Colin Gray is the first parent of an alleged school shooter to face murder charges. Here’s the message many Americans disgusted by gun violence want to send: If you give a child a weapon, be prepared to pay the price for what he or she might do with it.
There are parents who do the responsible thing when it comes to firearms: Show their children how to properly use a gun, perhaps for hunting, self-defense or sport, and then unload the weapon and lock it away.
There are other parents or guardians, however, who are far less conscientious, making careless or even reckless choices and woefully failing their children, who then end up hurting others.
Colin Gray could have surprised his son on Christmas morning with a Super Soaker water gun or a foam pellet-shooting plastic toy adolescents use for horseplay. Instead, he gifted Colt Gray with an AR-15 style rifle that the 14-year-old allegedly used in Wednesday’s deadly school shooting in Georgia, law enforcement sources told a few media outlets.
The holiday present was given just months after Gray and Colt, then 13, were questioned by police about anonymous online posts threatening a school shooting in May 2023. Colt, who reportedly had a tumultuous home life, denied authoring the posts, and there wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest.
We don’t know what the elder Gray was thinking, but at 54, he is certainly old enough to know better than to hand a troubled child the type of killing machine that has often been used in previous mass shootings, including the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school massacre in which 21 people, the majority of them children ages 9-11, were killed.
