, they could have argued that they didn't know he was crazy.

She was texting random associates that he wasn't OK, though.

Yes, and now there's an incentive to not tell your associates that you're worried about your kid, for the same reason.

Worse, I fear that the looming threat of liability might make parents less likely to seek help. If you have your kid diagnosed with something like bipolar or borderline personality disorder or something that makes them more likely to be violent, you’ve now created a situation where you’re admitting possible guilt

If you get your kid diagnosed, let his school know etc, then you’ve done at least some of your duty as a parent to society. Some kids are rotten apples and it is, I agree, unfair to blame the parent.

I don’t see any shitty parenting unless there is a lot more going on. A few text messages that look bad. If a prosecutor went thru my phone they will find plenty of shitty stuff I’ve done and a lot of stuff out of context.

I had some rough times in school sometime. Kids get depressed. Bullying happens. Most just grow up. Kids need to work thru there issues and grow up. I’m fairly certain Elon Musks had shittier parents than this. Very few kids grow up a member of the Brady Bunch and my guess is the vast majority of kids have some family dysfunction.

This actually scares me this definition of “shitty parents” because it sounds a lot like helicopter parenting instead of what I think is much better of just letting kids do what they want to do. I think the latter leads to children being much better adults and key to them developing their own self-esteem. I don’t want a legal standard where a parent needs to micromanage every bad thought their kids have.

I agree with guns should be locked up and secure. Though I feel like there is a ton of hypocrisy here as I’ve never seen a black father convicted of this.

I mean, I'm not against this exactly. I just fully expect it to be another tool of anarcho-tyranny where charges like this are rarely if ever pursued against parents of a politically relevant skin tone because disparate impact, restorative justice, blah blah blah.

Maybe not. Maybe I'll be surprised. A case in my state did see a mother of a political salient identity actually get charged, convicted, and sentenced to two years. They are going after the assistant principal for criminal negligence too, and frankly, she deserves it.

I wish I knew more about the process these convictions go through. I know our Republican Governor and Republican DA have been going hard on our out of control schools, and the bureaucrats who've ruined them. Sad to say it'll all probably get undone lickity split as soon as power changes hands again.

I share your concern about anarchotyranny, but on the other hand, the facts are pretty unique- few black teen murderers are being provided guns by their parents, after all.

Straw purchases are a routine way by which criminals, including Black criminals, obtain firearms. The authorities routinely decline to prosecute the overwhelming majority of straw purchases, which are in fact committed by family and intimate partners of the criminals. I think the facts are against you here.

I don’t see any shitty parenting unless there is a lot more going on.

I see

On the stand, Jennifer Crumbley pushed blame onto her son, her husband and the school, and she expressed no regret for her actions. (...) extramarital affair

Also

“Lol I’m not mad you have to learn not to get caught,”

Lol, she should learn to not get caught.

I can’t tell if you’re trying to be coy or if you think your point should be obvious.

Speak plainly, please.

There's some legal messiness about the standard of causation, but in an environment with any serious level of social trust, the Crumbley's would fall fast into the sphere where no one looks that closely at it, even had they just fallen down the stairs. Even gunnies whose literal jobs involve poking at the law agree with the moral question for this specific case. I'd be interested to know how consistently parents of teenagers who drive drunk are held criminally responsible, but I dunno that the data is really available in meaningful detail, and guns are different enough, and it'd still be a good arg in favor of tightening up the law then.

Part of that fall-through-cracks is because Michigan's statutes were pretty wonky: conviction for improper storage of firearm w/ a minor would have been far more clear-cut, but they didn't really clearly exist in 2021.

The court of appeals did, in fact try to spell this one out as good-for-this-ride-or-worse-only:

Finally, we share defendants’ concern about the potential for this decision to be applied in the future to parents whose situation viz-a-viz their child’s intentional conduct is not as closely tied together, and/or the warning signs and evidence were not as substantial as they are here. But those concerns are significantly diminished by several well-established principles. First, the principle that grossly negligent or intentional acts are generally superseding causes remains intact. We simply hold that with these unique facts, and in this procedural posture and applicable standard of review, this case falls outside the general rule regarding intentional acts because EC’s acts were reasonably foreseeable, and that is the ultimate test that must be applied.13 Second, our decision is based solely on the record evidence, and the actions and inactions taken by defendants despite the uniquely troubling facts of which they were fully aware. And this point is important, as although the judiciary typically recognizes that a decision’s precedent is limited by the facts at issue, it is particularly true when the court expresses that limitation.

