In the fall of 2024, fourteen-year-old Colt Gray walked into Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia with an AR-15-style rifle and killed four people and injured nine others. In an interview following the shooting, his mother, Marcee Gray, said, “It’s not his fault.” If it is not his fault, then whose fault is it? Should the parents be liable for the intentional torts and crimes of their children? Should they be liable, either criminally or civilly, for failing to properly supervise their child? Is the school liable for negligence for failure to protect its students? What about his classmates? Should we hold the classmates liable for failure to report his behavior? This article will explore those questions.
Almost 400,000 students across the United States have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. That is a startling statistic. Not only have there been injuries and loss of life, but everyone who experiences a school shooting, including students, teachers, and first responders, are likely traumatized. The median age of a school shooter is sixteen, and if those children did not have access to firearms, then there would be no such shootings. This article is not about banning guns, but rather suggesting that proper supervision of minors, and restricting minors’ access to guns, including proper storage of them, would go a long way to reducing or eliminating school shootings. “About three-quarters of school shooters obtain their guns from a parent or another close relative, according to a 2019 U.A. Secret Service report.”
Michael Shoels, the father of a Columbine victim, said, “They ask us if we blame the parents… who else do we blame? I taught my son right from wrong. My son wasn’t shooting people up. My son was in the library doing what he was supposed to do.” Conversely, just three days before Ethan Crumbley shot four students at his school, his mom, Jennifer Crumbley, took him to target practice, proudly posting a photo on social media of the 9-millimeter pistol Ethan referred to as “my new beauty.”
When parents and guardians fail to secure their weapons or supervise minors under their care, there should be a consequence. For example, a father, Colin Gray, pled not guilty to twenty-nine charges, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter, for shared responsibility for the actions of his son, Colt Gray, the shooter at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. A grand jury found that Gray “gave his son ‘access to a firearm and ammunition after receiving sufficient warning that Colt Gray would endanger the bodily safety of another,’ calling it ‘a substantial and unjustifiable risk.’”
This article does not suggest that all actions of children are the fault of their parents. “Children are not widgets on an assembly line; we cannot attribute their defects to the manufacturing process of the parental factory.” There have been efforts to reduce juvenile crime before it begins by providing character education in schools, establishing day care and family care services for underserved populations, and imposing juvenile curfews. But all of those programs skirt the very simple practice of locking up a gun in the house. It does not matter if the parent is working three jobs or if the child is often home alone. If the gun is locked away, then the child will not be able to take it to school.