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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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