The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.
Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.
He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.
It wasn’t that he didn’t secure the gun. It’s that he gifted it to the teen directly.
And if I’m not mistaken he did so after he’d been notified the kid was being investigated for death threats.
(I mean, I’m all for people who don’t secure their guns being charged for what their kids do with them, but this particular case goes far beyond mere negligence.)
does it matter? no it does not.
if you dont secure your human killing devices, and it ends up with dead/hurt humans you should be prosecuted.
e. and honestly, he absolutely failed to secure the device he was responsible for. the method he used is superfluous
It does matter. The teenager was the owner. Even if the gun was secure it would have been accessible to the teenager. The gun was gifted to the teenager and that is the problem. The teenager should not have position of a fire arm, that we both agree on. Stating that the gun should have been secure completely ignores the actual scenario here.
The contention is that a 14 yo is not a capable owner of a gun. They’re a child. The parent owns everything they have, in actuality. Both their possessions and their responsibilities/consequences.
It doesn’t matter who did or didn’t lock it, it’s the parents lack of a lock, parent’s lack of supervision, Parents gun, parent’s everything
Oh bullshit. I bought my son a rifle when he was a minor. You know where “his” rifle was when we weren’t actually using it? Locked up in my fucking gun safe.
Was the teenager the owner? Can a 14 year old legally possess a firearm like that independent of their parent(s)?
I always imagined it was similar to when a parent buys a car and “gifts” it to the child. The car still belongs to the parent, at least until the kid is old enough to take ownership of it.
id put money on the fact that teen did not buy an AR. The human killing remains the responsibility of the purchaser.
had the gift been to another adult, you might have an argument.
you should in absolutely no capacity be able to gift an AR to a 14 year old and claim no responsibility.
But that’s why the father is being prosecuted. Because he ultimately gifted the firearm to his teenager. Your original statement was about unsecured firearms. I was pointing out this is not a case of “teenager breaks into house and gets a gun.” This is about a father letting their 14 year old have a gun.
this is a failure to secure
Afaik there is no state where an underage person is allowed to handle assault style fully automatic weapons without the supervision of a parent or legal guardian. So even if it is his gun, it falls under parental supervision until 18 years old.
Semi automatic or hunting rifle is a little more murky.
Anyway I think that your comment nailed it - a person under 18 was able to obtain and handle a gun without supervision is a failure to secure.
Not being pedantic to kneecap you but the language matters. An AR 15 is not fully automatic
I’m not saying this to minimize what happened, or the danger of an ar15, but to clarify that fully automatic weapons are much more rare, and much more dangerous.
The linked article doesn’t say it was a AR-15 it says assault-style rifle and I would consider the specific model to be splitting hairs, since it hardly matters to the conversation.
But to be truly pedantic the article a little further down specifies it as an Assault style semi-automatic rifle, so fair enough.
Agreed. Still, semi-automatic assault style rifles pose a unique danger in that they could be “upgraded” to fire full auto, although it being illegal. Most of those are derived from regular fully automatic weapons and the layout allows them to be converted more easily. For example a SL08 with I think 4 parts switched can be operated like it’s military counterpart, the G36.
this is not pedantic… this is tone deaf to the epidemic. completely and totally irrelevant.
The gun was not full auto.
No it is not.