Shooting

• The Illinois effort is the first phase of a planned multi-state campaign called "Pause to Heal."
• "The State of Illinois is fortunate to partner with Brady and the Ad Council to launch a one-of-a-kind public health campaign educating the public on the importance of firearm restraining orders.
• "Illinois has two very effective tools, the Firearm Restraining Order and Clear and Present Danger reporting.
• "A Firearm Restraining Order gives a person in crisis time to heal," says one billboard.

• Both Crumbley parents have pleaded not guilty to four counts each of involuntary manslaughter.
• Jennifer Crumbley faces a maximum prison sentence of 60 years and maximum fines of US$30,000.
• Another victim was shot a second time after she was down, Rowe said, “to finish the job by shooting her again.”

Were the parents responsible?

Many were surprised when the Crumbleys, were charged for their alleged role in the tragedy. Criminal law, unlike civil law, is less likely to hold defendants liable for the actions of a third party, even if that third party is the defendant’s child. This is because in criminal law defendants face incarceration and the associated stigma that comes with a conviction.

• In the rare instances that parents of school shooters are prosecuted, they were normally charged with crimes such as child abuse, child neglect and the failure to properly secure a firearm.
• The charge lodged against the Crumbleys, involuntary manslaughter, also known as gross negligent homicide, was even more uncommon.
• In 2000, Jamelle James, a Michigan resident, pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter for leaving his handgun in a shoebox in his bedroom.
• Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald has taken direct aim at Crumbley’s parents.

‘Egregious’ behavior

• To prove the parents’ gross negligence, the prosecution relied on a series of alleged facts.
• Among the most central facts was that the Crumbleys bought their son the handgun as a Christmas present and later took him to target practice.
• Neither parent informed the school that they had bought the gun and that their son had access to it.

• “It takes the unthinkable, and she has done the unthinkable, and because of that, four kids have died,” McDonald said.
• Though the prosecution’s case appeared compelling, Shannon Smith, Crumbley’s defense attorney, had some very strong counterarguments.
• As Smith asked in her closing defense argument, “Can every parent really be responsible for everything their children do, especially when it’s not foreseeable?”

Changing the laws

• The same cannot be said for Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 years old at the time of the shootings.
• That federal proposal became part of a state legislative package
  signed into law April 13, 2023, by Michigan Gov.
• The new laws took effect on Jan. 1, 2024.
• Editor’s note: Some material used in this story was originally published on Dec. 20, 2021.

Thaddeus Hoffmeister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Juniper Landscaping (“Juniper”) today announced it has acquired Shooter and Lindsey, Inc., a leading landscaping maintenance and installation provider serving the greater Houston, TX market.
• Juniper’s partnership with Shooter and Lindsey represents Juniper’s first acquisition outside of the state of Florida and brings the Company to a total of 26 branch locations.
• “We are thrilled to be partnering with the Juniper team to continue scaling our business in Houston and other Texas markets.
• “Partnering with Shooter provides Juniper with an excellent opportunity to build a platform for further expansion across Texas,” said Brandon Duke, CEO of Juniper.

• Mass shootings tend to dominate the debate over gun violence – but they accounted for just 3% of all firearm homicides in the United States in 2021.
• The vast majority of gun homicides are murders that happen in an extremely concentrated number of neighborhoods – places where the rate of gun deaths rivals war zones.

Concentrated disadvantage

• These same neighborhoods tend to suffer from what criminologists call concentrated disadvantage – an unsavory mix of high crime rates, illegal drug markets, poverty, limited educational and economic opportunities, and residential instability.
• Cumulatively, these factors decrease the residents’ ability to maintain public order and safety in the ways that safer neighborhoods do informally by confronting violent behavior or supervising teenagers.
• The demographics of these neighborhoods means that both victims and perpetrators of shootings are disproportionately young Black men.
• Young Black men represented 93.9% of firearm-related homicide victims in Chicago and 79.3% of gun homicides in Philadelphia – where young Hispanic men make up another 12.9%.

How we did this work

• Our paper is published in JAMA Network Open, an open-source medical journal, and is freely available to read.
• We first collected all publicly available city-level data on shooting deaths, including the time, exact place and information about the victim.
• Our study focused on Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago because they were the largest American cities with public data available.

In military zones

For the military casualties, we relied on the estimates from studies of the mortality of U.S. soldiers at war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Afghan War was deadlier, with 395 deaths of U.S. combatants per 100,000 people per year, compared with 330 in Iraq. We used the higher rate from the Afghan War as our reference, setting its value as 1 and expressing the homicide rate in other places in relationship to this benchmark.

How places compare

• The violence of these city streets was captured by sociologist Elijah Anderson in his ethnographic study “Code of the Street,” published in 2000.
• During 2020 and 2021, this ZIP code was home to about 2,500 young men.
• Young men living there were 3.23 times more likely to die from a bullet than U.S. service members deployed to Afghanistan.
• Moreover, survivors of this violence bear the burden of it for the whole time they live in these neighborhoods.

Complicating the narrative

• Answering them can better help us understand the limitations of our study.
• For example, many service members do not engage in active combat.
• The brigade had a casualty rate 1.71 times higher than our benchmark.
• It is also worth noting that we studied two particularly violent years in U.S. cities.

Faster care could help

Our research also showed that soldiers who are injured on the battlefield are less likely to die from their wounds than people shot in the American cities we studied. Surviving a wound is more likely if medical help is immediate. This suggests two ideas to decrease shooting deaths: train more police officers to provide urgent basic medical treatment to the victims of gun violence and add capacity to trauma centers near violent neighborhoods.
Alex Knorre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.