Tag: The gun’s not in the closet’

Since 1999, children have committed at least 145 school shootings. Among the 105 cases in which the weapon’s source was identified, 80 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends.

Yet The Washington Post found that just four adults have been convicted for failing to lock up the guns used.
Now, after a deadly school shooting in Kentucky, a prosecutor must decide: Should the parent who owned the weapon be charged?

The gunfire had lasted less than 10 seconds, but now hidden behind locked doors all across the rural campus, teenagers wept and bled and prayed.

Police would soon swarm Marshall County High’s hallways on that chilly morning in January, and though the exact number of students who had been shot remained unknown for hours, it didn’t take investigators long to find the boy they believed had pulled the trigger. His name was Gabriel Parker, a sophomore whose family lived near the banks of Kentucky Lake. Before word spread that two were dead and 14 were wounded, a detective headed south, in search of the answer to a question:

Where had Parker, who was 15, gotten the gun?

Beneath a wind chime topped with a metal cross, Parker’s stepfather, Justin Minyard, opened the front door of their modest frame house, and the detective told him what had just happened. The 26-year-old’s stepson, police alleged, had opened fire on hundreds of students gathered in Marshall’s commons with a Ruger 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Minyard, according to court records, acknowledged that he kept one firearm in the home, stored in his bedroom closet. He walked back and checked the shelf.

His gun, Minyard told the detective, was gone.

In the hours that followed, police say, Parker confessed to his interrogators that getting the weapon was easy. It hadn’t been secured with a lock or sealed in a safe or even hidden somewhere secret. The night before the shooting, Parker explained, he carried a laundry basket to his parents’ bedroom closet. He reached up to a shelf and grabbed the pistol, which was inside a case, then stuffed it beneath the clothes. Parker also took at least two magazines, along with the bullets he needed, leaving behind more than 400 rounds of ammunition that police would later seize. The next morning, he put the handgun in his bag and rode with his mom to the school of 1,400 students, where at 7:57 a.m., police said, he fired the first round.

Since 1999, the shooters in at least 145 acts of gun violence at primary and secondary schools have been under the age of 18, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. Discussions about how to curb shootings at American schools have centered on arming teachers or improving mental health treatment, banning military-style rifles or strengthening background checks. But if kids as young as 6 did not have access to guns, The Post’s findings show, two-thirds of school shootings over the past two decades could not have happened.

While investigators don’t always determine — or publicly reveal — the weapons’ origins, The Post found 105 cases in which the source was identified. Of those, the guns were taken from a child’s home or those of relatives or friends 84 times. The Post discovered just four instances when the adult owners of the weapons were criminally punished because they failed to lock them up.

When Commonwealth Attorney Mark Blankenship took on the Parker prosecution, his focus was solely on ensuring that the teen would be tried as an adult, making him eligible to receive a life sentence. But the longer Blankenship thought about how Parker had gotten the weapon, the more it troubled him.

Parker wasn’t a hunter and didn’t hang out much with the high schoolers who were. The teen, a plump redhead who wore glasses, was quiet and shy. He had a small group of friends, mostly from Marshall’s marching band, in which he played the tuba. The teen couldn’t have persuaded another student, or anyone else, to give him a weapon without raising considerable suspicion, Blankenship concluded. To the prosecutor, that meant the only gun Parker could have used to ravage his high school was the one he took from his stepfather’s closet.

Like almost everyone he knows, Blankenship, 65, owns a firearm. It’s a shotgun his father passed down to him, and though he doesn’t keep shells for it and has never considered himself an enthusiast, he’s been around guns since birth. Blankenship also appreciates why someone would want to reach a weapon quickly during a break-in, so he researched gun safes online, and what he found were more than a dozen devices for under $250 that had been designed to securely store pistols — just like Minyard’s — and be opened in less than three seconds.

“That’s when it really hit me,” Blankenship said, “that this was so easily preventable.”

Gun rights are revered in Marshall County, a community of 31,000 where 3 in 4 voters backed Donald Trump in 2016. Generations of cattle, corn and tobacco farmers throughout this nearly all-white swath of countryside have long viewed their rifles and shotguns much the same way they do their rakes and shovels: essential tools that, on their own, could do no harm. In fact, many people still find it more unseemly to drink a beer in public— Marshall was dry until 2015 — than to wield an AR-15 rifle in public — legal in almost all of Kentucky thanks to its open-carry law.

Blankenship, in office since 2008, was on the verge of beginning his reelection campaign and knew that scrutinizing the pistol’s owner would be unpopular, but he just couldn’t shake how much trauma one gun in the hand of one 15-year-old had caused.

There were the teachers who’d been covered in their own students’ blood, the officers whose kids were begging them not to go back to work, the paramedic who could no longer stand large crowds, the young siblings of high schoolers who imagined they would be shot next, the two couples who had outlived their children, and the teenagers — so many that Blankenship couldn’t fit everyone’s parents into his office — who had bullet holes in their arms and legs and chests and stomachs and faces.

So, about a week after the shooting, in a meeting with investigators, the prosecutor finally said it out loud: “I’m seriously thinking about going after the stepfather.”………

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