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Speaker 1: Yes. [unintelligible 00:00:07] It's safe to come out.

Speaker 2: He said it's safe to come out.

Speaker 3: We're not willing to take that risk right now.

Speaker 1: I can't hear you.

Speaker 3: We're not taking that risk right now.

Speaker 1: Okay, would you come to the door and look at my badge, bro.

Speaker 4: He said, bro.

Speaker 5: He said, bro. Red flags.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Those were the chilling sounds from inside an Oxford Michigan classroom last Tuesday. A teacher huddled together with students as the gunman walked the school shooting indiscriminately at anyone in his path. We've later learned that the alleged gunman is 15 years old and a student at the school where two teachers had raised concerns over his behavior the day before, but despite these teacher concerns, he was allowed to return to school, which he did, with a gun. He killed four students, injured, seven others, and now is charged with murder and terrorism. On Friday, prosecutors brought other charges.

Prosecutor Karen McDonald: Based on the information and evidence I've received, today I'm announcing charges against the shooter's parents, Jennifer and James Crumbley. James Crumbley is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Jennifer Crumbley is also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Prosecutor Karen McDonald.

Prosecutor Karen McDonald: While the shooter was the one who entered the high school and pulled the trigger, there were other individuals who contributed to this, to the events on November 30th, and it's my intention to hold them accountable as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and today on The Takeaway, we start with the question of who is accountable for gun violence. With me now is Jonathan Metzl, Director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, and a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University. Jonathan, always good to have you with us.

Jonathan: Likewise.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Prosecutors filing these involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents, is that typical?

Jonathan: It is highly untypical. In fact, it's incredibly rare. There's a long line of different kinds of shootings where kids have either purchased handguns or rifles by their parents or pick up guns in the home and for over a decade now, there've been attempts to either prosecute or hold parents responsible. It's very rare, even in cases as egregious as this one. I'm glad this is happening. These are egregious and really, truly unconscionable efforts by the parents to put the guns in the hands of the perpetrator, but I think that we rarely see this kind of legal action.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, I'm sure that some of our listeners have heard why these steps were taken, but others may not have if they were having a busy weekend doing something else. Walk us through a little bit when you say this was egregious, what happened, in this case, to make this rare situation of a prosecutor feeling like the parents were not just neglectful, but maybe actually had some level of culpability here?

Jonathan: We've seen in the news that there were warning signs at the school, the shooter had been writing notes and searching for guns and ammunition, but you can pretty much guarantee that those warning signs were seen in tenfold at home and for a much longer period of time. In that context, the family went out and purchased a weapon for the shooter, a 15-year-old kid, they also took him for target practice, they bought him ammunition, they kept encouraging him.

Even at the time where he was caught searching for ammunition, the mother texted, "Just don't get caught next time," in a certain kind of way. We often hear it's the guy who drives the car as guilty as the guy who robs the bank. In this case, you can amplify that in a certain kind of way. They really did literally put the gun in his hands and the other important part of the information here is that there was a concern meeting at the school and the parents knew that they had purchased this weapon. To not alert school officials and refuse to take their son home and let him go back into class, I think was really the final kicker here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we narrow down to literally putting the guns in the hands, but I wonder when you make that metaphor about the guy who drives the car is as guilty as the person who themselves is committing the crime. How much are all of us driving the car? In other words, how much is there a broader social-cultural culpability here based on our gun culture and the ways that we have failed for decades to restrict access even to young people having guns?

Jonathan: That's exactly the point here. I certainly hope that out of this horrible tragedy comes some reasons, conversation about broader cultural culpability. Think about what we've done over the past decade and beyond. We've lowered the age of who can carry a gun, who can carry a concealed and open weapon, we've also broadened the realm of permissible shootings. We sell at the Rittenhouse case, 17-year-old kid, and when people feel threatened, they're justified firing weapons. In a way, we really have paved the road for this kind of abuse. Now, this is clearly a crime, but I think when you get into the question of, it's okay for younger people to carry a weapon and it's also permissible when you feel threatened for defensive use of a gun that there are so many cases that are nowhere near this egregious and I think that's part of the issue. That's one part of the question.

Then the other part is there's just a long history, as I mentioned before, of the lack of culpability. We've had cases in Tennessee where parents of kids under 10 left guns around that weren't put in a safe or no trigger locks and just the attempts to try to make parents responsible for the accidents of their kids is also, unfortunately, a long and failed history. We haven't done anything about that either.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We've seen this interestingly in very different kinds of circumstances around, for example, truancy and finding parents or holding parents responsible for truancy. Largely, that had gone out of vogue as a public policy, especially when we saw the ways in which it was really leveled against families of color and urban families and families living in poverty more so than for wealthy families. I'm wondering if this will bring back that narrative a bit.

Jonathan: I certainly think there's just a case even going a bit higher just who is seen as a patriot or a guardian and who's seen as a threat, who gets to carry a gun? Certainly, there's a larger racial politics just about gun ownership that I think is certainly important here. Then it's just interesting about, as you say, which parents are held accountable. That's why I think the charges are so important here in a particular way because there really is a bigger question and when we've debated for a long time, both about racial politics in the United States and also particularly about gun ownership and the responsibility of parents. I think there are so many layers here.

I think even at this endpoint of so many guns and so few laws, I do think it's so important that these charges are being brought now so that we can really think about the question of who's a guardian, who's a terrorist, in a particular way, and maybe try to change course a little bit.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, as we think about again broadening back the question of who might be responsible or who is culpable, you talked a bit about the school. Is there any possibility here that the school will also potentially be held accountable and that could have some consequences? Again, I always worry in cases as egregious if they end up setting a precedent that goes to a zero-tolerance policy that ends up having unintended consequences.

Jonathan: That's exactly right. I think the lesson for me of this case is just how much this is a system problem. You could have the most responsible school in the world and if the parents are buying their kid a weapon and encouraging ammunition, all these kinds of things, you really can't have a system that's going to be foolproof against something as unpredictable as this if the school and the parents and the community are not all working together.

I think the takeaway for me of this case is really that with this one weak link in that system, it's not full-proof. That being said, I do also worry. It seems to me like the school-- certainly, they are grieving about not taking the gun out of that backpack, not checking that backpack, letting that kid go back into the school. I don't want to say that it was a perfect planet by any way, but I would also say that the flip side, as you say, is that so many kids voice threats. So many kids play violent video games. Kids also reflecting their parents, search online for guns and ammo. That's just the world we live in today.

The question is where do you draw the line? Unfortunately, experts like psychiatrists like myself, like school counselors, they are not great at predicting which of the many kids that play video games, for example, are going to go on to commit real-life violence. I think the risk, as you say, is that there's a overcorrection in a particular way that really penalizes or surveils too many kids. Again, I think that in a way, really this is a system problem and it has to be looked at as such.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When we talk about systems, obviously, one important part of that system are the guns themselves. When young people were getting into Tylenol and having there were fatal consequences, the manufacturers of Tylenol had to change how you open and I just use Tylenol as a brand name to talk about medications in general. Medications now have safety locks that make it harder for kids to get into, I'm wondering if there is a culpability of the gun manufacturers themselves.

Jonathan: There is not, that's part of the issue is that we've seen safer cars when cars were killing people, we got more anti-lock breaks and better seatbelt laws. When cigarettes were killing people, we got anti-smoking legislation but gun manufacturers have been notoriously free from culpability for their products. The other issue as we were talking about before is that also the use of weapons. We had a case in Tennessee, it was called MaKayla Law. It was about 10 years ago, and there were parents who were just leaving their firearms around the home and I think, like an eight-year-old kid picked up the gun, took outside, and killed another kid who was under 10 years old.

It was a horrible, it was very reminiscent of the conversation we're having now, and everybody rallied on all sides and said, look, let's at least pass some laws that hold parents responsible for safe storage so that their kids don't pick up guns and kill other kids and I'll never forget we had about-- everybody on all sides of this debate was basically saying now is the time for change until the day before the vote was going to get taken in the Tennessee legislature, and the NRA flew in an army of lobbyists and the next morning everybody changed their vote. So holding gun manufacturers or parents or really anybody culpable for these events is a debate we've had before and, unfortunately, we've come up empty time again.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan, I wanted to ask you, in part, because we tend to focus on mass shootings, we barely even focus on them anymore but to the extent that the media about shootings the deaths of young people in that context. I'm just wondering if there's a way that we lose the actual larger count, the day-to-day gun violence death, that takes so many lives.

Jonathan: Every time something horrific like a high-profile mass shooting or school shooting happens, we all focus on how can we stop this one specific event, but we never look at the bigger picture which is the broader spectrum of gun violence and gun trauma in America. Most gun death is gun suicide. Two-thirds of gun death are gun is gun suicide, partner violence is really out of control and has been getting much worse over the course of the pandemic.

The frustrating part for me is that actually, those kinds of gun death are much more responsive to public health interventions and so, certainly, I think that we can't lose sight of the fact that there's just an everyday toll of gun death in this country and it's been, unfortunately, getting worse over the course of the pandemic not only as we've seen more shootings, but as we've sold unprecedented numbers of guns across this country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jonathan Metzl is Director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, and a professor of sociology and psychiatry. Jonathan, as always thank you so much for being here today.

Jonathan: Thanks so much.

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