Parental responsibility

Heather Mac Donald writes,

On December 3, a district attorney in Michigan filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of Ethan Crumbley. The 15-year-old Crumbley allegedly killed four fellow students during a shooting rampage at his Oxford, Michigan high school on November 30. The prosecutor based her indictment of Crumbley’s parents on the fact that they had allowed Ethan to access a legally purchased handgun and ought to have known that the boy was primed to kill his classmates. The press, Democratic politicians, and gun control advocates greeted the homicide charges against the Crumbley parents with ecstatic approbation.

When black juveniles perpetrate street violence, the press and public officials almost never ask: where were the parents? The less involved a parent is in a child’s life, the less society expects of him. These double standards may have a benign intent, but they enable a cultural dysfunction whose effects are thousands of times more lethal than school shootings.

Eighty-eight percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks is committed by blacks against whites, yet only in those rare instances of white-on-black crime will the race of the assailant be reported. Coverage of the killing of six holiday celebrants at a Wisconsin Christmas parade on November 21 by a man who plowed his car into the crowd faded out after the police released the suspect’s identity: Darrell Brooks is black (and on the record as anti-white). Had a white person (let alone one with such a trail of racial animosity) driven into a Martin Luther King Day celebration, the round-the-clock coverage would have lasted for weeks.

These double standards help no one. Society should have a colorblind norm of parental responsibility and of the duty to obey the law. If the Crumbley parents are found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, there are many more parents out there whose passivity in the face of likely lawlessness deserves equally strict scrutiny.

Read the whole thing here: https://www.city-journal.org/school-shootings-color-coded-parenting-standard-of-the-media