At what point do we punish the parents?

When my youngest daughter was in the 4th grade at a small magnet school. a male classmate walked up to her on the playground and told her he was going dove hunting that weekend. He then told her he was going to name all of the doves after her before he shot them. We complained to the school, of course. It was treated as a he said/she said incident, but they said they would “keep an eye on him”. We had known this boy’s family since kindergarten, so we were willing to accept that he said a stupid thing he didn’t really mean. Two months later he told another classmate, in front of my daughter, that he had had a dream that she was in his yard with some other kids and that he went inside, got a gun, and came back outside and shot her. The teacher overheard everything this time and took him to the office.

Unfortunately, the Principal instructed the teacher not to tell us what happened. We only found out about it when I asked my daughter about her day on the drive home and she told me everything. My husband immediately went to the school and things went from bad to worse.”We understand you’re upset...it was a joke...he’s a very nice little boy...we can’t tell you, legally, how we will handle his discipline.” We found out later that he wasn’t “suspended” formally. They allowed his mother to “keep him home” for two days. Long horrible story short, we spent a little time with the school superintendent’s office and were allowed to transfer our daughter out to the school of our choice. The little boy stayed at the magnet school and we were never able to determine how things were handled from there.

As all of these meetings were happening and we were working to deal with this school system’s disgusting handling of the situation, we did a little research into this kid’s family. His mom’s Facebook page was littered with photo after photo of this boy with guns, Both hunting with real rifles and pretend play with play rifles. One of his favorite things to do was dress up as a SWAT team member—-black mask, black vest—-and storm his house with a toy rifle. Pointing it at the camera, pointing it at his friends. Everything was chaos play—-he’s a cop! he’s a SWAT officer! he’s an MP! In the midst of all those posts would be posts about his “anxiety issues”. We were told by a mutual friend that he was seeing a therapist for anxiety.
But the gun play and hunting FB posts never stopped, and his mom received an unreal amount of responses and “likes” for these posts. “Awesome!” “He’ll be a great police officer one day!” “Fun!”

Will this boy inflict violence on anyone else? I don’t know. But I do know from my experience that not all school shooters or mass shooters will be disturbed loners whose parents turned a blind eye to things. His mom is active in the PTO. He has friends. He’s in a magnet middle school. He still dreams of joining the military or being a police officer.

We got my daughter away from him and sounded the alarm and that was really all we could do. It was shocking, as other parents found out what happened, how few of them were truly alarmed. One family said we should “let it go.” Another dad told us that his issues were between him and his therapist. These families and my daughter’s friends from this school drifted away, but stayed friendly with his parents.

Gun culture. A pride and love for the military and police forces and a reluctance to accept that not all of those drawn to those professions have the right motives and makeup. Boys will be boys. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t cause trouble for our beloved school.
All of those things took precedence over my daughter’s safety.