In a courtroom in Winder, Georgia on March 3, Colin Gray, the father of an accused teen school shooter, was found guilty of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. He had supplied his 14-year-old son, Colt Gray, with the gun Colt is accused of having used to kill two students and two teachers in 2024 at the high school he attended in nearby Apalachee. It was one of 336 school shootings in the U.S. that year, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Gray’s conviction represents a small but growing phenomenon of parents being held criminally responsible for school shootings their children have committed. As a student gun-reform activist and the co-president of Students Demand Action at Hume Fogg High School in Nashville, Tennessee, this has caught my eye.
The first time parents in the U.S. were held legally responsible for their child carrying out a large school attack was in the wake of the one that happened in Oxford, Michigan in 2021, when four students were killed and the shooter’s parents were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison on involuntary manslaughter charges. There have also been cases in the U.S. in which parents of mass shooters have been handed down lesser charges, ranging from misdemeanors to a felony charge associated with giving a child access to a weapon.
Parents getting convicted for shootings their kids committed raises all sorts of thorny questions. Like, who should be held responsible when terrible acts like the Apalachee shooting are committed? Is it right to legally punish parents of school-aged shooters, and does a charge of murder really make sense if they didn’t physically do it? And — most salient to activists thinking about how to stop school shootings — will parent convictions like this one actually reduce the number of students who pick up a gun and walk into a school?
For perspective on all this, I spoke to Vanderbilt University law professor Terry Maroney, a juvenile justice expert and lawyer who also used to represent juveniles in New York City. She told me it’s all complicated, but one thing is for sure: We shouldn’t assume convictions like Gray’s will prevent youth shootings.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity
I wonder if we could start with some legal basics for context. Could you give us some background on the U.S. legal protections meant to regulate the use of guns by young people?
Maroney: It is illegal federally for anybody to sell a firearm to a juvenile. The general rule is states don’t get to violate the federal baseline, but they can add additional protections as they see fit. It is legal for juveniles to possess certain types of firearms for certain purposes, especially if they’re under parental supervision. For example, in Tennessee, it’s illegal for a juvenile to possess a handgun, but then it is legal for a juvenile to possess a rifle for hunting. Once a parent provides a child with a gun, they are supposed to supervise a child’s use of it, but that implicates a different area of law. States vary a lot on whether or not they have child protection laws that command adults to secure the firearms in their home in any particular way.
How would you assess the strength of those legal frameworks that are meant to prevent youth gun violence and school shootings?
Maroney: The trouble is not so much the legal framework. The trouble is that most children, especially if we’re talking about teenagers, would not have a huge amount of trouble acquiring a gun illegally if they really wanted to.
Got it. Let’s come back to this case in Georgia, where the father, Colin Gray, was convicted earlier this month of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in connection with the school shooting his son Colt committed. There have been multiple cases like this of parents being prosecuted. To what extent do you think that parents should be held legally responsible for their kids’ acts of gun violence, especially when it comes to school shootings?
Maroney: At the most fundamental level, I think we have a very understandable impulse as humans to want to blame anyone we can when something really horrible is done. But I think sometimes that leads us to stretch the law a little bit too far.
I understand the impulse to want to hold parents criminally liable in scenarios like this one in Georgia, but I tend to think it’s stretching things a little bit too far. The reality is the parent did not kill those other children. I do think there are crimes that the dad probably should be convicted of — most of those have to do with child neglect of his own child, placing his own child in danger by providing him with a dangerous weapon he wasn’t equipped to handle, and then failing to supervise his child.
In terms of whether the dad’s criminal responsibility then stretches out one really significant jump past that, for the things his son did to other children — that’s when I think it’s like pulling a rubber band, and I think it’s past the point of snapping. Generally we are not responsible — even under existing criminal law — for the things that other people do to other people.
The theory of the case made against Colin Gray basically is that when he gave his child that weapon, ignored the mental health signs, and failed to supervise and lock up the weapon, he was committing the crime of cruelty to children — meaning the other children his son shot. Under Georgia law, if you commit the crime of cruelty to children and somebody dies, it’s second-degree murder.
We have a hindsight problem here. Because the child did what he did, it’s easy to go back and see all the steps that led to it. But there are lots of children who are just as disturbed, have just as many mental health problems, have just as dysfunctional families, and have access to firearms but don’t shoot anybody. That’s why it’s a little hard to say it was predictable.
I feel like the criminal law is the absolute last-resort societal response. And it’s often very much justified and needed. But we have to be very strict about it.
Zooming out from the extent to which it’s legally right to prosecute parents, let’s talk about the actual impact of cases like these on school shootings. You can see a kind of logic that maybe if a few parents are handed big convictions like Gray was, other parents who are seeing worrying signs might do more to prevent their kids from doing bad things. Do you think these parent prosecutions make school shootings and youth violence less likely?
Maroney: I don’t. I wish I did, but I don’t. I think school shootings are just such a heartbreaking indictment of where we are as a society. And I don’t think there’s any quick fix for that. So I think that one prosecution of a pretty bad outlier case is not going to have much of a society-level impact on school shootings.
Is there anything else you think we should consider when thinking about this case or juvenile justice around shootings in general?
Maroney: Young people do sometimes do really, really horrible things, but they are still young people. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held responsible, but what responsibility looks like for a child is different than for an adult. It can be really hard to keep that in mind when somebody does something so awful as what it appears Colt Gray did.
So I would just sort of reiterate that a kid is a kid no matter what they’ve done. And it doesn’t mean that they have no responsibility, but it does mean that they’re not the same as a grown up who does the exact same thing.
