The implicit argument as Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged and ultimately convicted of murders committed not by them, but their son, was that the circumstances, the evidence, was so unique that this mom, this dad, deserved to be held accountable for their miscreant son, Ethan. After all, they gave him a gun as a Christmas present and they knew of his propensity for violence. What are the chances that would happen again?
[Colin] Gray rocked back and forth in shackles and prison stripes on Friday morning as the charges against him were read. His son had just been charged with murder for opening fire at Apalachee High School, killing two students and two teachers. Next came the charges against the white-haired Mr. Gray, including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for allowing his son access to the gun even though, prosecutors say, Mr. Gray knew the boy was a threat to himself and others.
The very next school shooting. Colt Gray’s father committed no crime himself, but a tragedy occurred and sacrificing a 14-year-old school boy is no longer sufficient to sate the public lust.
These prosecutions satisfy the public desire to blame somebody. If you don’t like guns, shaming and punishing the parents feels like landing a righteous blow against gun culture. If you do like guns, it’s a bit like the predictable invocation of mental health by politicians — diverting attention from the weapons themselves and suggesting, instead, that the problem is a few bad apples among the owners. Most insidiously, though, these prosecutions set a murky legal precedent for questionable parenting while camouflaging the abject failure of the federal and state governments to adequately regulate gun safety and stop mass shootings.
But what of the legal culpability of a father for the murderous crimes of the son?
In the Georgia case, liability would depend on what precisely the parents knew. It has been reported that the FBI previously interviewed the school shooter because of online threats. Certainly, if the parents were aware that the teenager represented a credible danger to the school, they would have had the obligation to control him, including (most obviously) by not supplying the child with a rifle. But reports indicate that the child denied making the threats and the FBI could not find probable cause (a very low evidentiary standard) that he did so. It is doubtful that one unsubstantiated allegation months earlier that a child made threats would place parents on notice that a child may be violent now.
Much of this analysis derives from civil negligence law, rendering its applicability to criminal law dubious. But if the facts are insufficient to sustain a negligence claim, how could they possibly be enough for criminal culpability?
At the end of the day, however, it is not clear whether these legal technicalities will matter. We may be witnessing a development in the law of parental responsibility. Although school shootings and mass shootings are rare (they make up a small fraction of all homicides), they terrify the population far more than ordinary street violence. Americans may have had enough, and they may want the law to develop in a direction to impose a more substantial duty on parents to keep firearms away from minors. Guns are not the only dangerous instrumentality to which minors have access; cars cause thousands of deaths each year, too. If the law evolves, it remains to be seen whether it will be a “gun exception” to normal rules of parental responsibility or whether the law will impose stronger duties on parents in other domains as well.
If death by car seems too much of a stretch, even though cars can be every bit as deadly, what about a butcher knife?
As a thought exercise, let’s imagine that Colt Gray, instead of smuggling a gun into school, as he is accused of doing, took a butcher knife from his kitchen and stabbed his classmates to death. Would we be prosecuting his father? Of course not, you say. A knife is a normal household item, and there’s no law against leaving one unattended, no matter how it ends up getting used. But a gun, like it or not, is also a normal item in countless American homes.
Beyond the fact that there are guns in many homes, it is critical to bear in mind that school shootings are extremely rare despite pervasive fear. What parent would knowingly let his child have a gun if he truly believed he would take it to school and murder his classmates? Contending that a father should have known that his child presented a significant risk of danger is far easier after the fact than before.
Parsing the family dynamics, the tell-tale signs that a child is about to commit murder, to fit them into a fact pattern to muster parental blame looks entirely different before a child brings a gun to school and fires. Indeed, it may look relatively normal, as so many young people suffer from anxiety and depression and yet do nothing to harm anyone else, even though there are guns in the home.
Going after the parents in the absence of adequate gun laws is, in truth, a kind of scapegoating — displaying a head on a stake to satisfy the rage of a desperate crowd. We shouldn’t wait for kids and teachers to be gunned down, then punish the parents by having jurors try to read their minds and judge their parenting.
And yet, convicting a child for being a murderous child has proven insufficient to satisfy the public desire for retribution. After all, the child is still a child, likely to make terrible choices, including one to bring a gun to school and use it. No, someone more readily hateable is needed, even though the parent pulled no trigger and harmed no one. The argument is that maybe criminal culpability will make such parents take greater precautions to prevent their child from killing. As if the parent wouldn’t have done better had he known. But nobody knows beforehand, while everybody knows afterward.