The conversation on a recent night turned to active shooter drills, because a few of our kids had just gone through one at each of their schools.
“I just can’t imagine anything worse than our kids getting hurt like that at school,” one of my mom friends said.
“Well, maybe,” I posited, remembering the case of a 6-year-old boy in Virginia who took his mom’s gun to class and shot his teacher. “What if the shooter is your kid?”
This was the question searing every parent’s mind 25 years ago this month, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people and themselves at Columbine High School.
America wondered how their parents didn’t see this coming. Didn’t they creep their rooms and journals? Couldn’t they tell this was more than anodyne teen angst? And wait — should I stop my kid from wearing a trench coat?
Maybe this national reckoning was what supercharged a generation of helicopter parents.
“I would gladly have given my life to reverse what happened that day and yet I know that nothing I can do or say could ever atone for Dylan’s choices, choices that I have spent decades trying to understand,” Sue Klebold, mother of Dylan, wrote on the website for her memoir.
That mother wrestled with her own dread and the cocked eyebrows of her fellow Americans. But the Columbine parents never had to pay, legally, for their sons’ crimes.
Twenty-five years and nearly 400 school shootings later, the circle of responsibility surrounding this American atrocity is finally widening.
This year, Michigan juries decided it takes a village to raise a mass shooter. After those decisions, a judge this week sentenced the parents of a teen who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021 to at least a decade in prison for their failure to prevent — heck, let’s be honest, and their part in enabling — this mass killing.
The road to the massacre began on Black Friday, when the Crumbleys bought their 15-year-old son, Ethan, a 9mm handgun as an early Christmas present. Four days later, he used it to kill.
His parents had been warned. After a teacher saw Ethan searching for ammo on his phone during class and alerted school officials, the school reached out to Ethan’s mom, Jennifer.
“LOL, I’m not mad at you,” Mom texted her son in response. “You have to learn not to get caught.”
These parents are no different from the getaway drivers in a bank robbery. And bravo to the jury that recognized that.
The courts in Virginia came to the same conclusion last year, slamming Deja Taylor with convictions on federal gun charges after her 6-year-old swiped a gun from her handbag and took it to school.
Virginia stretched that arc of accountability even further this week to include a school official in that case, who a grand jury concluded had failed to act on warnings about the boy and his behavioral problems. Two years before the shooting, he tried to choke another teacher.
And in the days before he fired the handgun, Taylor’s son broke his teacher’s cellphone after grabbing it from her and called her an expletive, with no substantial consequences.
In January 2023, with his classmates looking on, the child pulled his mom’s gun from his jacket pocket and shot Abigail Zwerner from less than six feet away.
“Ms. Zwerner looked down to see a pool of blood forming,” the special grand jury impaneled in Newport News wrote in the report it released this week. “The child continued to stare at her, not changing his emotional facial expression as he tried to shoot again.”
His size, ironically, saved lives that day. Seven bullets stayed in the magazine and 16 children were physically uninjured (though their mental scars from seeing the shooting may last a lifetime) because his weak pull on the trigger jammed the gun on the first shot, according to the grand jury report.
The signs of trouble were clear at school, the jurors decided, and they indicted the school’s assistant principal, Ebony Parker, on eight charges of child abuse. And that may be a legal precedent.
We’ve had hundreds of school shootings since the Columbine massacre reset our nation’s tolerance for gun-fueled bloodshed. It came and went, and no meaningful federal gun restrictions have taken hold in the decades since.
The biggest incidents sent us diving deep for answers and have provided a trail of warning signs and red flags that may seem confounding, but are nevertheless important to heed.
Eventually, patterns emerge after a quarter-century: easy access to guns, violent outbursts, warning signs such as deranged sketches and manifestos.
Ignoring those signs is negligent — criminally, now. And that’s exactly how it should be. The courts were right to convict the Crumbleys and Taylor. Parker’s indictment is an important message to send to school administrators who may be too quick to dismiss the messy process of discipline.
But we, too, are accountable, when we don’t insist on common-sense gun laws, when we reduce legitimate debate to T-shirt slogans and when we fail to respect machines whose only purpose is to kill with chilling efficiency. Some of this blood is on our hands.
It takes a village to stop mass shooters, too.