The trouble's that there's not much social trust. The Crumbley's are going to prison for a decade because their kid had a hallucinations and intrusive thoughts that the parents blew off, and that's extremely bad. What if he'd just written a lot about depression, and they'd ignored that? If he'd had the same problems, but not gotten sent to the principal's office the same day? He was a 15-year-old they allowed to have effective control of a handgun, would that change if he was over 18? 21? 25? They didn't lock (or 'locked' with 0-0-0) firearms. If they used a cheap 20-USD trigger lock that doesn't actually work, would that have broken the chain of causation?

These are problems for any serious statute with where the caselaw involves a ton of phrases like 'reasonably foreseeable', but most serious statutes don't have a sizable lobby pushing for (and often getting!) laws enforcing blanket criminal consqeuences in related context. The parade-of-horribles where someone is criminally liable because 'obviously' the seller knew this guy shouldn't have a gun, he shot people is an implicit goal for the Brady Bunch. I'll give Rov_Scam props for stating outright "a number of requirements that seem onerous but that's the point", but that only makes Rov honest; it doesn't help with the general problem.

This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.

Taking rights away from a mentally ill person should require an adversarial hearing where the person accused of being mentally ill has the right to bring evidence, cross-examine witnesses, etc. If there hasn't been such a hearing, and the law otherwise allows the boy to have a gun (which it sounds like it does), requiring people to keep guns away from the "mentally ill" person is just a roundabout way to circumvent gun rights.

Nobody would accept a ruling that forced the boy into involuntary confinement without a hearing, even if failure to involuntarily confine him meant that he could, and eventually did, kill someone.

The law allowed him to have a gun under the supervision of his parents, which makes it pretty inherently reasonable to hold them responsible for his misuse of that gun.

But on the other hand, individual knowledge can make a difference.

If I sell my neighbor a gun, ordinarily, I'm fine. But if I've heard my neighbor talking about wanting to shoot his ex, and then he goes and does that with the gun I've sold him, I might be in trouble. I'm comfortable with there being some similar point at which parents are responsible not to let their teenager have a gun.

(Do these particular parents meet it? I don't know the facts well enough to confidently say.)

If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter?

Civilly, quite possibly! (Caveat, I'm not a Michigan lawyer so this isn't legal advice, but my Westlaw subscription includes Michigan cases and I'm bored). Michigan recognizes the tort of negligent entrustment, and there are several cases in which parents are found liable for permitting incompetent minors to drive. Dortman v. Lester (1968) 380 Mich. 80; Zokas v. Friend (1984) 134 Mich.App. 437

Yup! Nice finds btw.

If that is overreach then a lot of our justice system has the same issues. You can be tried for murder just for being the getaway driver, you can be tried for murdering if the gang you put together does it on your watch, you can be tried for murder for talking about murder on the phone with someone who goes on to murder. There are 10 different ways you can be tried for a murder you didn't take a physical role in. This is not a novel legal concept.

But at least in the case of a getaway driver, the driver absolutely knows and is an active participant in the murder. He knows he’s driving someone to a place where they fully intend to shoot someone, and they know after the fact they will be helping them escape. If an adult I share an apartment with takes my car keys and drives to someone’s house and shoots them, I’m not involved. I had no reason to think that a crime would result from me leaving the keys on the counter.

They don't know any of that. Probably they have a great record of robbing without killing anyone, almost no criminals are arrested for their first crime, or even their 30th. Then one time it happens and boom they are on the hook for murder 1. You can probably buy a gun for a million kids and most won't go on to murder someone with it. Being from a hunting family I received a gun much younger, and I didn't kill anyone.

These parents fucked up hard, and they should be punished. It is their responsibility to society and to humans everywhere to not let this happen. Let this be a lesson.

It’s unreasonable to hold someone responsible for choices that other people make unless they’re knowingly making choices that a reasonable individual would see an enabling a crime. If I leave my keys on the counter, that’s not participating in the roommate using my car to drive to his girlfriend’s house and shoot her. If I know he’s going to get her in some way and I knowingly give him the keys, sure I get that. Any person watching would interpret that as me giving the guy the keys to go harm his girlfriend.

