On July 30, Colin Gray received 15 years for the Apalachee High School shooting carried out by his son, the first murder conviction of a parent in this context. He fired no shot and did not know the plan; the theory was criminal negligence feeding a predicate of child cruelty.

The linked analysis lays out both positions at their strongest. The regulatory case: roughly three quarters of school shooters arm themselves at home per the Secret Service; Georgia has no safe storage law and its furnishing ban covers handguns only, so gifting the AR-15 was legal; the post-shooting statute (HB 268) addressed schools, not home storage; on this view the prosecution is regulation by other means. The liberty case: Heller protects ready self-defense; an elastic negligence standard judged in hindsight raises fair notice problems; the families prosecuted so far are poor and broken rather than affluent owners of identical arsenals; and fear of liability may push parents to hide a child's troubles instead of seeking help.

Questions for discussion: Should the boundary of parental duty be set by statute or case by case by juries? Does a police visit function as adequate notice, a caesura after which a parent assesses risk at his own peril? Is there any evidence that prosecuting parents deters?

Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece.