This month’s shooting in Georgia is the latest instance in which a minor attacked their school using a weapon they’d gotten from a parent.
On Sept. 4, 14-year-old Colt Gray allegedly opened fire at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, killing two other 14-year old students and two teachers. Gray was arrested and charged with murder.
The following day, Gray’s father, Colin Gray, was also arrested in connection with the attack, and was charged with multiple counts of involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder and cruelty to children.
At a news conference held that day, Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said, “These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon.”
Colin Gray is not the first parent to be charged for a school shooting carried out by their child. In February, a Michigan jury found Jennifer Crumbley guilty of manslaughter for the 2021 school shooting committed by her son, Ethan, who was 15 years old when he opened fire at his high school, killing four students. Jennifer Crumbley purchased the weapon used in the attack and took her son to a shooting range to practice firing it, according to prosecutors. (In a separate trial, Ethan Crumbley’s father, James, was also convicted of manslaughter in the shooting.)
Though school shootings are increasingly common, the victims of such attacks account for a very small percentage of firearm deaths. The majority (54%) are suicides, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. Of the 48,830 total gun deaths in the U.S. in 2021, 103 (0.21%) occurred in shootings that met the FBI’s definition of an active shooter incident. (An alternative analysis by the Gun Violence Archive counts 706 deaths in incidents it defines as mass shootings, or 1.4% of all gun deaths.)
These attacks loom large in our collective fears, particularly since so many of the victims are children. The reality is that most children are more likely to encounter a weapon in their own home. Given the high rate of gun ownership in the United States, millions of American children are living in homes that contain a firearm. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 48% of people who have children under the age of 18 live with a gun in their home or on their property.
Parents can take steps to reduce the risk of children being hurt by a firearm at home.
Parents’ gun safety practices don’t necessarily follow the patterns you might expect.
A study published Sept. 9 in JAMA Pediatrics surveyed 870 parents in nine different states who owned at least one firearm and had at least one child under 18.
Researchers found that “parents who demonstrated and practiced proper firearm handling with their children and showed children how to shoot their firearms … were significantly more likely to store their firearm unlocked and loaded,” Jennifer Paruk, a researcher at Rutgers University and one of the study’s authors, told HuffPost.
Overall, Paruk said, 17% of parents with a firearm in the home stored it unlocked and loaded, with those who taught their kids how to safely handle firearms more likely to leave a firearm accessible in this way.
These findings suggest “that some parents believe that modeling responsible firearm use and teaching responsible firearm use just eliminates the need for secure storage,” Paruk said.
Parents might think, “Well, I already taught my kid how to use it safely, then why do I need to keep it stored up if I already taught them how to use it?” she continued.
While keeping weapons in secure storage — defined as having weapons stored locked and unloaded, separately from ammunition — has been shown to reduce the risk of children being harmed by firearms, teaching kids about gun safety may not have the same benefits.
“Training and education shouldn’t replace safe storage,” Paruk said. One reason is suicide prevention.
In child firearm suicide deaths, 79% of the time the firearm belonged to a parent or to an extended family member, and the death often took place in the child’s home, Paruk said. These grim statistics, she continued, “highlight that an important part of firearm safety is just keeping those firearms stored securely so that kids can’t access and use them, especially in moments of crisis.”
Some parents who own guns are speaking out about safe storage.
Johanna Thomas, a social worker and gun safety advocate for Be SMART, is raising a 15-year-old and an 11-year-old in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There are three handguns in her home. Thomas keeps them in a safe in her bedroom closet that can only she and her husband can open, either with their fingerprints or with a code only they know.
“Firearms are locked and unloaded and our ammunition is stored in a separate safe that is controlled by an electronic keypad. Both safes are bolted into the shelving,” Thomas told HuffPost.
Of her two daughters, only the 15-year-old has handled a gun — under parental supervision at a firing range. The process was controlled and deliberate.
“As a family, we sat down and talked about if she felt ready to handle a firearm and if she even wanted to. She was interested, so my brother and husband took her to the range for her first lesson,” Thomas said.
