The Opinions - Charging Parents for School Shootings Protects Weak Gun Laws

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

After school shootings in Michigan, southern Virginia, and now Georgia, parents have been charged in connection to their children’s actions. Megan Stack, a Times contributing opinion writer, argues that states should turn their attention to gun storage and access laws instead of criminalizing parents.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Megan Sack, and I'm a writer for New York Times Opinion. I've covered gun violence in the U.S. on and off since I first started working back in the late 90s as an AP reporter. One of my first assignments in Texas was a mass shooting at a church, and I've been tracking this topic ever since. A 14-year-old student opened fire at a Georgia high school and killed four people on Wednesday. 14-year-old Colt Gray is charged as an adult. The teenager faces four counts of felony murder.

In a separate hearing moments later, his father also made his first court appearance. Colin Gray is charged with two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children. The father says his son was bullied, tormented, and called gay by his son. classmates. This shooting is different primarily in the legal reaction from some of the shootings that we have seen before. And in some ways, it's building on what we saw happen in Michigan. I see the Georgia case as kind of growing out of that earlier case against the Crumley parents in Michigan after their son had carried out of school shooting there. What we're starting to see is a real,

I would say both grassroots and increasingly prosecutorial enthusiasm for charging the parents of school shooters and charging them with increasingly serious crimes. The Crumley parents, James and Jennifer Crumley in Michigan, were charged with involuntary manslaughter, with a very similar argument to what I understand the prosecutors are going to use here in Georgia. I know just from being in the world and talking to parents around me that there is a lot of approval, popular approval, for this kind of approach and this idea that if we crack down on the parents, it may somehow have an effect of restricting or stopping

or slowing the rate of school shootings. I understand 100% the desire to charge these parents, and to some extent I would say that I even feel it myself. I also think that we have to be very careful, when it comes to the state being able to charge people in new ways and put them into prison, I think we have to stop and analyze what are we actually doing and what laws have been broken. And, you know, I personally think that those questions are very serious when it comes to parenting, which is a really hard thing to make laws around in the first place because there are so many different ways of parenting.

And one way or the other, most parents are flawed. And I think when you're going after a parent, to me, especially in a case like this, for something that their children did, you should have a very clear explanation that this is the law that you broke and this is specifically how you broke it. I think states would be better served to be looking at putting in things like safe storage gun laws, you know, laws around children having access to guns at all. because the reality in Georgia is that there is no safe storage gun law. There is no law against this kid having that gun and being able to use it. I don't think you can be that state that is positioning yourself as a basically a free-for-all for guns and then turn around after someone has slipped through the cracks and go after the parents. In a way, I would say tacitly for breaking laws that actually don't exist.

You end up with a kind of compounded idea that you're trying to prove in court, which is that you gave your son access to a gun. Well, that's not a crime. But you did so, knowing that he was having mental health problems, that he might be dangerous to people. The problem is, legally, to get that standard of negligence up to where you're claiming someone is responsible for murder or manslaughter is very, very high. It's not just that you were careless.

It's that you were wantonly careless, that you knew something was going to happen and you didn't care and you didn't do anything. I think in good interpretation, it would have to be seen as being beyond just having a gun in a house in a state where it's legal to do so. This was a hunting family. That was sort of the recreation that they used. As a young adolescent, he would go with his father. They would go deer hunting. And that was actually seen in that family, a family. as it is in many families in the U.S. as kind of a recreational pastime and a sport.

That was also true in Michigan. The problem is when parents have a kid who may be mentally struggling, maybe having depression, maybe they're getting bullied at school, most parents are going to start thinking about, okay, well, what gives the child pleasure, what can we do together that might cheer him up? How do we kind of distract him? And it seems that in both of these families, the answer to that question was actually guns. I think these prosecutions are very convenient for a lot of politicians who actually don't want to do anything about guns and who find it either ideologically or politically prohibitive to go and look at the systemic problem of guns

because then they can say, look, it's just these bad apple parents, it's these sort of low-life parents who aren't doing their job and they shouldn't have had kids and all these sort of like rhetoric that we're seeing on. on social media toward Mr. Gray right now, rather than saying, we have a problem across the country, this is going to keep happening, whether we prosecute this dad or not, and we need to look at our own laws and whether we are doing everything in our power

to protect kids at school, which, in my opinion, the answer there is no. I mean, the fact is the guns are around kids all over this country, and I just don't think that the way to solve that is through, you know, coming in after the fact and charging the parents for what they didn't do or what they didn't know, or perhaps not having the imagination or the wisdom as parents to intervene at the right moment.

I think we're really dealing with a systemic failure, and I think it's a bit of magical thinking to think that prosecuting these people is really going to make a difference. I have my own views of guns and what should be done. Personally, I'm quite anti-gun. I spent a lot of my adult life out of the United States where we just didn't have shootings. And of course, there were people with mental health issues. There were people who were depressed and angry. There were people who snapped.

But when you don't have this easy access to guns, it doesn't end up in a bloodbath. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by J. Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez-Boid, Vichaka, Phoebe, Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelsa. and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.