by Andrew Fenner ‘27

On September 4, 14-year-old Colt Gray entered his high school in Winder, Georgia, and opened
fire with an assault rifle, killing four and injuring a handful of others. Colin Gray, Colt’s father and an alleged drug addict, bought Colt the gun as a Christmas present in 2023. Just a year before the shooting took place, Colt was investigated by police after the FBI received tips about online threats
the teen made about shooting up a school. Colin Gray was indicted on 29 counts, including two counts of second-degree murder and two counts of involuntary manslaughter stemming from his involvement in allowing his troubled son access to the firearm. This is a small price to pay for the terrible hurt his negligence caused, but it’s a step in the right direction of stopping adolescents from having access to guns.

In May of 2023, the police interviewed a then 13-year-old Colt Gray regarding anonymous tips the FBI received about threats to commit a school shooting the teen had made online. They questioned his father as well, who said that there were hunting rifles in the house, but Colt didn’t have unsupervised access to them. Even with all this information, the sheriffs let the boy go. Despite the evidence suggesting the teen was not in the right mental state to have access to a weapon, let alone a rifle, his father bought him a firearm just a few months later. The father, though not explicitly helping Colt carry out his shooting, played a big role in allowing it to happen. There’s little solace to be found in this tragedy, but the father’s arrest and potential conviction is an important course of action to prevent these school shootings in the future.

A trial in Michigan earlier this year resulted in the conviction of the parents of the teenage shooter who killed four students at Oxford High School. The convictions of Ethan Crumbley’s parents made them the first parents to be charged in a mass shooting in the United States, and they eventually were convicted for four counts of involuntary manslaughter. Colin Gray’s trial will be only the second time that the parents of a school shooter are charged in relation to their negligence. Parents who don’t keep guns safely away from the adolescent children should be held criminally responsible. However, what about the states that refuse to insist that parents are responsible gun owners? The state of Georgia is one of the states with the weakest gun laws, ranked #46 in its gun law strength, according to a CBS article. The fact that Gray, who is a drug addict by all accounts, would be able to pass the background checks necessary to obtain a firearm is startling. This incident serves as a sign that great reforms need to be made to make guns harder to obtain.

Secure storage laws have been implemented in 26 states to prevent tragedies like those in Oxford and Winder from happening. These laws legally require gun owners to lock up their firearms to prevent them from getting into the hands of unsupervised children and young adolescents. In households that lock their firearms and ammunition, unintentional gun violence among children dropped 85 percent. The state of Georgia is unsurprisingly not among the states that have passed these laws. Irresponsible parents–and also state governors and legislators–should not get away with the role they play in the scourge of gun violence in the United States.