Could charging parents of shooters be a deterrent for gun violence?

Months after the parents of the Michigan school shooter were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for their role in the shooting, prosecutors in Georgia have brought more serious charges against the father of a school shooter who killed four people and injured nine others.
The father — 54-year-old Colin Gray — was arrested Thursday and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children for his role in the shooting at Apalachee High School. If convicted he could face up to 180 years in prison.
Gray is accused of “knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey.
The Crumbleys were the first parents to be charged in a shooting carried out by their child, and Gray is now the second to face similar charges.
Investigators believe the suspected shooter received the AR-style weapon used in the mass shooting as a Christmas present from his father, sources told ABC News.
Experts told ABC News that it is still too early to tell, but the facts that have emerged suggest parallels to some of the negligence of Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the Michigan school shooter.
In separate trials, the Crumbleys were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and each sentenced to 10 to 15 years for a shooting carried out at Oxford High School by their son.
The parents had ignored several warning signs in the days leading up to the shooting, and had just bought their 15-year-old son the weapon he used in the shooting, according to prosecutors.
“There do seem to be some similarities in that both the Crumbleys and it would appear Mr. Gray didn’t properly secure their firearms, and in fact, may have actually put the firearm in the in the hands of a child who went on to do a horrific, horrific thing at their school,” Nick Suplia, the senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown, told ABC News in an interview.
“Criminal charges here against Colin Gray — who purchased a weapon of war for his 14-year-old child months after the FBI knocked at the door with concerns about a potential school shooting — is unacceptable as a moral matter, as a legal matter, it’s a dereliction of responsibility, and he should be held accountable,” Suplia said.
Another expert agreed the fact patterns between the Michigan shooter and the Georgia shooter are “stunningly similar.”
“You have a father giving a son who’s quite young a firearm and with deadly, tragic consequences [and] there were some warning signs that were missed or not adequately responded to,” Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at John’s Hopkins University, told ABC News in an interview.
“The set of facts are very similar and, in each case, you have local prosecutors, seeing what — in hindsight — certainly seems like stunningly irresponsible parent practices, bringing charges against them,” Webster said.
In May 2023, federal investigators interviewed the suspect, who was then 13 years old, about alleged online threats to commit a school shooting, after the FBI had received anonymous tips about the threats which had photos of guns, according to the FBI. The teen had denied making any such threats during an interview.
The shooter’s father told authorities at the time that he had hunting rifles in the house and said his son is “allowed to use them when supervised but does not have unfettered access to them,” according to the police report obtained by ABC News.
The conviction of the Crumbley parents opened the door and invited a “conversation on what it means to be a responsible parent and gun owner, and I think it answered the question pretty clearly that there are steps that we must take to protect our kids and our community as a moral matter, but also as a legal one. The verdict in that case, I believe, sent the message across the country, but Mr. Gray did not receive that message clearly enough,” Suplia said.
Suplia said he believes there is “deterrent value” in bringing charges against parents in cases like this.
“Prosecutions have an important role in educating the public about their responsibilities under the law, and I hope that cases like this one send that message loud and clear. But it’s not sufficient. We need to continue to send the message at all levels of government and society,” Suplia said.
“I think prosecutors are going to look, in these cases, for egregious conduct, for putting the gun in the child’s hand and/or ignoring warning signs that should have been obvious to the reasonable person,” Suplia said.
Webster said it is possible that officials could bring cases like the one against the Crumbleys when the facts make a strong argument.
“People in positions like district attorneys, police chiefs, mayors, they all look at what their peers are doing, they pay attention to what their peers are doing, and if they agree with something their peers are doing, they’re not shy about following that lead, or doing something similar,” he said.
But, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, who helped convict the Crumbley parents in Michigan, said she doesn’t believe the case brought against the Crumbleys has set a new precedent for charging parents of shooters.
“I always resisted the idea that this sets some precedent because I just firmly and wholeheartedly hoped that we wouldn’t have these … a set of facts that would give rise to such a charge and conviction,” McDonald told ABC News Live in an interview.
“These are difficult cases to charge and really difficult cases to convict on and it should be. It should be very hard because holding a parent responsible criminally and in a school shooting — related to one — should be rare. And in our case, the facts were very rare and so egregious,” McDonald said.
McDonald said the visit made by FBI investigators to the shooter’s house could serve as direct evidence that he was on notice of the threat his son could pose.
“I’m sure there’s a lot of other evidence that has not been released. We don’t know at this point if the gun was secure or how it was secure or in what capacity the minor had access to it and what kinds of signs he might have been showing you,” McDonald said.
“Our case was prosecuted under a gross negligence, involuntary manslaughter standard. Not holding parents accountable for what their son did, but holding them accountable for their own gross negligence which was criminal,” McDonald said.
Three-quarters of school shooters acquired their firearm from the home of a parent or close relative, according to the U.S. Secret Service which examined 40 years of incidents.
A Secret Service study of incidents from 2008 to 2017 revealed that in nearly half of the shootings, the firearm was easily accessible or was not stored securely.
Gun safety advocates have long advocated for safe storage or child access prevention laws to curb gun violence, which Georgia does not have.
Twenty-six states have a form of those laws on the books, which aim to prevent unauthorized access by children, according to Everytown. Some of the strongest versions of these laws impose penalties on parents if a child gains access to a firearm.
It has not yet been revealed how the shooter accessed the gun used in the shooting.
Safe storage of firearms was a key argument made by prosecutors in the Crumbley case, where the parents did not place a lock on the gun, despite having it, and left a gun case on the default passcode.
McDonald said she was horrified that this was playing out again, saying it is “so senseless when it’s just so easy to secure your firearm.”
“I’m going back to the idea that it takes less than 10 seconds to install a cable lock on a firearm. All responsible gun owners will tell you that your weapon should be secure,” McDonald said.
“At the end of the closing argument in James Crumbley trial, I actually installed a cable lock and showed the jury and it took around 10 seconds and I installed it on the murder weapon. This is so senseless and so tragic when we know it is so easy to prevent crime,” McDonald said.