Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Elisa star, Elisa star. Rubber mouth. Breathtaking. So bizarre. Elisa star, Lisa star. She's your friend.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: I love Court tv. Not judge duty, but, like, long ass actual trials. I watched the Emily D. Baker talk about trials. She's a prosecutor. She has her own YouTube show. And I wade through objections and citations and new laws, and I think about what's admissible in court. I love that shit. Partly because I started watching Perry Mason at six years old, but partly also because I grew up in California, and California is ruled by lawsuits, just by existing California for 24 years. I accidentally ended up in three or four lawsuits. And I honestly think I'm forgetting a few. In a lot of ways, it's great, because when you quit or are fired in California, your employer has to have your last check in your hand by the end of that week.
Usually they hand it to you by the end of day.
If they don't, you can report them. And because of some lawsuit, it fucks their shit up, and it's just not worth it. So you always know that you're gonna get your full check regardless of how things end with an employer. And I was amazed when I got to Oregon and Washington and saw that employers just keep that last check depending on their mood, with no repercussions because of a lawsuit. In California, you're not responsible for any damage to the carpet in your apartment if you've lived there for more than a year. There are a lot of good protections that were put into place in California because of a lawsuit. And I'm not saying all lawsuits are good. I'm saying some of them are. And you can't grow up in California without a pretty good understanding of the law.
Now, I got super sucked into the Oxford shooter mom's trial.
None of my favorite court tv junkies covered it, but I just couldn't stop watching. I listened to watched 8 hours of testimony, and I watch it on like two times so super fast.
So it was like 16 hours worth of testimony, really.
By the end of that trial, I knew they'd send her to jail because she's his mother. We as a public want someone to blame, and legally, we aren't allowed to blame gun manufacturers, so parents it is.
I know you don't remember this one because America has more mass shooters than days of the year. We have so many mass shootings. They are the definition of american culture. That and long ass rite aid receipts. So this shooting itself was similar to a lot of school shootings.
They all jumbled together for me in a shame cloud. So I don't blame you for not remembering. The difference is the events leading up to this shooting and this trial.
This time, we blame the shooter and his parents. So let me recap it for you. It was 2021.
The kid, Ethan, is 15 years old. He'd been depressed, and not just for pando reasons. His only friend had just been sent to a mental institution. His dog had just died. His grandmother had just died. His parents, who had already been investigated for neglect two different times in his life, registered that he wasn't okay, like. But they didn't try to help him. His mom texted his best friend's mom about it, but their solution was always to buy him a new gun and then go to the barn to drink by themselves with their horses.
A month before he shot up the school, he started his teacher things. He texted both his parents, telling them over and over again that there were demons in the house, and he was scared to be home alone because they kept throwing things at him. The parents would come home and get pissed because there was a mess.
He also asked them several times if he could see a doctor at least once that made his mom laugh.
I don't know why. She's never said why. She was on the stand for hours, and no one asked her why she didn't get him help, which is, like, 90% of the reason why she's on trial. So I'm guessing that where she asked that question, she wouldn't have a great answer. But, I mean, that's the disadvantage of not watching that, not asking her that question. Maybe she just had a shitty attorney. She did have a shitty attorney. It was very difficult to watch.
He told his counselor, Ethan, her son, that he'd almost called 911 because he was suicidal and scared of his hallucinations. But he knew that his parents would get mad at him, so he didn't.
Neither parents were interested in getting him help or helping him themselves. At no point do they address him seeing demons.
When that happened, they'd come home, get pissed at him because of the mess, give him sleeping pills, telling him, tell him to get his shit together, and then just went on about their business.
His mom said that they're big jokers in their family. So when he said he was scared to be alone because he was worried the demons wouldn't get him, she thought he was joking.
Here's the thing.
If someone I like texts me that they're not doing okay, they can't be in their house because the demons are throwing things at them. I'm fucking worried. Like, if that's a joke, okay, let the joke be on me. I'm gonna take you fucking seriously. If they're like, I need to see a doctor, I'd be like, fuck yeah, let's go. I'll go with you. If you really love them, you go to their house to like, help keep the demons at bay. So I don't understand why his parents weren't giving him that very basic care that I would give a friend or a stranger I'm fond of.
And whether Ethan made up the demons or his breakdown was real. He needed the fucking help and attention.
He definitely needed them to lock up their guns, or better yet, get rid of them. But on the day of the shooting, his school counselor called his parents into school to tell them that he was worried that their son was suicidal. He'd seen Ethan's math teacher, had seen him drawing the shooting he was about to embark on on a math worksheet. So the math teacher sent him to the counselor. And that school counselor then spent 2 hours talking to Ethan. And he said on the stand that he didn't want to let Ethan out of his sight. Ethan was a danger to himself. He was suicidal.
And just being there with Ethan made him sad because of how sad Ethan was. And in that meeting, the parents walked in, didn't hug their kid or express any interest in getting him help.
The counselor said, ideally he doesn't go back to class. Ideally, you take him right now. And here is a list of mental institutions that can take him right now because I'm worried that he will hurt himself.
They made it clear, his parents that they weren't taking Ethan home with them. And they weren't taking Ethan to therapy that day. Maybe not at all.
So the counselor went out and tried to talk to the rest of the staff to see if they could keep Ethan out of class because he was worried Ethan would try to self harm. But there wasn't a disciplinary reason to keep him or to search him at that time, so they didn't.
My parents didn't like me very much, but if a stranger or school counselor told them I was suicidal, they get scared. They'd hug me.
They'd want us to talk about it. They'd want to find out if it was true.
We'd go home or out to lunch somewhere after that appointment. They'd probably be pissed at me for making them look at bad parents. That might even be the whole reason that they were sad or angry. But then when we got home, they'd look around and they count the fucking knives because a dead daughter looks a fuck of a lot worse and is ultimately a fuck of a lot more inconvenient than one struggling with suicidal ideation.
I know because at 15, I angrily knocked all of my breakable knickknacks off my dresser, smashing them against the wall and a satisfying tinkling of glass.
I never received anything breakable again.
They taunted me about my anger problem, but they also made sure to keep the glass out of my way. And this kid's parents were not that future thinking. They refused to take him to a doctor after he'd asked them several times.
The mother, like I said, never asked why she never took him to a counselor or why she got him a gun instead of counseling. But the way she talked about her kid, she didn't really have to say it outright. Every part of her son annoyed the fuck out of her. She called him an oopsie baby. Publicly for most of his life. She complained to co workers that she wished he, quote unquote, was normal. And she thought he was weird and gross.
Taking him to the doctor was just another pain in our ass. Like getting to know him and spending time with him.
In this meeting, the kid had the guns in his bag right there. The bullets were rattling in his pockets.
He said at his trolley. Thought they would search him. And he was relieved. He was fucking relieved. He didn't want to shoot up the school. But none of his cries for help had worked.
His mom said it never occurred to him that he would hurt anybody else. She always just assumed he'd hurt himself. And she was okay with that.
He could have gone back to class, gone to the bathroom, broken a mirror and bled out before anyone found him. And she sent him back to class. With that being a distinct possibility, she and her husband were okay with him maybe unaliving himself at school. The school counselors couldn't figure out what else to do. Usually when you say someone you love wants to unalive themselves, people spring into action. Even fake action. Hugs, therapy, tea, apologies, intense listening. They didn't expect the parents to be like, huh, sucks to be him. This meeting is hella inconvenient for me. I gotta get back.
So right afterwards, Ethan goes back to class. But he doesn't. He goes to his locker, he loads the guns.
So she goes back to work, complains to her coworkers that she's failed as a mom before. She finds out there's an active shooter at Ethan's school.
Then she calls her husband to check their armory. He says all the bullets are gone.
She texted him. Ethan don't do it on the stand, she said. I wish he'd unalived us instead. But what she meant was, it would have been fine if he'd only unalived himself.
She said, he ruined a lot of lives. She was clearly talking about herself and feeling sorry for herself, which is true. Ethan did ruin her life. But she ruined his first. He'd written in some other disturbing journal entries. My family was a mistake.
