by Lavinia Kumar
The first parents convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison Tuesday as a Michigan judge lamented missed opportunities that could have prevented their teenage son from possessing a gun and killing four students in 2021. —AP, April 10, 2024
The judge says,
These convictions confirm
repeated acts, or lack of acts,
that could have halted
an oncoming runaway train—
the parents who’d purchased
the weapon,
the unstable son who had killed
with the weapon,
the genocide in Gaza
the US and UK giving
the weapons
repeatedly,
the unstable Israel which kills
with weapons,
repeatedly,
a runaway train
that could have been halted.
Will anyone be convicted?
Lavinia Kumar’s latest book is Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists—very short prose of near 90 amazing women writers, poets, publishers, painters, artists, abolitionists, early suffragettes, and activists.