In the case of the Apalachee High School shooting in Winder, Georgia, the father probably does bear some responsibility for what allegedly happened. After all, he was visited by law enforcement and told his son may have threatened a mass shooting. He knew his son had mental health issues. His answer to that was to buy the kid an AR-15 and not keep in safely secured where he couldn’t get to it without permission.

He’s been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. 

In Georgia, there are many cases where people involved in a crime are charged for murder even if they don’t pull the trigger. Getaway drivers, for example, get charged. The state isn’t unique on this, either.

So, Colin Gray is being charged.

But an op-ed argues that this won’t make things better.

For what it’s worth, I agree. It won’t.

I just disagree about why it won’t work.

Here’s the op-ed writer’s philosophy on the subject, where he then loses the plot entirely.

Then earlier this month, Colin Gray, the father of 14-year-old Colt, who killed two teachers and two students at his school in Georgia, was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for buying his son an assault-style rifle for Christmas.

Megan Stack, a New York Times contributing opinion columnist, described the trend to charge parents thusly:

“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.”

Precisely.

There’s no doubt a bit of feel-good in making someone accountable for what is otherwise unexplainable, except that we live in a country with little gun safety protections while there are approximately 120 guns in circulation for every 100 Americans, the most of any country in the world.

American civilians account for an estimated 393 million (about 46%) of the worldwide total of civilian-held firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey.

Maybe by making parents accountable, more of them will pay attention to their children’s behavior and help keep guns out of the hands of those with mental and behavioral problems.

The author then comes back around to note that most shooters are adults so they’re not exactly subject to their parents’ whims anymore.

However, let’s also recognize that laws don’t exactly turn bad parents into good parents. If that were the case, we wouldn’t have bad parents at all. Neglecting your kids, abusing them, all sorts of things are prohibited by law and yet, parents lose custody of their kids all the time for neglect and child abuse. You’re not going to just mandate parents be better.

As for guns, though, charging parents is little different than gun control is. If charging parents is a distraction from the guns, blaming the guns is a distraction from the underlying problems that make someone think that slaughtering people in job lots is a viable idea worth pursuing.

Mass murders aren’t the exclusive domain of people with guns. That might be the lion’s share here in the United States, but that doesn’t mean they are the totality of them.

Yet what do we talk about? What gets the self-appointed elites in a tizzy?

So yeah, charging parents probably won’t change a whole lot, but gun control won’t either.