Changing Language to Change The Calculus of School Shootings

It’s terrorism, not just tragedy.

We don’t yet know yet if the unusual charge of terrorism brought by Oakland County, Michigan prosecutor Karen D. McDonald against the teenager who killed four people and wounded seven others at Oxford High School outside Detroit—or the charges against the parents who enabled 15-year-old Ethan Crumbley’s plot for a deadly rampage by purchasing for him a semi-automatic weapon—will hold up in court.

Yet the charges of terrorism against the adolescent shooter and involuntary manslaughter against his abetting parents James and Jennifer Crumbley are welcome. The evocative language—terrorist!—and the emotions touched off by fingering the parents for their culpability have energized public reaction. 

For decades, we have watched the ease with which high-capacity, military-style weapons can be obtained and wielded by those who are untrained, unstable or inhumanly narcissistic. With infuriating predictability, cold-blooded mass shootings are called tragedies, or heartbreaks or moments that require the community to “come together.”  

The sanitization of language has consequences. Most obviously, it allows politicians to evade responsibility for doing anything at all to change this course. It also allows society to quickly look beyond the headlines to the next “tragedy,” the next moment of prayer and condolence. 

Can calling a decision to shoot up a school an act of terrorism, as the prosecutor has charged under Michigan state law, spark even small progress against indifference? 

Terrorists inflame American indignation like few other criminals.  We pledge to give them no safe haven. We have waged costly, global wars, enacted page upon page of policy and listened to an uncountable number of political bromides uttered in the name of keeping us safe from terror. 

But the particular terror that hits closest to home, the bloodbath at a neighborhood school, repeats itself. And until now we’ve never really called it what it is.  

It may turn out that the terror charge doesn’t stick, or that James and Jennifer Crumbley evade criminal conviction for their complicity.

But language can be powerful—the pen mightier than the sword, it’s said.  If calling a terrorist act exactly what it is can begin to change this deadly trajectory, it’s worth breaking semantic ground.