Colin Gray’s Conviction Is Just, but It’s Not a Game Changer

This week, a Georgia jury convicted Colin Gray of 27 criminal charges — including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter — over his role in facilitating gun access for his teenage son, who subsequently committed a mass shooting at his high school. It’s one of only a few instances in which parents have been held criminally liable with respect to their child’s commission of a mass shooting inside of a school or elsewhere, and the first time a conviction has included a murder charge.

To be clear, it certainly feels like some manner of criminal accountability for Gray was justified under the circumstances. Gray knew that his teenage son was mentally unwell and in need of serious help. He knew that this mental instability made his son prone to lashing out in physically violent ways. He had been warned, specifically, that there were serious concerns as to whether the teen — who had a shrine to a well-known school shooter in his bedroom — might have threatened online to commit a school shooting.

Despite all this knowledge, Gray chose to purchase a rifle and ammunition for his deeply troubled 14-year-old as a Christmas present and then gave him unfettered and unsupervised access to the weapon. Four people would arguably still be alive if Gray had shown a modicum of common sense in his parental decision-making.

But the justice of the outcome notwithstanding, Gray’s conviction isn’t nearly as remarkable as many seem to want it to be.

First, it’s not at all clear that this conviction marks a significant change in prosecutorial tactics seeking to hold parents criminally liable for actions that facilitated the crimes committed by their children. It’s true that Gray was convicted on two counts of a crime literally called murder by the state of Georgia. And it’s true that previous parental convictions of this nature have been limited to manslaughter or weapons-related offenses. A careful look at how Georgia actually defines second-degree murder, however, quickly reveals that the difference between it and what most states consider felony involuntary manslaughter is largely a matter of semantics.

Georgia’s second-degree murder statute covers an oddly specific and narrow set of circumstances that don’t require the intentional or malicious killing of another person. Instead, the offender must simply cause the death of another human being while committing second-degree cruelty to children. Second-degree cruelty to children, in turn, requires only that the offender “with criminal negligence causes a child under the age of 18 cruel or excessive physical or mental pain.” In other words, second-degree murder in Georgia is, more or less, just felony involuntary manslaughter of a child by another name.

It appears the state charged Gray with two counts of second-degree murder because only two of the victims were students under the age of 18. With respect to the two adult victims, the state just charged Gray under Georgia’s generically applicable involuntary manslaughter statute, which (at least under these circumstances) only constitutes a misdemeanor offense.

It’s far from certain at this point whether Gray’s second-degree murder convictions will hold up during the appeals that are inevitably forthcoming, as the state clearly relied upon novel legal theories in pursuing these charges. And even if Gray’s conviction could be properly characterized as a watershed moment in holding parents liable for shootings committed by their minor children, it’s a watershed moment that’s unlikely to matter in the overwhelming majority of school shooting cases.

It might feel good to explain away school shootings as a phenomenon driven primarily by parental negligence in giving kids access to firearms, but it’s not a feeling grounded in reality. Most mass school shooters over the last two decades have been legal adults who could lawfully purchase and possess firearms independently from their parents. Of the minority of mass school shooters who were under 18 at the time of their crime, few had their access to firearms facilitated by some obvious degree of criminal negligence on the part of their parents.

The 17-year-old who killed ten people at a Texas high school in 2018, for example, used weapons taken from his father’s gun safe. The gunman’s parents ultimately prevailed in a lawsuit seeking to hold them civilly liable for their son’s actions, in significant part because there was simply not the same amount of evidence as with Gray that they knew their son was dangerous and bought guns for him anyway. In fact, it seems most likely that the Texas teen accessed the firearms despite his father’s efforts to keep them secured. The two teens who opened fire in a Colorado high school in 2019 similarly accessed their firearms despite “safe storage” efforts by their parents, prying open a locked gun safe. And local officials just last year declined to charge the parents of a different Colorado teen school shooter who broke into the family’s locked gun safe without their knowledge.

The final sad reality is that while it’s arguably just to prosecute the few parents who, like Colin Gray, facilitate tragedies through their own criminal negligence, it’s unclear whether such prosecutions would meaningfully deter the same type of parent likely to engage in similar criminal negligence. After all, Gray made his fatal miscalculations about arming his son even after national headlines touted the prosecution and conviction of two Michigan parents over similarly egregious parenting decisions that enabled their teen to commit a school shooting in 2021. A parent who doesn’t intuitively understand that giving a mentally troubled school-shooter-worshipping teen free access to a loaded firearm is a terrible idea likely to have tragic outcomes is an unlikely candidate to successfully learn that lesson from the failures of others.

Colin Gray’s convictions are probably appropriate, given the nature of his actions. It may even make us feel a little bit better that “justice has been served” here. But it’s a fool’s errand to pretend it matters in the grand scheme of our efforts to prevent future tragedies.