“The parents didn’t buy the gun for their son, they just didn’t secure it.”
That is completely incorrect. On the contrary, Jennifer Crumbley (the mother) had posted on Instagram that the gun was an early Christmas present for her son.
The thing about a good Wikipedia article is that it will include plenty of good sources. An article without sources or with sources that are… meh… may or may not be made up, you can’t know for sure.
But this article includes several sources that look reasonably good. Therefore, chances are big that it is fundamentally true.
(Note that both earlier versions have “1/16” in the last panel. But this is misleading: The only Sunday, January 16 was in 1994 and it has a different strip.)
…and not a cow…