Proving Criminality

WE ARE UNITED BY SENTIMENT, SUNDERED BY OPINION, said the always percipient Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Our currently universal, united sentiment is our fondest hope that the parents of the "alleged" teenaged killer of four will be held accountable for their role in providing society with a killer, and will be incarcerated for a long time. It does not seem presumptuous to presume that all of us share this sentiment. Our sundered opinion is whether this will in fact happen, and, if so, how. The lady in charge of prosecuting the case reflects our outrage. Her outrage, she says, is as a prosecutor, a citizen, and a parent. As citizens, we are all outraged. She calls them "criminals", but does not say exactly what crime they are guilty of commiting, or how she intends to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The parents of the child turned killing machine are crimnals, and must be confronted with justice. Ominously, she doesn't say exactly how. Assuming they end up in court charged with involuntary homicide, exactly how will it be demonstrated that they are in fact guilty of this? Precisely what law or laws did they break? They purchased a powerful handgun, evidently quite legally. They gave it to their son, which is not illegal. They failed to placed the weapon in a secure, locked location, which is risky and stupid, but not illegal. They were seeingly oblivious of the fact that the kid took the gun without parental permmission, put it in his back pack, and went to school with it. No parental crime there, but only parental irresponsible idiocy. When the kid's school warned the parents of their son's alarming behavior prior to his killing spree, they did nothing about it. They evidently ignored the warnings, and did nothing about it. All reprehensible, stupid, immoral, irresponsible. But, exactly what law did they break? Or did they violate any laws? It is not illegal to be poor parents. Can it be proven that they were "accessories to a crime" when they could claim that they had no intention of aiding and abetting criminal activity? Whether they are represented by a public defender of by a world class criminal defense attorney, these questions are obvious, and must obviously be asked and answered. It is to be hoped that it can be established in open court that they were beyond a doubt negligent. The novelist Truman Capote held the belief that there is no such thing as crimes commited by individuals, but that all criminal activity is the collectve responsibility of society, and that society en toto is responsible for and guilty of all crimes commited by its members, and that placing blame upon individuals for crimes commited is merely a matter of expediency, not fact. This is the theme of his seminal nineteen sixties novel "In cold blood". It could probably be more easily proven that our entire society is negligent than any one person is or two people are, and that no one person is quantitatively any more or less guilty than any other, of any crime. For if the parents enabled the killer, society enabled the parents.