When Ethan Crumbley, a troubled 15-year-old, shot and killed four students at Oxford High School, in Oxford, Michigan, he was charged with terrorism and murder. In a virtually unprecedented step, the prosecutor, Karen McDonald, also indicted Crumbley's parents for involuntary manslaughter, arguing that they should have known their son was a danger to his school and should have revealed that he had access to a handgun that was an early Christmas gift from his parents, and stored in an unlocked locker in their bedroom.

Just days after the school shooting, Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, posted a family photo with each member of his seven-person family brandishing a rifle, with a caption ending in " P.S. Santa, please bring ammo." The congressman assumed that celebrating Christmas - literally the mass celebrating the birth of Christ - by this macho display would surely bolster his political prospects.

The Michigan indictments challenge what has become a gun-slinging culture. We've gone from a constitutional amendment that protected the right of an "organized militia" to bear arms to a gun lobby push to dismantle any limits on gun ownership, assert the right to flash weapons of war openly on the nation's streets, and the right to secret carry as well. Children are being raised in homes like Massie's where guns are not simply owned to hunt animals but collected and stored and celebrated as protection against the "other."

The Oxford attack was the deadliest U.S. school shooting since May 18 when eight students and two teachers were shot at the Santa Fe High School in Texas. According to CNN, there have been 48 shootings this year on K-12 campuses, 32 of them since August.

Should we hold parents responsible for the terrorist acts of their children? Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, carried an AR-15 with 30 rounds - a weapon of war - to the protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that arose after a white police officer shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, a Black man, without being held responsible. Rittenhouse shot three people and killed two. He was carrying a gun purchased for him by a 20-year-old friend. His mother, a single mother struggling to raise three children, took her son to a bar, where he was photographed with members of the right-wing Proud Boys organization. Despite internet reports to the contrary, she apparently didn't know that her son had gone to Kenosha.

Gregory McMichael enlisted his 35-year-old son, Travis McMichael, to hunt down and murder Ahmaud Arbery for the crime of jogging through their neighborhood while Black. The father wasn't a constraint on the son; he was the instigator of the chase. But, of course, Travis, at 35, was an adult able to make his own decisions.

In the Oxford case, the prosecutor moved to indict the parents because "the facts of this case are so egregious." Ethan's parents were called urgently to the school when one of his teachers found an alarming note he had drawn, scrawled with images of a gun, a person who had been shot, a laughing emoji and the words "Blood everywhere" and "The thoughts won't stop. Help me."

His parents dismissed any concern that their son might be a danger to his classmates. They did not reveal that he had access to a gun that they had just given him. They refused to take him out of school for the day. They didn't ask their son if he had the gun on him and didn't bother to search his backpack. A few hours later he took his gun from that backpack and started shooting.

I have no idea if the parent's will be found guilty. Michigan has no law requiring that guns be stored safely locked and with ammunition separated from the weapons. A jury will sort the facts out.

What I do know is that homes are where values are forged. Children are not born to be racist. They are taught those values. The children of Southern plantation owners weren't born to assume that children with dark skin were less than human. They had to be taught those values and the behavior that those values rationalized. Children who assume guns can be the answer to their pain, aren't born with that assumption. The culture - and most of all the lessons they learn at home - teach them those values.

We need to challenge the celebration of vigilantes and gun slinging, the laws that allow people to march with weapons of war down the streets of our communities, and the culture that worships guns even in the hands of children. The unspeakable deaths of children won't stop unless we crack down on those responsible for providing them with guns - whether by commission or by negligence. That's true in our cities, where gangs, guns and drugs make simply going to school a life-and-death risk. It is true in rural communities and affluent suburbs where alienated or troubled children - often acting alone not in a gang - have easy access to guns that should not be allowed outside a battlefield. Sensible gun laws can help. Communities can mobilize to teach. Most of all, however, we need parents and families to teach values and reinforce behavior that challenges the gun-slinger culture.

We started with a romantic image of a man teaching his son how to hunt and shoot a deer with a rifle. We've ended with legislators sending out Christmas cards displaying their whole family armed with everything from assault weapons to shotguns. And with a troubled 15-year-old with a handgun holding 30 rounds killing two and wounding seven of his classmates. This murderous culture cannot be allowed to fester. And parents - whether held criminally responsible if an act of terror is committed or not - are responsible for the example they set and for what they teach their children at home.

You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.