And from the way his parents acted, that's what they believed. But none of that neglect makes a mass murderer. And you know what does? A weapon of war.
She was a terrible mother. I can't find any reports of her comforting Ethan or offering him emotional support.
She didn't like him. She didn't want to take care of him. She didn't feel responsible for keeping him alive. And the only interest she showed in him or his ideas were when they went to the gun range.
So when his interests crossed over with hers.
Which is also probably why, instead of killing himself, unaliving himself, Ethan shot as many people as he could in the face.
Look, mom, you paying attention now?
Out of the hundreds of shootings in the last three years, I remember this story because for a day or two, it looked like his parents were on the run. They'd emptied their bank account.
They lived in a small town, and it was only $4,000 that they had in their bank account because most of us don't have that much in our bank accounts. And it just sounded like a stupid ass move to me. Like it's not 4000, I didn't think was gonna take her very far.
Or her husband.
The cops found them at a friend's house because she and her husband were getting death threats at their house. They did live in a small town. They weren't running from the police, she explained on the stand. But she couldn't go home while there were reporters and a public who fucking hated her and her family camped out at her house. Her kid had just murdered a lot of people in that small town. She was afraid that they'd be murdered as well. So she and her husband took the money out of their accounts so they could get a place to sleep. They were worried their bank accounts would get frozen and they needed to buy food.
Those were the moments I felt for her, the human moments, when she was explaining to you what it's like to be related to a mass murderer in a small town.
Because that could happen to any of us.
You don't control all of the people you're related to. But then when she described her son or actions and her relationship with him in the months before his murder spree. I found my empathy just running out. Even after listening to 9 hours of testimony, fast forwarded testimony, I was surprised at just how shitty of a mom she is. And I just kept having to pinch myself, like remind myself that's not what creates this school shooter. The key is in the name school shooter.
A gun turned this kid into school shooter. Because if he hadn't had a gun, he wouldn't have been a school shooter, he would have been a school kid, he would have still been depressed, he would have still needed help, and he might have still unalived himself. But guns are the easiest way to unalive. Pretty much anything else he could have tried might have given him a chance to be saved and would have saved the lives of the other people in the school.
He might have still done it in a traumatizing manner, but he would have been able to carry out his mom's wish and only on alive himself.
In the nineties, in high school, guns weren't in the equation. I knew kids going through all those things. They did drugs, they self harmed, they bullied, they got bullied, they got tattoos, they drank too much, they fought with other kids, there were knives, they fought with teachers, there were graffitis.
The thing is, though, it's really fucking hard to stab a group of people to death. Even in a knife fight, the maximum people you hurt is usually two.
It's harder still to beat a group of people to death. And all of the things that you go through as a kid get more deadly when you add a gun to them.
Guns are the key to mass murder. Take guns out of this equation and you still have a kid having a mental breakdown, hearing voices, hallucinating, wanting him to unalive himself. It's still scary, it's still upsetting, but it's manageable. It's possible to fix a massacre, isn't this is my first podcast for a year. I kind of thought I was done with it. It was a vanity project. It cost me time and money to make it put a lot of time and worry into writing words that I wasn't sure anyone even heard. But then this company, magic mind, contacted me and said they wanted to sponsor me. And it took me a few months to say yes. I wasn't sure I had any long form essay like ideas in me anymore. But then this trial gripped me, and I had this old, that old elisa feeling, like I knew what we could do to fix it. I know how to make this horrible thing a little bit better. And now somebody wants to sponsor me so I can tell you how.
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Thought of the day. Thoughtoftheday and use the code thought of the day to get that 20% off or 56% off a subscription. And now I'll tell you my solution.
Now I will tell you my solution. It's actually not my solution. It's actually a California solution, ironically. Okay, first things first. Fingerprint scan for guns, gun manufacturers. The NRA and politicians banded together over the last 30 years to create laws so that it is illegal to sue gun manufacturers.
That's right.
