Charging parents for child gun crime doesn’t go far enough

When a child is able to carry a rifle responsibility does end with their parent but with the state

Buying your 14-year-old son an AR-style rifle for Christmas is a curious thing to do, I think most of us would agree. But we don’t live in America, and by giving his boy a gun last year, Colin Gray wasn’t actually doing anything illegal.  
Although Georgia law prohibits minors from possessing handguns, there is no age requirement either there or in many US states when it comes to rifles and shotguns. Nor is there any law in the state requiring “safe storage” of firearms, to prevent children from gaining access. Why would there be, in a country where 385 mass shootings have taken place this year alone? A country where, in 80 per cent of school shootings, perpetrators got their weapons from family members?
No, 54-year-old Gray’s actions only became criminal when his son used the gun to shoot dead four people and wound nine others at Apalachee High School in Winder last Wednesday. And today, murder charges brought against the father (two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children) have prompted long overdue discussions on the issue of parental responsibility.
Although these are the most severe charges ever filed against a school shooter’s parent, reports describing them as “unprecedented” are wrong. It was the conviction of James and Jennifer Crumbley of Michigan in March of this year that will, I hope, prove to be the game changer.
The parents of 15-year-old Ethan were both found guilty of manslaughter and now face up to 15 years in prison, after their son killed four students at Oxford High School in 2021 with an unsecured gun – and the words of the judge at the time made a strong impression on me. “These convictions are not about poor parenting,” Oakland County Judge, Cheryl Matthews, said. “These convictions confirm repeated acts, or lack of acts, that could have halted an oncoming runaway train.”
More than 50 people are killed by a firearm every day in the US. How many of those, suicides included, are runaway trains that could have been stopped? I’m all for this new gun logic, only let’s take it to its logical conclusion. If you follow the chain all the way up, there are others that could be accused of “criminal negligence”, aren’t there? Of “recklessness”, of “foreseeability.” The state legislators who have insisted on the right for adults and children to bear arms and fought against any tightening of the laws. The NRA heads telling us all that the answer to gun violence… is more guns.
“Colt is like a lot of young kids these days with the tablets and some of the garbage they pull up,” said Gray’s grandfather yesterday, “the blood and all the fighting.” And yes, that could describe a lot of 14-year-old boys the world over. Only this one happened to live with a criminally negligent father, in a criminally negligent land.