EDITORIAL — Making parents also responsible for school shootings

In an unprecedented move, the parents of a teenager who committed a school shooting in the US are now being charged in connection with the crime.

James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of teenager Ethan Crumbley, who opened fire at his high school in Oxford, Michigan, in 2021, killing four classmates, are now being charged for manslaughter.

Government prosecutors say the two didn’t just ignore their son’s frequent displays of violence and mental health issues, they also bought him a gun just days before the shooting occurred.

It seems like a good strategy, at least where teenage school shooters are concerned. If the government can’t prevent teenagers from accessing extremist or hate messages, or prevent them from buying guns, or prevent them from entering schools and shooting people up, perhaps they should just go after their parents.

That should at least scare the parents into paying more attention to what their children are doing, as it would seem that these days more and more parents no longer see the actions of their children as their responsibility.

The result of this case should set a precedent where school shootings carried out by underage individuals or those under legal guardianship are concerned.

Of course, we can also see the disadvantage of such a move. By the time parents or guardians are held responsible or punished for the actions of their children, this means they had to wait for another crime to be committed.

It’s more of a reaction than anything else, a deterrent rather than something that prevents.

The best way to deal with school shootings is still to make sure they don’t happen in the first place. And how to do that is by preventing those with impressionable minds from accessing extremist or hate messages, preventing those who don’t deserve to have guns from buying them, and preventing them from entering schools and shooting people up.

Of those things mentioned above, preventing those who don’t deserve to have guns from buying them seems to be the easiest thing to do. But then again, in the US, it’s also one of the hardest things to do.