Lax gun laws and lax parents can create a deadly combination

As with most school shooters, the 14-year-old charged in Barrow County didn’t have to steal a gun or buy it on the street. His father gave him an AR-15-style rifle during the holiday season last year. The high school freshman allegedly used it to kill two teachers and two classmates at Apalachee High School on Sept. 4.

It’s not unusual for young killers to source their weapons from their parents. Data collected by the Violence Prevention Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center, shows 80% of school shooters get their guns from family members, most often parents and grandparents.

What is unusual is that 54-year-old Colin Gray, the suspect’s father, is also under arrest, facing four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

Gray’s arrest follows the conviction in April of Michigan couple James and Jennifer Crumbley, who bought their son, who was 15 at the time, a 9 mm Sig Sauer pistol he then used to murder four classmates and wound seven others at his Michigan school three years ago. The semiautomatic weapon was an early Christmas gift.

Gun safety advocates hailed the Crumbley convictions, the first ever to hold parents criminally liable for a school shooting by their child. The former Florida judge who presided over the trial of the shooter in the 2018 Parkland High School shooting said at the time, “I think it sets a precedent that parents cannot be stupid anymore.”

Yes, they can.

Gray gave his son a rifle last December, only a few months after police questioned the boy about threats to shoot up a school reported anonymously to the FBI by users of an online gaming chat room. When questioned in May 2023 by the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office on his front porch, his son, then 13, denied he made any threats. His father assured an investigator that his son did not have unsupervised access to his hunting rifles.

In a newly released video of the interview, Gray admits he didn’t lock his weapons away from his son, saying, “We do a lot of shooting, We do a lot of deer hunting. He shot his first deer this year … He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do and how to use them and not use them.”

The Apalachee High School shooting occurs at the intersection of two particular modern American failings — the deference of political leaders to the money and influence of the gun lobby and the unwillingness of parents to impose and enforce limits.

The political problem offers a simple fix. Stop electing people who say our guns make us safer. With the highest rate of civilian gun ownership per capita compared to any other peer country, the United States should be among the safest places in the world based on the political claims.

We are not. We are among the most at risk for gun violence, especially our children. Firearms now kill more children ages 1-17 years in the U.S. than any other type of injury or illness.

The parent problem may be harder to remedy. Parents increasingly treat rules — whether around schoolwork, driving or underage drinking — as optional for their kids. I still see parents letting newly licensed teens drivers exceed Georgia’s strict passenger limits. I am always surprised how many parents shrug off traffic camera and parking tickets that arrive in the mail for their young drivers. The common rationales are, “Kids are only young once. Let them have some fun,” and “I was just as wild as a teenager.”

In a case now in the news, a Michigan mother allowed her then-16-year-old to drive an even faster car after he exceeded 140 mph in the family’s Audi sports coupe. The Detroit Free Press reported: “According to police reports, his mom knew about his driving habits through a special safety app called Life360, and once texted him: ‘I have screenshots of you … doing 123 mph. … It scares me to my bone.’ But she didn’t take away his keys. Rather, she bought a faster and more powerful car and allegedly gave him access to it: a BMW X3 M series that can reach up to 177 mph.”

When teen Kiernan Tague lost control of that BMW in late 2023 driving 105 mph in a 25-mph zone, he hit a pole and killed his teenage passenger, Flynn MacKrell, police said. In the two weeks before the fatal crash, the Free Press reported that Life360 recorded 94 trips by Tague, nearly half them over 90 mph. The highest speed recorded was 153 mph.

Upon now learning Tague’s mother was aware of her son’s past recklessness, MacKrell’s parents asked prosecutors this summer to arrest her, along with her son, now 17, who faces a second-degree murder charge. They contend that Tague’s mother can be prosecuted because she knew her son was a danger and didn’t lock away the car keys, citing the Crumbley conviction as precedent for parental accountability.

After many school shootings, including at Heritage High School in Conyers a month after Columbine, the parents said they never worried about their household guns because they didn’t realize their child was capable of violence. As she recalled her son walking to the school bus the morning of the Heritage High shooting in 1999, the mother of shooter T.J. Solomon told the court, “I thought we had the perfect life.’’