OSD 290: Sins of the father
An unsatisfying look at whether parents are guilty of their children’s crimes.
A Georgia man named Colin Gray has been arrested after his son killed four people at school. Gray is charged with second-degree murder*, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children.
(*Second-degree murder has a unique definition in Georgia. They added it to the criminal code in 2014, and it’s defined as “when, in the commission of cruelty to children in the second degree, [a person] causes the death of another human being irrespective of malice.”)
This is the second time a parent has been charged in their child’s commission of a mass murder, and it’s very similar to the first time. James and Jennifer Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years in prison after their son killed four people at his school in 2021.
The general shape of both cases is a troubled child gets a gun as a gift and then uses the gun to kill people. The charges against the parents hinge on (a) whether they should have known their child would snap and (b) whether they adequately secured the gun in their home.
Involuntary manslaughter means you acted recklessly or negligently in a way that you should have known would get someone killed. For all the law built up around it, negligence still comes down to a jury’s judgement call. You can imagine a hierarchy of severity here:
Model parents of a model child. They occasionally go to the range, and they always keep their gun locked in a TL-30 jewelry store safe.
The kid is a little depressed sometimes but it’s not a big deal.
The kid is into weird Scandinavian horror movies.
The kid occasionally gets detention at school for generic edgelord behavior.
The kid sees a therapist for depression.
The parents keep the gun in a Liberty safe.
The parents keep the gun in a Stack-On gun cabinet.
The parents keep the gun in their dresser with a cable lock on it.
The parents keep the gun unsecured but hidden in the dresser.
The parents keep the gun loaded on the kitchen island, between the key tray and the Live Laugh Love sign.
The kid has gotten in trouble repeatedly for writing school shooting fan fiction.
The kid has attempted suicide.
The kid plans a school shooting and takes the gun without their parents knowing it.
The kid says, “I’m going to shoot everyone at school today” and the parents don’t take it seriously.
The kid says, “I’m going to shoot everyone at school today” and the parents say, “Great, here’s a gun.”
If the kids in all 15 scenarios did a school shooting, in which scenarios would the parents be guilty of involuntary manslaughter?
Tough call once you get away from the extremes. Maybe around number 9? That gun storage does seem reckless. But however ill-advised, a lot of people do that and nothing bad happens. For some people, it leads to a suicide. In extremely rare cases, it leads to a murder. And in a small fraction of the extremely rare cases, it leads to a mass murder. If you do something that creates a bad outcome 0.1% of the time, then should you have known it would lead to a bad outcome? Maybe you made a statistically reasonable choice and just caught the unlucky 0.1% outcome.
But that’s not an airtight defense. Most drunk driving doesn’t lead to a crash. Most unsafe gun handling doesn’t cause an accidental shooting. Most flyovers of the crowd at an airshow don’t end in disaster. That doesn’t absolve you of responsibility if you do those things and they go bad. It’s a crime to make a negative expected value bet with other people’s lives. And that’s a good thing. Post hoc liability is a great way to manage negative externalities. Much better than imposing ex ante regulation. But the tradeoff is that in nascent domains, there is no immediate consensus about what the rules actually are.
There are two issues in the prosecution of these parents:
The expected value of their decisions is unclear even in retrospect. The most damning evidence against the Crumbleys was that when the school called them in on the morning that their son drew a cartoon of a school shooting, they didn’t take their son home for the day. He did the shooting later that day, so that seems like poor judgement on the parents’ part. But if the threat was so obvious, why did the school return him to class? The parents felt he’d be safer in school than sitting home alone while they were at work, and the school felt he’d be safer in class than sitting monitored in the principal’s office for the rest of the day. Who made the poorer decision there? Clearly nobody perceived any actual danger. The only other real knock on the parents was their gun storage, which was probably lackadaisical. And it would be extremely reckless to keep a gun accessible to someone who you have reason to believe is a danger to themselves or others. Did they have such a reason? That just goes back to what they could reasonably have predicted about their son’s state of mind. It’s common for suicides to blindside families, and most mass shootings are a form of suicide. Should parents be arrested if their children commit suicide?
With this precedent now established, the political incentives are set. After a mass shooting, gun control groups are hungry for any action and the law-and-order caucus of the gun rights world is always happy to see someone stamped “bad guy” and thrown in prison. So the parents are the consensus target. Going forward, expect charges to be brought against the parents of any mass shooter who is a minor.
This doesn’t have a black-and-white answer. It’s easy to imagine cases where parents should be charged. And it’s easy to imagine cases where they shouldn’t be. The trouble is that in real life it’s hard to tell the two apart, and there are a lot of people who are incentivized to get it wrong.
