It is often said that the greatest tragedy for any parent is witnessing the death of their child. However, this may be preferable to witnessing their incarceration for multiple accounts of first-degree murder. Colin Gray, the father of Colt Gray, will live this reality. At only 14, Colt Gray, with an AR-style weapon given to him by his father stowed in his backpack, perpetrated September 4th’s tragedy: the 2024 Apalachee High School Shooting. . Although mass shootings have become a staple of the United States’ flaws – which often fades into the background because of their exponential proliferation in the last decade – this particular incident provokes a compelling line of inquiry.
As a notably rare occurrence among school shooting cases, Colin Gray has been implicated in the crimes of his son. More pertinently, Colin Gray faces the greatest quantity and most serious charges of any parent in the history of school shootings in the United States. Currently, the charges are four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children. The precedent for convictions on parents was four counts of involuntary manslaughter against James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents of the 2021 Oxford High School Shooter, Ethan Crumbley. This case seems even more likely to lean toward greater blame being placed on the parents of shooting perpetrators.
Legally, the degree of incumbency to which Colin Gray has been held begs the question if this case will become precedent for future prosecutions of school shooters, perhaps an indication of a legal and cultural paradigm shift regarding who the real perpetrators of school shootings are. Despite being tried as an adult, Colt Gray is indeed under 16, just as occurred in the case of Ethan Crumbley, a fellow minor at the time of his hearing, while both of their parents concurrently were also charged with involuntary manslaughter. On the front of both the perpetrator, if a minor, and the parents, charges and opinions of the court have grown synergistically more severe than in previous incidents. Inferrably, the increasing severity of such opinions are to be preemptive and preventive for not potential perpetrators, but rather, the parent, even if the child incurs more severe legal consequences, such as being tried as an adult.
In increasing this prosecutive austerity for both defendants, the parental concupiscence is exacerbated, for in lying upon their deathbed, ruminating that their genetic legacy, likely without the possibility of parole, will breathe their last entangled in the corroded vines of a concrete jungle, is the most psychologically severe prosecution to be determined. To die recognizing you are personally responsible for the actions of your child due to your own negligence and failure as a parent, to grow old sooner from your guilt, and to be tormented by that grave fault of your character, is ones of the most severe punishments imaginable. This will hopefully build parental caution about the security and availability of their firearms, as the legal implications are more real than ever before.
Finally, in acknowledgement of these court opinions and future rulings for similar cases, once again, we are brought to the age-old dichotomy of human volition and absolute determinism, and to what extent they do or should dictate statutes and legal interpretations thereof. American jurisprudence, from a very metalegal and retrospective perspective, is essentially predicated upon the ideal of volition, or “free will.” Though I do not believe frivolous debates circumscribed to a priori logical and ethical rationales serve any benefit other than to further muddle our understanding of psychology, if our legal “ethicists” and “contemporary political philosophers” took to the time to adduce empirical data, experimental findings, and psychological research, a more scientific, secular, and malleable jurisprudential ideology may be contrived, or, at least assimilated after numerous reformations to the current state of American jurisprudence, may benefit courts in such scenarios in which their flowery legalese and purported “critical thinking” that are near incomprehensible to the average American citizen result in faulty rulings, or, as we are seeing now, result in developing legal paradigm shifts regarding the culpability of a parent regarding their actions of their children, could benefit how courts determine future opinions. Indeed, with growing evidence against the existence of a pure human volition as American jurisprudence is predicated upon, in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, the legal system will need to contend with a growing scientific body, and determine to what extent their opinions should reflect a philosophical and scientific paradigm as deterministic ethics, or, as can be reasonably inferred here, the law to demand a peremptory disposition among fire-arm owning parents, to prevent future tragedies like those of September 4th’s. As to the effectiveness of proliferating charges against parents in preventing school shootings, only time will tell.