Responsibility

I've just been reading a piece in this week's FT Weekend Magazine about the case of Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old from Michigan, who perpetrated a mass shooting at his school in the small town of Oxford, just outside of Detroit, in November 2021. A depressed teenager, who was quiet and normally no trouble, he had been exhibiting, had they been recognised as such, signs of fairly obvious psychosis. His parents, too wrapped up in their own messy lives, largely left him to his own devices, and ignored the signs of his gradual mental deterioration. In fairness, most teenagers exhibit some - to their parents - odd behaviour as they struggle to find their identity and come to terms with puberty and impending adulthood; as any parent knows full well, but:

Of course, this particular scenario played out in America, and in a State where gun ownership and use is particularly popular and encouraged. Also, his parents, keen to indulge Ethan in at least one of his interests, guns and shooting, regularly took him to their local range. His father, keen to please him with an early Christmas present that November, took him to a local gun store, where they bought a Sig Sauer 9mm semi automatic pistol. They signed an obligatory document that they understood that the law forbade the sale of arms to or on behalf of a minor and drove home. Several days later, Ethan walked the halls of his school carrying out a plan of action that had obsessed him - to commit a mass shooting - and be convicted, notorious, and be incarcerated for life as a result.

He pleaded guilty at trial and was sentenced accordingly. But then, his parents were arrested and tried with involuntary manslaughter on the grounds of their negligent parenting and failure to prevent the atrocity from happening. It's easy to argue - especially living in the UK - that buying a 9mm combat pistol for your teenage son's Christmas present is actually rather negligent in and of itself, let alone that it's actually illegal in the state of Michigan, anyway. The fact that the weapon was stored in the house un-securely further compounds the criminally lax parenting accusation.

Where should the buck stop? Should it be with the boy who did the shooting? Should it be with his largely disengaged parents? Should it be with the gun store owner that sold the gun, probably in the full knowledge that it was intended for the boy? Should it be with the state legislature for allowing such loose practices to prevail within their purview and jurisdiction? Or should it stop with the American Constitution itself, its Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association, and the US arms industry - or indeed with successive governments which lie supine before the former? Like all schools Stateside these days, Ethan's operates with a permanent police presence and under an emergency code of practice that seems frankly perverse to a UK resident of my generation.

My point is that although a good number of modern society's institutions are publicly risk averse, they do little save give lip-service - the gun shop owner ticking his legal box and covering his arse, for instance - to its actual mitigation in real terms. Anyone who has actually worked for a large organisation or company in the last thirty years will be familiar with the scenario of Health & Safety 'training' actually amounting to merely sitting someone down in front of a laptop and ensuring they achieve some nominal pass score just to tick the box that ensures that they as an individual now bear full responsibility for whatever unforeseen accident might happen in the future, and thereby exonerating the larger entity from culpability. That many organisations turn a blind eye to, and often encourage, cheating in such quizzes, in order that a manager's stats achieve the desired figures, often resulting in bonuses; simply shows that culpability and ultimately, responsibility are, more often than not, legally hedged; as we have seen played out in spades on the stage of the Post Office Scandal enquiry.

The fact is that blame should never be laid at the feet of the most vulnerable in what is inevitably a convoluted and complex chain of human fallibility, deliberate or otherwise, simply to cover the backsides of those higher up the food chain for their own stupidity, disengagement or venality. Hopefully, here in the UK we have at last turned a corner towards more responsible and overarching risk management and governance in the form of the new Labour government; and towards a society where everyone takes their part in exercising the responsibilities we all have for one other. It feels positive thus far: let's make it work, eh?