In a gun-friendly state, parental liability looms following school shooting

When John Monroe was 12 years old, his dad gave him his first rifle.

For Mr. Monroe, the Christmas gift – a tradition among some outdoor enthusiasts – was the beginning of a life of hunting and arms advocacy, leading him to become one of the foremost gun rights attorneys in Georgia.

That tradition was also about teaching children how to safely handle weapons, for their own protection as well as for others’, all as part of growing into a healthy adult. The gun was for hunting and protection, nothing more. “I never shot anybody with it,” says Mr. Monroe.

The prosecution of Colin Gray, a 50-something father in Barrow County, Georgia, on involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder has put a darker spin on that nostalgia-steeped rite of passage. 

Even after a visit from law enforcement in 2023 on a tip that his son, Colt, had threatened a school shooting, Mr. Gray bought his son a Christmas present: an AR-15 platform rifle – a self-loading gun used for sport and home defense, but also used for more than half of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States. Last week, police say, 14-year-old Colt brought the rifle to school and used it to kill four people and injure nine others. Both Colin and Colt Gray are now charged in the killings.

The case against the father in this north Georgia town pits the emerging principle of parental liability for a child’s violent gun use against this Southern state’s lenient gun laws and culture. 

A conviction for Mr. Gray would send a strong message to gun owners in a state where lawmakers have already begun to weigh stricter gun storage laws. But seeking retribution by holding Mr. Gray accountable could also sap energy from more systemic efforts to halt what has become a scourge of mass violence in the U.S.

“We are seeing the rise of a new movement to hold parents responsible when their children engage in mass shootings,” says Adam Winkler, author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right To Bear Arms in America.”

Guns as gifts

In many ways, the aftermath of the shooting in Winder, Georgia, is an expression of a U.S. society overcome with frustration and fear. School shooting incidents rose from nine in 1966 to 349 in 2023 – the highest ever recorded, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Getting a weapon is not hard: There are at least 20 million AR-15-style rifles, fashioned after the M16 military rifle, in circulation in the U.S. While the nation’s Gun Control Act dictates that shotguns, rifles, and their ammunition may only be sold to those over age 18, the weapons often find their way into younger hands. 

The key question for many Americans is, “What is a perpetrator this young doing with an AR-15?” says San Francisco-based writer Mark Follman, author of “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission To Stop Mass Shootings.”

The answer is elusive. Civil lawsuits after shootings often take aim at schools, law enforcement, and the weapons industry. With rare exception, those segments of society enjoy immunity from accountability.

As a result, “What we have seen is pressure pushed over and focused on parents,” says Georgia State University professor Tim Lytton. “They are bringing criminal charges against the father for doing something that is standard practice: provide children with weapons.” 

The charges may be valid, adds Professor Lytton, but “the framing is now that this was an irresponsible father.”

It’s too soon to know whether increased focus on the parents of underage shooters will have any impact on gun laws.

Jennifer and James Crumbley, the first parents convicted for a mass school shooting by their child, were sentenced this past spring to at least 10 years in prison. 

The successful, first-of-its-kind prosecution of teenager Ethan Crumbley and his parents in Oxford Township, Michigan, presented a novel theory under which “somebody could be convicted of involuntary manslaughter for their contribution to a chain of events that produced death,” says Evan Bernick, a professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law in DeKalb.

A remarkable shift

Georgia prosecutors have stepped up in this latest case even more, he says, including adding second-degree murder charges for Mr. Gray. 

“The argument is that ... Colt’s intentional actions were foreseeable consequences of Colin’s negligence,” says Professor Bernick.

On its face, the strategy is hardly ironclad. Georgia law mandates that murder suspects be tried as adults, so the state will argue that Colt is an adult with moral acuity to act intentionally – and (in the other case) that he is a child whose father was negligent in safeguarding him. Despite such paradoxes, prosecutors who don’t bring charges in similar cases would now face “justifiable public outrage,” Professor Bernick says. 

The “who’s responsible” debate this time includes Apalachee High School, where students in the Georgia Piedmont were just getting settled into the school year last week when gunfire broke out in the hallway. School officials may have received a warning about Colt’s intent before the shooting began. 

But the focus is mainly on the Gray family, including Colt’s father. Federal law bars those under age 18 from buying rifles. You have to be 21 years old to buy a handgun. Georgia allows adults and teens to carry rifles in public, though not in school zones.

Barrow County is conservative. Seventy-one percent of the county’s voters supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election. And when Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed a landmark gun rights bill into law in 2022, he referenced giving a Glock handgun to his daughter, Lucy, who was 21 years old at the time of his speech.

But times may be changing. President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, and the state’s voters have sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate. Democrats are typically more supportive of gun restrictions, including assault weapon bans. 

That suggests gun rights and public safety may be in play even in traditionally conservative counties. In a meeting in Atlanta a day after the shooting, members of a state Committee on Safe Firearm Storage expressed anger about the Apalachee High shooting.

Family failure or social breakdown

Such public probes underscore that, given the unthinkable pace of shootings, parents may have to step up. After all, becoming a teenager on the way to adulthood “doesn’t come with a user manual,” says Aaron Stark, a mental health advocate in Denver. “That’s why the failure looks more on the family side, and possibly the school.” 

Indeed, in a state like Georgia, “It is not necessarily inconsistent to favor broad gun rights and also impose responsibility to parents,” says Professor Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is an idea that only parents can really control the household and only parents can really keep guns out of the hands of dangerous children.”

In the days after the shooting, a wave of new threats hit schools nationwide. Highlighting a newfound vigilance by authorities, dozens of Georgia children – including a fourth grader – now face felony charges of making terrorist threats.

Earlier this week, Georgia’s Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools warned parents in a letter that “any student found responsible for making threats toward our schools or toward another student or staff member could face serious consequences, including felony charges.” 

Whether that shift is enough to stem shootings is uncertain.

“The turn of attention to parents is a distraction from the fact that ... there’s no real motivation in many states to do much about access to firearms,” argues Professor Lytton, in Atlanta. “If the legal response is just individual culpability, then the ways to think creatively about addressing the problem shrink drastically.”