The NRA and gun manufacturers have paid our representatives a lot of money to make sure it's illegal to sue them. It's a 2005 protection of Lawful Commerce and Arms act, or PLCAA, gives immunity to gun makers so they can't be held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons, Adam Winkler, a law professor of the University of California, Los Angeles, told the AP in an email. He said Congress feared liability could put firearms sellers and manufacturers out of business. This is a federal statue. That means it's a national law. Did you. Did you hear that part? We could put firearms sellers and manufacturers out of business by suing them. It's possible, and they knew it, so they gave themselves immunity in this law. That law is only 19 years old. So we could kill it. It's only been around for 19 years. You know what else is 19 years old? An uptick in school shootings.
We could stop that.
And they know it, which is why it's possible for us, if we made the law 19 years ago, it's possible for us to unmake the law now.
It's a federal statute, but that doesn't mean we can't change it.
Now, I know what you're thinking, because I've had this conversation with a lot of people.
The law says they can't be held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons.
As a Californian, I like to parse my words like a fucking lawyer. And misuse of the weapons is an interesting phrase, because the thing is, is that I would like a gun manufacturer to say that this weapon was created to kill a lot of people, and that's what it did in a court of law to defend their position, because that's fucked up and obviously not what we want these guns to be used for. If you ever hear a gun manufacturer talking, they never talk about killing people with their guns. They talk about hunting. They talk about hunting and quote unquote, safety. They are very careful not to say, we make these guns to kill people.
So it's possible even with the wording here to Sue Smith and Wesson or whoever provided those guns that Ethan used to shoot people in the face.
It's possible to sue them, even though this law exists.
More than that, though, regardless of the fact that guns are deadly, there are a lot of things in our lives that are deadly that. That we create safety mechanisms for.
There are things in our lives that aren't deadly that we create safety mechanisms for. Think about it. Your phone, your computer, your tv, pretty much everything else in your life, even work, requires a password, facial recognition, a six digit pin code, then a text or an email or a phone call to confirm your identity. A gun does not. But it could.
That technology is available and could be married to guns. Each gun could require a code to open it.
You have to show your driver's license at Walgreens if you want to buy cold meds. And then you have to wrestle with childproof packaging when you get at home in order to get them open.
There's no fucking childproof packaging on guns. But there could be. Those guns weren't legally purchased by Ethan. Ethan wasn't supposed to be able to access them. His parents hid the bullets in a stupid attempt to make them safe. However, those guns belonged to his father and his mother. If they had keyed the guns to their fingerprints, then those guns wouldn't have worked for Ethan. The tech exists. You use it every fucking day. We all use it every fucking day. And I didn't come up with this idea either.
In 2022, in Congress, Representative Katie Porter asked a gun manufacturer why there aren't safety features on guns. And his answer was, cause we don't have to put them on guns. His company doesn't have to, because we don't hold them legally responsible.
You couldn't always get cough medicine out of a bottle, as it wasn't like you didn't always have to wrestle with the packaging. I remember before when you could open it really easily, and then some kids OD'd on it. The manufacturer got sued, and they changed their packaging.
Jennifer crumbly has been found guilty of being a shitty mom. She is a shitty mom, but that's not all her faults.
Well, the shitty mom part is definitely her fault, but her son's shooting is not all of her faults. There are lots of shitty moms. If those guns had basic safety features, even like the basic safety features of a 2006 phone, she could have at least put a pin code on the fucking gun, and maybe then her son wouldn't have been able to use it.
And until we put those manufacturers on trial, like we did with Nyquil. They're not gonna do shit to make their guns safe. I get why we tried her. It feels good to make someone responsible. It feels good to shit on a mom. I had an abusive mom. I've met other shitty moms. And watching them do damage to their kids makes you feel enraged and helpless. So putting a mom on trial feels good.
It's just also bullshit. Obsessing about how shitty of a mom is, she is a delicious distraction.
That infantile desire to make your mom do everything that sucks in your life, including take responsibility for your murders, is very seductive. She was the first person who betrayed you by not being everything you needed. Even good moms can't be everything to their kids. But this mother is completely indifferent to her child, and that kind of neglect can really fuck a person up.
