THE NEW YORK TIMES: The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-millimeter Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” Ethan Crumbley, 15, called it.

The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed.

“LOL I’m not mad at you,” Jennifer Crumbley texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

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