I think it has to go through that reasonable man test. If a reasonable person looks at the situation and says that the parents knew or reasonably should have known that he wanted to kill people, and they knowingly provide him a weapon and ammo and refuse to secure it, yes, they’re involved. But if it’s “there are guns in the house,” not really. And especially if the kid gets into a safe or something, at that point, they’ve done everything reasonably doable to keep the kid from getting a gun.

The problem with "reasonable man" tests is they get evaluated in retrospect. It's easy to rationalize that a "reasonable man" would have acted differently if you know how things turned out.

Aren’t most of us doing this now? I mean most people are assuming that this was negligent simply because a shooting occurred. But my contention is outside of buying a troubled teen a gun and taking him to gun ranges to practice with it (which is negligent) a lot of the things they did would not be that unusual for a family that owns guns. And I think that matters because you shouldn’t be able to convict someone of not taking extraordinary measures to prevent a crime.

Yes, that's my point. These "reasonable man" tests are presented as a way of softening a Draconian-appearing rule such as "if you buy a gun for your child, you're responsible for any murders he commits" or even "if you have a child you're responsible for any murders he commits". The problem is the "reasonable man" test only gets applied when something bad has already happened, and the reasoning of "if something bad happened, the parenting must have been unreasonable" is irresistible to juries. And thus people learn that if you don't want to risk going to jail for murder you just don't buy your kid a gun full stop -- or you just don't have a child.

The case is that their son was foreseeably going to hurt somebody or at least be highly irresponsible with guns. And I think that’s been proved well enough at least for the probably existing statute on liability for storing firearms within the access of a minor to kick in.

If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter?

Maybe. We don't have that counterfactual available to us, but I don't think it would be crazy to say that parents bare some degree of responsibility for providing their homicidally deranged child easy access to effective murder weapons, whether those are vehicles or firearms. I would hope for proportional approaches to the degree of ease, efficacy, and likely use as a weapon for a given implement. Firearms are probably the single most effective tool readily available for targeted violence. Cars are actually pretty high on the list as well and I think it's generally very bad that we treat vehicular fatalities with less seriousness than other negligent homicides. When we get down to something like knives, there is no plausible path to parents preventing their homicidally deranged child from acquiring a kitchen knife, but it's also unlikely that they'll succeed in killing four people on a rampage with said knife.

I would also want proportion to the amount of non-violent usefulness for the item, and the amount of necessity for the item in society. No one needs a firearm to get along in society. Yes, it may have usefulness in a law-abiding way, but even the closest thing to a necessity for firearms in society in self-defense -- which involves, inherently, violence. It may be justified violence, but it is violence. Someone who shoots a carjacker is doing the same thing an armed carjacker-gone-wrong does -- using a firearm against a person. And there is no necessity in the 21st century to hunt for food, and certainly no necessity to hunt or shoot for sport.

A car, however -- using a car to run someone over is incorrectly using a car. No one for a lawful or legitimate purpose runs over a person with a car. There is no sense in which a car is supposed to be used to run someone over. There are no sports in which people get run over by cars. There is no such thing as driving through a crash test barrier made of clay for sport. A car, used properly, is not a weapon, it's a means of transport. Firearms are weapons.

And you also kind of need a car to get along in society -- especially in places where public transportation does not exist or is woefully inadequate. It makes a lot more sense to give your depressed teen (with a drivers' license, of course!) access to the family car than to give them a gun. After all, if they can't use the car to go visit their friends, or go to their after-school job, what they'll be doing is moping around the house. And that just sounds like more depression.

Perhaps he could have used the gun at a firing range to let off some stress. But if I were the parents, and actually paid attention to the kid, I wouldn't let him do that without supervision. And I wouldn't even do that, personally. The parents made an active choice to put a weapon in the hands of their depressed, angry son, unsupervised. That's not bad parenting, that's ludicriously harmful parenting. I would even say negligent.

All that being said, it's interesting to me that owning a firearm is a right, but driving a car is a privilege -- yet the former is optional and the latter, for many people, a necessity.

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