Deadly Gifts and Bad Parenting have Consequences

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This past Tuesday in a courtroom in Barrow County, Georgia, a judge sentenced 16-year-old Colt Gray, a former student at the local Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, to life in prison without the possibility of parole for an assortment of crimes, the primary of which was shooting and killing two students and two teachers at his high school in September of 2004 when the shooter was fourteen.    Seven others were injured in the shooting, and many throughout the community remain traumatized.

Yesterday, the same judge in the same courtroom sentenced Colin Gray, Colt's father, to fifteen years in prison after he was convicted earlier this year of murder and manslaughter regarding the  same shooting.  Mr. Gray was charged with those crimes because he bought his son, then fourteen, an AR-15 - style rifle for Christmas and left in unsecured in their home - despite warnings that his son was a danger to others.

Prosecutors had asked that the parent be sentenced to eighty years in prison.

Colin Gray is the first parent of a US school shooter te be convicted of murder.  Two other parents of an Oxford, Michigan, school shooter, James and Jennifer Crumbley, were sentenced to 10-15 years in prison for their convictions of involuntary manslaughter after their fifteen-year-old son was also convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for shooting and killing four students at his high school. in 2021.

Colin Gray is fifty-five years old, an age when most people are thinking about retirement.  But instead of enjoying sis early Medicare and Social Security years at a time when he will be his healthiest as a retiree, he will be showering with hardened, tattooed criminals half his age and sleeping in a cage with one eye open.

School shootings continue to pose a very real and deadly danger in the world's most gun-craziest nation, but perhaps holding parents criminally accountable for the actions of children they raised and armed will be a start in reducing the level of gun violence and madness that threaten our schools and society today.

Pottery Barn rules:   You break it, you own it.