This week’s links
A theory on school shootings
Look at this chart from Peter Gray’s piece, “Why Did Teens' Suicides Increase Sharply from 2008 to 2019?”:
And then this one below. The most interesting thing about it: the rise in teen suicides is really just a rise in schooltime suicides. The summer time suicide rate doesn't go up until 2021.
The most accurate way to think of school shootings, and mass shootings generally, is as a specific type of suicide. And Gray’s piece suggests that school is suicidogenic. A lot of people look at school shootings and think about what’s wrong with guns, but it would be more fruitful to think about what’s wrong with school.
Handwaving Freakoutery on school shootings
A modest proposal.
“Memories of the Draw-down”
From stories my grand-uncle told me in 2072 or so.
Lucky Gunner on why 10mm was a disaster for the FBI
Fun side note at 15:20 on the value of moving quickly: Gaston Glock goes to SHOT Show 1990, steals some .40 S&W cartridges from Smith & Wesson’s booth (where the round was being announced), designs a new gun around it, and beats S&W to market with their own cartridge.
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This latest case is a real edge case that tests my principles and makes me want to compromise them ad-hoc because of the facts on the ground.
But in general, I am _extremely_ uneasy with this idea of punishing third parties for crimes committed by someone else.
The parent/child angle complexifies things, so let's ignore that for a second and talk about principles. And let's shift from guns to something else where the issue is clearer: free speech.
There has been a definite move in society to criminalize all kinds of speech on the grounds of its consequences. But every time this happens, there's a really important factor that gets papered over. The basic logic goes like this (for example): "We can't permit people to publicly spout hate speech, because they might inspire someone to act on it".
Here's the thing tho: acting on it is already illegal. If I say "damn I wish someone would kill those [fill in your disfavoured group here]", it's still illegal for someone to do that. It doesn't just magically become ok for them to do that just because I told them to. In fact, one of the moral and legal obligations that people have as citizens in a free society is to use their brains, think critically, and respond to that hate speech with "how about I don't".
For some reason, this always gets ignored. The law, and the public in general, want to act as if citizens of this country are mindless automata, powerless to resist the words of some random person on the internet. And this is bad for two very important reasons
The first is because it creates basically an infinite liability that gives a fully general justification to just about any clamp down on free speech that the government wants to do. Virtually nothing in life is risk-free, and if you can justifiably silence someone just by drawing a tenuous line of causality between them saying something and some random third party taking an extreme action because of it, you can justifiably silence anything. For a silly example: I like to drive fast. I have a fast car. I talk about driving fast. Someone could shut me up on the grounds of "you brag about your fast car, some idiot is gonna go 90mph while drunk driving, and kill someone!". This sounds absurd to us, but, it's not meaningfully different from "you complain about [minority] online, someone's gonna go shoot them". Maybe they will, maybe they won't. It's still illegal either way, they've still committed a crime either way, and it had nothing to do with me or my speech either way.
The second is less talked about I think, but even more important, and that is that it erodes the responsibility from the person actually committing the crime. That's really, really bad. First off, because knowing you will suffer the consequences of your actions is a major disincentive to doing crime in the first place. If you think, "oh well, I'll go shoot someone but then blame XYZ thing I read online", maybe you're more likely to go shoot someone because you think someone else will get in trouble instead. Secondly, our entire criminal legal system is premised on the idea of people being responsible for their actions, so if suddenly we're saying that third parties are responsible for motivating them, then the entire concept of eg jailing someone is nonsensical. And third, in the general case, as a trend in society, we do not want to live in a world where nobody takes responsibility for their actions.
When some person decides to go on a murder spree, the correct social response is to shoot that guy in the head to stop him from murdering more people. It's not to arrest _someone else_ for motivating him. Like I said above, this specific case is reaaaaally an edge case, because there is a sense in which parents are responsible for the actions of their children, in a way that does not apply to my examples above. But still, it's the wedge. It's how it starts. Mark my words, this is a dark path we do not want to go down.
As an aside, and this is probably preaching to the choir, everyone just automatically assumes that guns are why school shootings happen. They take it for granted that school shootings are just, like, a force of nature, and I don't understand why.
School shootings did not happen like they do now, a hundred years ago, despite firearms being much more commonplace, socially acceptable, and less regulated.
I also can't help but think back to my Canadian highschool experience. From grades 7 through 12, there were exactly two incidents of violence at my school. One was a Special Ed kid who had a freakout and just kind of ran around the school screaming, but didn't actually do any violence. The other was when a kid from our rival highschool came by at lunch hour and pepper sprayed a guy because his girlfriend cheated on him with that guy.
If "the reason for school shootings is guns" was true, we would expect my highschool to have had just as much violence, just, not with guns. But, my highschool basically had zero violence. If people really cared about stopping school shootings you'd think they might step back and ask why so many kids want to shoot up schools in the first place. But then you might have to actually grapple with serious social issues, and it's way easier to just fuck those republicans out of their rifles.