Opinion | Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws

If you’re cheering on the charges brought against Colin Gray, the father of our nation’s latest school shooting suspect, it’s worth asking yourself how, exactly, he broke the law.

His 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, has been charged with opening fire at school on Wednesday, killing four people. The assault-style rifle he was accused of using was reportedly a Christmas gift from his dad.

But the Grays live in Georgia, where giving your son an AR-15-style rifle is not, in itself, a crime. (The laws appear to be stricter about handguns.) Nor does Georgia have a law requiring Mr. Gray to safely lock away his guns. Georgia is notorious for having some of the weakest gun laws in the country.

Mr. Gray rocked back and forth in shackles and prison stripes on Friday morning as the charges against him were read. His son had just been charged with murder for opening fire at Apalachee High School, killing two students and two teachers. Next came the charges against the white-haired Mr. Gray, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son access to the gun even though, prosecutors say, Mr. Gray knew the boy was a threat to himself and others.

Now father and son are both sitting in jail.

The United States, desperate to stop mass shootings, has been seized by an increasing zeal to prosecute parents. Jennifer and James Crumbley, convicted of involuntary manslaughter this year in Michigan after their son’s school shooting, hadn’t broken any gun laws, either. Prosecutors introduced lurid testimony about their personal lives and hobbies in trying to convince a jury that the Crumbleys were indifferent to their son’s mental health. When they were found guilty, many Americans were pleased.

These prosecutions satisfy the public desire to blame somebody. If you don’t like guns, shaming and punishing the parents feels like landing a righteous blow against gun culture. If you do like guns, it’s a bit like the predictable invocation of mental health by politicians — diverting attention from the weapons themselves and suggesting, instead, that the problem is a few bad apples among the owners. Most insidiously, though, these prosecutions set a murky legal precedent for questionable parenting while camouflaging the abject failure of the federal and state governments to adequately regulate gun safety and stop mass shootings.

Going after the parents in the absence of adequate gun laws is, in truth, a kind of scapegoating — displaying a head on a stake to satisfy the rage of a desperate crowd. We shouldn’t wait for kids and teachers to be gunned down, then punish the parents by having jurors try to read their minds and judge their parenting.

Georgia’s elected representatives have had ample opportunity to pass safe gun storage legislation. They are, presumably, aware of the scourge of school shootings. But they either deemed such laws unnecessary or didn’t bestir themselves to act.

Since Mr. Gray can’t be charged with giving a child a gun or leaving the gun within a child’s reach, the arguments will probably be pushed into hazy areas of judgment, knowledge and understanding. In the Crumbley trials, in which prosecutors were similarly swimming in the murk of perception, lawyers argued passionately over nuances of text messages, stray comments and other glimpses into the family’s domestic life.

For many Americans, it’s enough to hear that Mr. Gray bought his son an assault-style rifle for Christmas. He should not have bought the child the gun, they say, and any guns should have been securely locked away. Mr. Gray should have understood the danger last year, when sheriff’s deputies interviewed his son about threats to shoot up a school. Mr. Gray told investigators that his son had been bullied by classmates and said, “We’re up there all the time talking to the school.” In the end, investigators decided there was no cause for arrest. The boy denied posting the threats, and authorities couldn’t prove that he had.

As a thought exercise, let’s imagine that Colt Gray, instead of smuggling a gun into school, as he is accused of doing, took a butcher knife from his kitchen and stabbed his classmates to death. Would we be prosecuting his father? Of course not, you say. A knife is a normal household item, and there’s no law against leaving one unattended, no matter how it ends up getting used. But a gun, like it or not, is also a normal item in countless American homes. I think giving your minor son a gun should be illegal. But that doesn’t make it so.

The state doesn’t want you to focus on that. Instead, it wants you to get mad at Colin Gray and feel good about his prosecution.

There is another glaring problem with the case against Mr. Gray: His child is being tried as an adult. That means that in the eyes of the state, Colt Gray was a mature, fully cognizant individual who can be held to the same legal standard as a grown man. But prosecutors should not be able to claim that Colt Gray was just as responsible as any adult for the crimes he is accused of while blaming his father for neglecting his parental duties.

The facts and circumstances of this family’s life remain little known, and we probably won’t get a sufficiently clear picture until evidence emerges in court. Scraps of information depict a desperate family — plagued by drugs, evicted from their home, the boy’s parents were separated. His mother has been suspected of possessing fentanyl and methamphetamine.

In other words, yet another family clinging to the social and economic margins of middle-class American life.

We are angry. We are right to be angry. A war hasn’t been fought on the continental United States in well over a century, and yet our kids learn how to hide from gunmen in between multiplication lessons and spelling tests. Every day we send them off, protected only by our perpetual hope that the whims of fate won’t strike their school — not today, not any day.

When I read a text exchange between a woman and her two daughters, both of whom were cowering silently in the school while gunfire rang out nearby, my stomach rolled over. The woman asked where the girls were hiding. She said she was coming. Finally, she told her daughters to pray. She typed out the Our Father; there was nothing else for her to do.

The anger is righteous. But we can’t prosecute our way out of this mess.