Father of Georgia Shooter Rightly Charged with Murder

I have long argued for strict liability for gun owners meaning that they should be held legally liable for anything bad that that is done with a gun they owner or that they purchase and give to someone who then commits a crime with the weapon.  For too long America's insanely lax gun laws have put the lives of the majority of voter who want strict gun laws behind the wants of the few gun fanatics who wrap themselves in the 2nd Amendment which has been warped beyond recognition by right wing judges and Supreme Court justices.  Strict liability for gun owners might motivate insurance carriers to either not insure homes that have one or more guns present whatsoever or at minimum sharply jack up insurance premiums so that gun ownership would become less financially viable for many homeowners.  Gun nuts could have their guns, but they might have to choose between homeownership where lenders require insurance coverage as a condition of their loans and their guns. This weeks horrific school shooting in Georgia and the charging of the shooter's father with murder is a step in the right direction toward a reality where gun ownership and/or irresponsibly providing a gun to anyone who commits a crime will carry a very heavy cost and might deter would be gun owners from purchasing a weapon and putting their freedom at risk.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at the charges filed in Georgia which I loudly applaud.  Here are highlights: 

Georgia officials charged the father of the suspected Apalachee High gunman with two counts of second-degree murder Thursday — the most severe charges ever filed against the parent of an alleged school shooter. The arrest came less than 36 hours after two students and a pair of teachers were gunned down with an AR-15-style rifle that, investigators allege, the man allowed his 14-year-old son to possess.

Along with murder, Colin Gray, 54, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. His son, Colt Gray, has been charged with four felony counts of murder.

The father “knowingly allowed him to possess the weapon. His charges are directly connected to the actions of his son,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said at an evening news conference. . . . . There were warning signs before Wednesday’s attack, according to law enforcement officials and family members.

A year ago, local investigators interviewed Gray and his son about alleged online threats the teen had made to shoot up a school, accusations that Colt Gray denied at the time. This week, the boy’s aunt, Annie Brown, told The Washington Post that the teen had been “begging” the adults around him for mental health support in recent months.

Before Thursday’s announcement, the teen’s grandfather, Charles Polhamus, said he wanted Colin Gray charged along with his son. “If he didn’t have a damn gun,” Polhamus said, “he wouldn’t have gone and killed anybody.”

The charges come five months after a mother and father in Michigan became the first parents of a school shooter sentenced for involuntary manslaughter, a less severe crime than second-degree murder. Investigators found that, in November 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley had bought their 15-year-old son a gun, didn’t lock it up and ignored blatant warning signs before he opened fire at Oxford High in Michigan, killing four students.

Between the Columbine High shooting in 1999 and the one at Apalachee 25 years later, children have committed at least 195 school shootings, according to a Post database that tracks gun violence on K-12 campuses. Among the cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, more than 80 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. Yet just 11 times have the adult owners of the weapons been charged with any crime because they didn’t lock them up.

The dearth of criminal consequences has often been blamed on weak firearms laws. Just 21 states and D.C. have passed statutes that impose criminal penalties on people who store guns where children could access them, according to the Giffords Law Center, an organization that advocates for gun-safety legislation.

As in Georgia today, Michigan had not passed a law back then requiring gun owners to safely store their firearms away from children — a legal obstacle that didn’t prevent McDonald from holding the Crumbleys accountable.

But unlike the case in Michigan, prosecuted in a Democratic-leaning county just outside Detroit, Georgia’s Barrow County is staunchly conservative, making both the seriousness and speed of the charges against Colin Gray especially notable.

Prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the country who are struggling to grapple with gun violence are likely to watch the Georgia prosecution closely to see how it plays out, legally and politically, in a state with loose firearms laws and a pro-gun culture.

I hope the father gets convicted and gets the maximum sentence. I also hope the families of the victims will sue him if he has homeowner's coverage and perhaps make risk adverse insurance carriers reluctant to insure homes were guns are present.