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On Tuesday, a jury in Georgia found Colin Gray guilty of second-degree murder, manslaughter, cruelty to children, and reckless conduct, even though he did not kill anyone. The conviction came in the wake of a school shooting carried out by his son, Colt, on Sept. 4, 2024.

Colt Gray killed two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and injured nine others. As CNN notes, the case against his father has been “testing the limits of who is responsible for a mass shooting.”

On the day of the shooting, Colt brought an AR-15 to school concealed in a backpack. He asked his first-period class teacher how Apalachee High would respond to an active shooter. She was alarmed by his question and alerted others. But not long after that, his shooting spree started.

Just before Colt started shooting, he texted his father, “I’m sorry, it’s not ur fault” and “ur not to blame for any of it.” The Georgia jury was not so forgiving of a parent who gave an AR-15 to a 14-year-old child.

They are only the second jury in American history to find a parent guilty after their child went on a shooting spree at a school. It is an important step forward in what CNN calls a growing nationwide effort “to hold more people accountable for a school shooting, including the shooter’s parents and responding law enforcement officers.”

It is also an important step forward in the effort to curb America’s school shooting epidemic.

Colin Gray’s conviction sends a clear message to parents that they cannot stand idly by in the buildup to a school shooting. And they can no longer supply guns to their children and walk away unscathed if they misuse them.

What Colt Gray did is hardly an anomaly. In 2023, there were 350 school shootings during the year. The number was 332 in 2024 and 116 last year. We cannot stop school shootings unless parents do their part. All too often they do not, with disastrous results.

But what happened to Colin Gray in a Georgia courtroom is an example of so-called vicarious liability. In such cases, someone can be held responsible for an act done by someone else. Many scholars question the fairness of vicarious liability in criminal cases, viewing it as an unwarranted exception to the general rule that criminal responsibility must be personal.

Moreover, the verdict in Colin Gray’s case will not be welcomed by parental rights advocates. They do not want the government telling parents how to raise their children, how to discipline them, or how to supervise them, or punishing them for their children’s crimes or misdeeds.

Others think that punishing parents like Gray may make matters worse by distracting us from addressing more important issues. As Boston University Law professor Angelo Petrigh argues, “This approach is a poor substitute for firearm safeguards and mental health support. These prosecutions are concerning because holding people criminally responsible for the actions of others expands the already wide net of criminal responsibility.”

Petrigh is right to say we need gun control and better mental health care. However, we should not ignore the fact that school shooters most often come from families in which their parents abused or neglected them and introduced them to guns and gun culture at an early age.

We also know that the parents of children who carry out school shootings often ignore the warning signs. We need to address these issues as well as the ones Petrigh mentions.

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While the idea of holding parents criminally responsible when a school shooting occurs is new, the idea of holding parents responsible in other ways for what their children do is hardly novel. It can be traced to English common law, which imposed a duty on parents to prevent foreseeable damage or harm done by their children. Today, that idea is reflected in the fact that almost every state has parental responsibility laws on the books that impose civil liability on parents. Those laws are said “to provide an incentive for parents to carefully supervise kids and help them develop into mature, law-abiding adults.”

A 2011 study found what it called “lukewarm” public support at best for punishing parents when their children commit crimes. Yet such prosecutions may be the wave of the future. To offer one example, in 2023, a father faced criminal charges after his son killed seven people during an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. He had helped the son get a firearm license even though he knew that his son was deeply troubled and had a history of violent behavior.

The father pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanor charges of reckless conduct. After the father’s guilty plea, the prosecutor said that he hoped it “laid down a marker to other prosecutors, to other police in this country, to other parents, that they must be held accountable.”

Last year, the state of Wisconsin charged Jeffrey Rupnow with two counts of intentionally giving a dangerous weapon to a minor and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after his 15-year-old daughter killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison.

And, in 2025, a Texas woman was charged with buying ammunition and tactical gear for her 13-year-old son. It was the first case in which a parent had been charged with a crime before their child carried out a planned school shooting. But the real watershed in the evolution of parental criminal responsibility occurred the year before, when Jennifer and James Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter after their son Ethan murdered four students at his school. It was the first time that prosecutors had been able to convince jurors that parents should be punished in a school shooting case.

As the New York Times reported, the jury found that the Crumbleys did not “remove their son from school after he made a violent drawing on the morning of the shooting. It included a written plea for help.” They also allowed Ethan to have access to a handgun that his father had purchased. Each of them was sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

The facts in the Gray case bear an eerie similarity to the Crumbleys’. CBS notes that Colt Gray “also displayed a series of red flags for months leading up to the tragedy. According to investigators, he wrote step-by-step plans in a notebook, including diagrams and potential body counts, and had a poster of the Parkland shooter hanging on his bedroom wall.”

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Both his parents were addicted to drugs and alcohol and paid little attention to what was happening to Colt even as he developed paranoia. His father even bought him the AR-15 as a Christmas present. It was the gun that Colt used to kill his classmates and teachers.

In the end, what Judge Cheryl Matthews said before she handed down a sentence in the Crumbley case offers a good way to think about parental responsibility for school shootings. “Parents,” Matthews explained, “are not expected to be psychic.” But at the same time, the law can’t allow them to turn a blind eye to their children’s problems.

“These convictions,” Matthews said, “are not about poor parenting. These convictions confirm repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train—repeatedly ignoring things that would make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up.”

This week’s jury decision in Georgia goes a long way to help ensure that parents who do nothing in response to the kind of impending danger that Matthews describes will not be able to get off scot-free.

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