Schools in this country are shooting ranges with living students as targets.

Why would a 15 year old boy need this military-grade handgun?

$499.99 was how much it cost to kill four kids in Oxford, Michigan. That was the price a gun dealer charged James Crumbley, the father of Ethan Crumbley, who killed four of his fellow students and wounded seven others at Oxford High School on Wednesday.  The gun he bought for his son was a Sig Sauer SP2022 Semi-Automatic pistol that holds 15 rounds of ammunition.  He apparently also bought four magazines because the boy was found with one magazine in the gun and three more in his pocket when he was arrested shortly after shooting his fellow students.

The Sig Sauer company, located in Eckernforde, Germany and Exeter, New Hampshire, calls its SP2022 Semi-Automatic pistol the “Nitron.”  It is chambered for a 9 millimeter Parabellum or Luger round which is typically sold for 32 cents for one, or $15.99 for 50, or $324.95 for 1000.  The “Nitron” is very similar to the Sig Sauer models P320 XM17 and XM18 which the Department of Defense recently purchased for use by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.  The Department of Defense plans to buy 417,000 of the weapons in total for use in combat by all four services.

So why would a parent buy such a weapon for his 15 year old son?  Police and prosecutors announced today that Ethan Crumley was with his father when he bought the gun on Friday, November 26, only five days before the boy used it to kill his fellow students.  The gun was stored lying in an unlocked drawer in the Crumbley home, according to police.  The state of Michigan does not have a law requiring that handguns or other firearms be locked up by gun owners to keep the weapons away from children.  A PDF document on the Michigan State Police website recommends that all guns be stored “safely” by their owners, but that is as far as law enforcement goes in that state to ensure that guns are kept out of the hands of children.

Today, Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald announced that the parents of Ethan Crumbley, including his mother, Jennifer, would be charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with their son’s murders.  The prosecutor produced evidence that the parents were aware that their son was disturbed and may have been planning to shoot up the school.  When the boy’s mother heard about the incident on the radio, she texted her son, “Ethan, don’t do it.” When the father heard of the incident, he immediately drove home and looked for the weapon.  The name of the shooter had not yet been made public.  On November 21, just a few days before the father bought the gun, Ethan was caught searching on his phone for ammunition while in class.  When his mother was called by the school and told about the incident, she didn’t respond but instead texted her son, “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”

The only thing that’s new about the shooting in Michigan is that the parents were charged with a crime.  The rest of it is old news.  I spent a good deal of time today looking at various data bases trying to determine how many school shootings have taken place in this country over the last several decades.  The best numbers I could come up with were from something called the “K-12 School Shooting Database” – yes, folks, there is such a thing – which is published by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.  According to their figures, there have been several thousand school shooting “incidents” since 1970.  There were 226 school shooting “incidents” this year, including murders within schools carried out by students, drive-by shootings, accidental shootings, officer-involved shootings, murder-suicides, indiscriminate shootings of random people, hostage situations, shots fired in the commission of illegal acts such as theft, robberies, sales of drugs or exchange of stolen property on school grounds.  43 percent of the shooters have been students, 19 percent had no relation to the schools, 16 percent were unknown, 4 percent were former students, 4 percent were non-students using athletic facilities or attending school games, 2 percent were parents, 2 percent were police officers, and 1 percent were teachers.

You get the picture.  Schools in this country are functionally shooting ranges with living students as the targets. The killings at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 were a particularly big story.  Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed 12 students, one teacher, and wounded 21 others using two 9 mm handguns, two shotguns, one carbine and several bombs, at least two of which were used as diversions with the rest not going off.

But Columbine followed another shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 at a middle school carried out by Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, who were students at the school.  The boys deliberately missed their bus the morning of the shooting and instead drove Johnson’s mother’s minivan loaded down with camping supplies, snack food, and nine weapons which they had taken from Golden’s grandfather’s house, along with 2,000 rounds of ammunition that had been kept on top of the home’s refrigerator.  The boys parked the van and carried the guns and other supplies into the woods at the top of a hill overlooking the school.  Golden went into the school and pulled the fire alarm and returned to the woods where he and Johnson proceeded to kill four students and a teacher and wound ten more when they exited the school thinking it was a drill.

In neither Columbine nor Jonesboro were the parents or other relatives of the shooters arrested or charged with any crimes such as negligent storage of firearms, as Golden’s grandfather obviously did, or with any other crimes in connection with the shootings.  According to a story in the Washington Post today, there are only four instances of parents or adult owners of firearms being charged with failing to safely store the weapons used by children in shootings. “That’s despite the fact that if children as young as 6 did not have access to guns, well more than half of the country’s school shootings since 1999 would never have happened,” the Washington Post reported.  “If you look at school shootings, the overwhelming majority are committed by students, and the overwhelming majority of those students have guns that they brought from their homes or a relative’s home,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, told the Post.

Video tape obtained by Oxford police shows Ethan Crumbley and his mother firing the pistol at a range near their home on Saturday, four days before he committed the murders.  The boy’s mother posted a photograph on social media showing the two of them at the range with the caption, “Mom and son day testing out his new Christmas present.”  It would be interesting to know for a fact what kind of targets they were shooting at, but I can give you a good guess:  they were doubtlessly the full-size human silhouette targets used at public firing ranges and gun store ranges around the country.

That was the case with the boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  After the shootings, it was revealed that the parents of both boys had taken them to so-called “practical shooting courses” near their homes.  “Practical shooting” is a euphemism for firing practice at a range where shooters using handguns and rifles are taught to shoot at human silhouette targets while moving and firing from behind obstacles and other simulated protective cover.  It is a civilian version of the combat training given to soldiers in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, where they learn to “move and shoot” and conceal themselves from enemy fire. 

The parents of the Jonesboro boys took their sons to “practical shooting courses” beginning at age 8 and 10.  The shooter in Oxford, Michigan, is 15 years old, two years older than the oldest boy in Jonesboro, Arkansas was when he and his friend killed their classmates and teacher.

I realize I am beating a dead horse, as the saying goes, but these shootings by children of other children are madness, and by that I don’t mean the children are suffering from a mental illness.  That the citizens of this country put up with the killings of dozens, even hundreds of children every year, many if not most times by other minor children, is wide-open jet-fueled madness on steroids. 

The number of school shootings may have been reduced if the parents of the children who killed were charged with negligence for not keeping safe the firearms the children used, or even with involuntary manslaughter for what amounts to bad parenting by not properly supervising their children and doing something about behavior they knew to be suspicious or even threatening.  The parents of Ethan Crumbley were summoned to the school on the day of the shooting and shown a cell-phone photograph taken by a teacher of a drawing their son had made that morning.  The drawing showed a semi-automatic handgun of the kind his father had bought him and the words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”  There was also a drawing of a bullet with the words “Blood everywhere” alongside a drawing of a bloody body with two gunshot wounds with a “laughing” emoji.  After they were shown their son’s drawing, the parents resisted taking their son out of the school for the rest of the day, and he was returned to class.

Three hours later, he walked out of a school bathroom and began shooting at students in the hallway.  When students tried to get away by running into classrooms, he opened the doors and shot into the classrooms.

His mother’s text was too late.  Everything she had seen depicted in Ethan’s drawing that morning had already happened. There were bodies on the ground with gunshot wounds and blood everywhere at Oxford High School.  The gun that was used was the $499.99 Sig Sauer SP2022 she and her son had practiced with a few days earlier.