Sadly, the spree killer of four people in Oxford, Michigan will be charged as an adult but will be defended for a variety of reasons, perhaps including pubescent urges and a libertarian spin on what his step-mom called the costs of “getting caught”.
The killer wrote explicit threats on an answer sheet, drew a picture of a weapon, (and wrote “The thoughts won’t stop, help me”), What’s worse was that after he was disciplined, he wasn’t separated from the school population immediately and was allowed to retrieve a gun brought illegally onto the premises.
Perhaps those same folks who supported the assassination threats on the state’s governor will protest at his trial for a defense of the accused killer’s sense of irony about using a gun after being disciplined for writing about them. Today there were copycat gun threats in Michigan schools.
In the case of Alec Baldwin, he’s claimed that he didn’t pull the trigger of the gun that wounded one and killed another on a movie set. He claimed that he was practicing drawing the gun when it went off. Likely this is a legal defense that blames the weapon rather than the operator for the misfire. Ultimately the situation determines the reality.
One 1980s essay on Claes Oldenberg’s “pop art” public sculpture criticized such sculpture on the grounds that because they challenged the canon of memorialized figurative public sculpture. The modern, post-war impulses that also condoned Jim Crow sculpture also supported a type of “light” pornography. Like Justice Stewart, do we know it when we see it.
Symbolic violence is not identical to actual violence, yet claims about the media effects of its violence make that mistake. What seems endemic in the history of firearms accidents is that children don’t recognize that difference effectively.
The literalness of art therapy’s interpretive methods might easily conclude that any child drawing guns might be predisposed to using one. However, there seems to be little uniform direction on how educators might handle such activity as expression and not threats.
(2007) Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.
"My son is a very good boy [who] doesn't get into trouble," the boy's mother, Paula Mosteller, told CBS affiliate KPHO correspondent Mary Valenzuela. "There was nothing on the paper that would signify that it was a threat of any form."
"He was just basically doodling and not thinking a lot about it."
www.cbsnews.com/…
(2020) A 12-year-old boy in Colorado Springs was suspended from school for five days for playing with a toy gun during a virtual art class – an infraction that resulted in Grand Mountain school sending a police officer to the pupil’s home.
The boy’s parents, Curtis Elliott Jr and Dani Elliott, say the police visit terrified them and put their son Isaiah in danger.
“I never thought, ‘You can’t play with a Nerf gun in your own home because somebody may perceive it as a threat and call the police on you,’” Dani Elliott told the Washington Post.
Isaiah Elliot was not charged but he now has an entry on his disciplinary record saying he brought a “facsimile of a firearm to school”, and a record with the El Paso county sheriff’s office. Another boy who was studying at Elliott’s house was also reportedly suspended.
Dani Elliott accused school administrators of acting irresponsibly, given police violence against Black people that has caused protests across the US.
“With the cultural events going on right now, especially for young African Americans, you calling the police and telling them that he could have a gun, you put his life in jeopardy,” she said.
In a statement on Facebook, the school said it could not provide details on what happened during the class on 27 August, three days into a remote learning semester.
“We never have or ever will condone any form of racism or discrimination,” the statement said. “Safety will always be number one for our students and staff. We follow board policies and safety protocols consistently, whether we are in-person or distance learning.”
According to the Elliotts, the art teacher emailed them to say she had notified the vice-principal that her son was distracted and playing with a fake gun. The parents assured the teacher it was a toy gun, they said, sharing a photo of the “Zombie Hunter” in question, and said Isaiah would be dissuaded from displaying it in future.
www.theguardian.com/...
In Oxford Michigan, it does seem more likely that the firearm was bought for the killer by his father as an early Xmas gift. The Sig-Sauer SP2022 has interchangeable grips for smaller hands.
His mom wrote to his son, "LOL. I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught."
James Crumbley purchased the weapon days before the shooting, according to the sheriff. McDonald told reporters that James Crumbley brought the suspect, Ethan Crumbley, with him to the store.
Under Michigan law, an involuntary manslaughter charge can be pursued if prosecutors believe someone contributed to a situation in which harm or death was high. If convicted, they could face up to 15 years in prison.
Ethan Crumbley, 15, has been charged as an adult with two dozen crimes, including murder, attempted murder and terrorism, in the shooting Tuesday at Oxford High School in Oakland County, roughly 30 miles north of Detroit.
In an appearance on NBC News NOW, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said Thursday that it is "clearly a crime" if someone gives a firearm to a minor.
In a separate appearance on MSNBC, the top prosecutor in Oakland County said Thursday that the teen appeared to have “free access” to the gun.
“If you own a weapon or possess a weapon and you knowingly allow someone to have free access to it, who you have reason to believe might use it to injure somebody, that is willful and it’s gross negligence, and there are lots of criminal consequences for that,” McDonald previously said.
www.nbcnews.com/…
Ever since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School, the parents of children who commit school shootings have come under scrutiny over missed warning signs and whether they should bear some blame. But they are rarely held criminally responsible in the raw aftermath of a school shooting, even though many underage attackers arm themselves with guns from home.
But in an extraordinary news conference, Ms. McDonald recounted a nearly minute-by-minute litany of missed opportunities to intervene — including how the suspect’s parents had been alerted to a disturbing drawing he made containing violent images and a plea for help just hours before the shooting.
“I am in no way saying that an active shooter situation should always result in a criminal prosecution against parents, but the facts of this case are so egregious,” Ms. McDonald said.
“I’m angry as a mother, I’m angry as a prosecutor, I’m angry as a person that lives in this county, I’m angry,” she added. “There were a lot of things that could have been so simple to prevent.”
On the morning of Tuesday’s shooting, the suspect’s parents were urgently called to Oxford High School after one of his teachers found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot, a laughing emoji and the words “Blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”
School officials told the parents during the in-person meeting that they were required to seek counseling for their son, Ethan, Ms. McDonald said. The teenager’s parents did not want their son to be removed from school that day, and did not ask him whether he had the gun with him or search the backpack he brought with him to the office, Ms. McDonald said.
“The notion that a parent could read those words and also know their son had access to a deadly weapon, that they gave him, is unconscionable, and I think it’s criminal,” she said.
As Oldenburg uses it, “ray gun” is a semiotic experiment, an exercise in sensational pattern matching. The script of ray gun is applied to all objects. Like an artificial intelligence algorithm seeking out patterns, Oldenburg’s script treats everything as a ray gun and then provides a range of ray guns. Every ray gun is a ray gun but some are more ray gun than others. Yve-Alain Bois quotes Oldenburg in Formless A User’s Guide: “Examples: Legs, Sevens, Pistols, Arms, Phalli-Simple Ray Guns. Double Ray Guns: Cross, Airplanes, Absurd Ray Guns: Ice Cream Sodas. Complex Ray Guns: Chairs, Beds.” Bois explains:
“…Oldenburg made huge numbers of ray guns (in plaster, in papier-mache, in all kinds of materials, in fact), but he soon saw that he didn’t even need to make them: the world was full of ray guns. All one has to do is stoop to gather them from sidewalks…Even better he did not even need to collect them himself: he could ask his friends to bring them to him (he accepted or refused a find, based on purely subjective criteria).” (Bois, 176)
Was Oldenburg’s criteria for the potential ray guns brought by his friends purely subjective or was he running a more complex decision script that mimicked a certain subjectivity? The following mix of screen-written and computer script, including a reworked “for each” loop from a web log (Rich), is a fictional approach to a possible scenario for Oldenburg’s choices…
collectingseminar.wordpress.com/...