“She only handles the firearms under the supervision of my husband or me and in a controlled environment, specifically an indoor or outdoor firing range, and only for sport.”
Thomas’ 11-year-old is “not ready,” she said, although she is aware of the guns and her sister’s trips to the firing range.
Thomas doesn’t worry about her children being harmed by the securely stored weapons in her home, but she fears what could happen when they are at other people’s houses.
“I do worry about my child coming into a situation in which another adult has not properly stored their firearm, and now that adult’s child has an unsupervised gun. It’s terrifying. I never depend on my children to not touch a gun, no matter how much I emphasize that they shouldn’t,” she said.
Whenever her children have friends over, Thomas discloses that she has secured weapons, along with information about pets, a swimming pool, alcohol and medications, and she expects other parents to reciprocate.
This normalization of guns can seem foreign to folks from the bluer parts of the country.
Ben, a father of two young daughters who asked to use a pseudonym for this article, was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, he said, “guns were not a part of life.” He did not know anyone who went hunting, and the only weapons he’d seen in person were “two non-operable guns from World War I that [my grandfather] got at a garage sale or something well before I was born that just sat up above his bar.” He had no gun education, and, had he taken any interest, Ben would have had to seek out that information on his own — which could have put him in a dangerous situation, such as another person showing him their gun.
Ben now lives in rural Minnesota, where hunting, both with guns and bows and arrows, is a regular part of life. “Children here, including my own, grow up knowing that hunting culture and hunting season is something that your family does,” he said. People there can’t comprehend why anyone would want to ban guns, just as people in California don’t understand why people would own them, he said. He also noted that Minnesota has background checks and other safety measures that some other states do not.
Ben’s weapons are stored in safes, separate from ammunition. He said his children do not know where they are kept, and are aware that they should never touch a gun and should alert an adult if they ever find one.
While he only rarely hunts and owns few weapons, Ben sees the prevalence of guns as a compelling reason to educate children about them and their use. “My daughters growing up with gun safety and knowledge when they’re of age, even knowing of them now and what to do now if they encounter one, is important,” he said.
Gun safety requires parents to acknowledge their blind spots.
Parents aren’t the only ones wrestling with when and how to speak to their children about guns. Pediatricians are also expected to talk about gun safety with families ― especially now that firearms are now the No. 1 cause of children’s deaths in the United States, after surpassing motor vehicle accidents in 2020.
Janine Zee-Cheng is a pediatrician in Indiana, which has a relatively high rate of gun ownership. One of their standard questions when talking to parents, they said, is how weapons are stored and secured in each family’s home. In addition to storing unloaded guns in fingerprint safes like the kind Thomas described, Zee-Cheng recommends trigger locks, which their patients can get for free at the local children’s hospital.
Unfortunately, they have found that many families do not abide by these precautions.
“A lot of people around here have guns for home security. So they’re like, well, there’s no point in having a gun if I have to unlock it and load it and stuff like that,” they said. “They want immediate access, in case there’s some threat to them or their property.”
These conversations with families aren’t easy, as parents tend to get “super defensive, super quickly” when asked about firearms, they said ― even though Zee-Cheng tries not to sound judgmental when posing these questions.
Zee-Cheng also recommends that parents follow Thomas’ lead and couch questions about guns as part of a standard set of questions to ask before playdates.
“I think people place a lot of trust in their kids’ ability to be safer on firearms than developmentally — I’m not sure that all of those kids are in that same place,” they said, noting that gun safety is not the only place that parents overestimate their kids’ maturity.
“We have a hard time remembering that our children are not extensions of ourselves. Our children are not always able to make the mental jumps that we are as adults,” Zee-Cheng said.
Paruk echoed this sentiment. “We just want parents to think back to their own childhoods, to their own teenage years, if they ever snuck around the house, or if they ever did something that their parents told them not to.”
That exercise may reveal potential blind spots. A 2021 study showed that while 70% of parent gun owners reported that their children could not access a firearm in their home, their children reported otherwise over one-third of the time.
“The onus to keep kids safe always falls on the shoulders of adults,” Thomas said.
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