The only time she expressed interest in her kid was when he expressed worry about what he'd do after high school. And she observed that she didn't do anything to help him. In his manifesto, he said, I'm gonna unalive some people and then live the rest of my life in jail. And this shooting seemed to be his way of solving for his future, since no one would, he thought, shoot some people, go to jail was an option, like college, waiting tables, or the army. And if you think about it, hundreds of Americans a year shoot some people and go to jail. It is a life plan.
But it's only a life plan if we. If we let it be as a country. This is a life changing case, not just for Jennifer, who's looking at ten to 20 years, but also her husband, James, who's looking at also ten to 20 years for his similar convent eviction. Although his trial was a lot shorter than hers. I'm pretty sure all I asked him was, did you go to work? I guess you were a good dad then. How. How was he supposed to know was was his defense's main argument.
Um, this is a life changing case for the US. If we're gonna hold parents responsible for their children's actions, then we're inventing a whole new kind of law, and we are contorting logic in order to avoid holding guns responsible.
Growing up in California taught me to look at every party in a situation that can be sued. If I was an attorney. Going after a gun manufacturer is a no brainer. Thousands of people are victims of accidental gunshot wounds every day. This is a huge class action, going after several companies with deep pockets. And they could have created multiple safety procedures to ensure this never happens, they're clearly negligent, at least as negligent as Ethan's mom.
We can sue the shit out of them. We can make them pay. We can drain the resources, and then we can reclaim some safety. If you. If we keep up regular local gun buyback programs to claim the old unsafe guns, then we can phase out the current bad guns. It's possible we could make this better, and it's especially possible now in California.
In 2022, Biden said we should let gun manufacturers be sued.
It's a shame that it's not legal, which made me crazy because he's the fucking president. He could have just made it legal. But as soon as he said that, Gavin Newsom, the California governor, said, bet, so he made it legal to sue gun manufacturers in California. It's a state law that conflicts with the national law, much like when marijuana was starting to be legalized.
It utilizes an exemption to the federal statute that allows gun makers or sellers to be sued for violations of state laws concerning the sale or marketing of firearms.
The law was signed, but it hasn't been tested. I contacted a few law offices, asking them if they'd use it, but it's a new state law that contradicts federal law. And most attorneys I talked to hadn't heard of it or didn't believe it was lawful. And laws are like boundaries. Like, once they're put into place, they need to be tested for strength.
So a judge, a jury, several litigants, people who sue need to help define those laws, need to rule on those laws, so we know how far they extend. The language of the law needs to be clarified.
Governor Newsom did this 25 years ago when he was the mayor of San Francisco. He was just the fucking mayor, but he just pronounced gay marriage legal. He announced it at city hall, and it was still not legally recognized anywhere in the country, even in the state, just in San Francisco. But it created a spark.
Thousands of adorable couples showed up at city hall, and you just fell in love with love. People started to get seen and heard, and they started to fight harder for their rights.
I remember crying in my car, happily listening to these adorable little old couples telling their love stories.
He likes to create sweeping social change by doing something semi legal and then letting us fight it out in the court amongst ourselves, like two Californians that gave us gay marriage and it could now give us guns safety. So I'm talking to you, California. If you know someone who's been shot, there's a good chance they, or even you could sue a gun manufacturer and suing a gun manufacturer could net you money and make our world a safer, better place. So do it.
We need you now more than ever.
Sue like a Californian. Sue in California. Sue outside of California. Let's make these fuckers pay. The real fuckers, the gun manufacturers, not the moms. I mean, I do have to say she's a bitch. I'm glad Jennifer crumbly feels bad. But you know what?
This is not all her fault. And it's fucked up that, as Americans, we need to blame her more than we are willing to stand up for safety and reason.
You can change everything.
Just remember, Sue.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Elisa star, Alisa star.
Leather mouth. Breathtaking. So bizarre. Elisa star, Alyssa star, trying to get you to laugh at yourself.
She is a booby blubber mouth. Who is your friend?
