Gun Control, Georgia Style

How America might stumble into gun control

Base image by Deleece Cook on Unsplash; gun image by TheAlphaWolf, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; image smashup by author

The school year wasn’t two weeks into its fall session in America when the bullets started flying. Once again, dead children and teachers, thoughts and prayers.

As the usual fusillade of frustration roared from those of us tired of lax gun control laws, an interesting thing happened in a state where kids can legally possess weapons of mass destruction: The father of one of those kids was charged with two counts of second degree murder in this, the latest killing spree, this time at the trigger-happy hands of a 14 year old child.

The shooter’s father, 54 year old Colin Gray, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children. He faces up to 180 years in prison.

In Georgia, where the mass murder took place, the only restriction on minors possessing weapons is on handguns. You must be 18 years old to possess a handgun. Other than that, any other weapons, including weapons of war like AR-15s (used in this latest shooting), are available to any minor who isn’t a felon.

Peering through the various online reactions toward the shooting, I saw tremendous outrage toward the 14 year old shooter, a child, who is about to be tried as an adult for the shooting deaths of two of his peers and two of his teachers. This outrage spanned all political leanings: right to left, and everywhere in between.

I can’t imagine what would make anybody want to slaughter anyone, much less children, but the mind of a 14 year old is not developed enough to hold them to the same standards as an adult.

It’s not surprising for a ruralish Georgia county to respond viciously toward one of their children to an event like this. One of Georgia’s leading industries is its prison industrial complex, with one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and a surprisingly vast subset of agencies, companies, and organizations to help support it.

What is surprising is holding one of the parents accountable. How prosecutors intend to skirt around Georgia’s lax gun code, where kids can possess any armament they please aside from handguns, is going to be an interesting question. There are no licensing regulations, no age restrictions, nothing at all to stop a kid in Georgia from possessing a weapon of war.

But it’s difficult to argue with intent in this case. Chris Hosey, Director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said that the charges are “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”

If Georgia succeeds in prosecuting this kid’s father, it should set off alarm bells within the families of other gun owners, which should make the rest of us happy.

The inconvenient truth about gun ownership is that if you’re a parent who has weapons of war in the house, you should be held accountable if one of your kids shoots up a school or anything else. It doesn’t matter how secure you think the guns are. It doesn’t matter how “locked up” they are.

The whole idea of any kid who is entertaining the idea of shooting up their school is to defeat such a system. If you have guns in the house, and a kid is determined to use them, he’ll find a way to do so. No amount of security will defeat a kid with vengeance in his soul.

I don’t know if this kid was bullied, or if he was, as his grandfather claimed, simply a victim of a lousy family situation. Something set him off, and no matter what his father did to keep his guns away from his kid, the kid would have gotten his hands on them. They always do.

What then, happens if this, like a recent case in Michigan where parents were also held accountable, becomes the norm?

What if county and state prosecutors start locking up parents when their 14 year old sons slaughter people?

It seems to me that it becomes a sudden, surprising, and welcome, new delta point in the gun control wars, which has been dominated by a long string of NRA victories in court and legislatures during the last 40 years.

If parents have to think of the possibility that they could wind up in prison when their toddler starts wiping out his classmates with the family AR-15, maybe they won’t buy the damn thing.

Nobody needs these kinds of weapons, anyway. The people who own them claim their use as hobbies. They should get another hobby.

Those who don’t may end up in prison no matter how safely they think they locked away the guns.

Update

The father apparently bought his son the AR-15 after his son was accused of threatening to shoot up his school in a Discord channel.