Some gun advocates are upset that a Georgia father who allegedly allowed his 14-year-old son to have access to an assault rifle used in a school shooting now faces the possibility of 180 years in prison.
The father has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. The father’s arrest came after a school shooting that left two students and two educators dead and another nine people injured.
Witnesses said the son did the shooting with a gun the father owned.
The father’s arrest follows another case hundreds of miles away in which parents also found themselves held accountable for their son’s actions.
In April, a Michigan court sentenced a mother and a father to 10 years in prison apiece for giving their troubled 15-year-old son a gun the boy used in a school shooting.
In that 2021 tragedy, four of the boy’s fellow students died.
Some firearms devotees have bemoaned this developing trend of holding parents of mass murderers accountable if those parents did anything to aid or nothing to stop the slaughter before it occurred. They wonder where the logic is that holds people responsible for shootings in which they did not pull the trigger.
They shouldn’t be puzzled.
The gun advocates are the ones who developed the arguments now used to prosecute parents of school shooters.
For decades, the gun lobby—primarily in the form of the lobbyists, flacks and camp followers of the National Rifle Association—has contended that government and law enforcement should have no role in controlling or restricting people’s access to deadly weapons.
Owning a gun, they said, was not just a matter of personal autonomy, but of personal accountability. Gun owners should be entrusted to handle their firearms responsibly.
The NRA’s argument has been successful in political terms.
In many states—including Indiana and, yes, Georgia—the laws governing guns and gun ownership are the work of the NRA and its public policy team. They assert that the individual’s right to own a weapon takes priority over any public safety or public health need.
In service of that belief, the NRA’s foot soldiers here in Indiana have fought against measures that would have restricted people who have been convicted of, among other things, domestic violence and drunk driving from having guns. The individual’s right to have a deadly weapon, however intoxicated or dangerous that individual might be, trumped the public’s right to take steps to provide for the safety of the innocent.
The gun lobby’s long campaign to prevent even the mildest forms of gun control meant that there were few if any restrictions in many places—including Indiana and, yes, Georgia—on the possession of firearms.
In short, in those places, the NRA won the argument that it wasn’t government’s job to keep guns out of the wrong hands.
No, it was the individual’s responsibility.
The folks who unquestioningly followed the gun lobby line now are getting some idea of what their argument has wrought.
No one in the courts in either Michigan or Georgia as yet has argued that the parents charged in those horrific shootings had any intention of helping their offspring commit multiple murders, much less any actual physical involvement in the killings themselves.
But, if we take the NRA’s argument about the precedence of individual rights seriously, then anyone who places a firearm in the hands of a disturbed individual or leaves a gun lying around where an unbalanced teenager can get hold of it must assume a portion of the responsibility for the tragic acts that follow.
For years now, thanks to the NRA’s effective hamstringing of the law and law enforcement in dealing with America’s epidemic of gun violence, victims of firearms-related violence haven’t been able to count on the protection good laws might have provided them.
Now, gun owners who have been careless or thoughtless with their weapons are learning that they can’t count on such protection, either.
There is justice in that.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
