Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people last week at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.
This isn’t the first time that parents are being held liable for their children's actions. Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.
The problem here is that there are a lot of mistakes to go around, and all too frequently, many fail to identify these murderers before they commit their crimes. As I will discuss later, the question is, what policies do you put in place when you know that we won’t identify these killers before they strike?
Georgia police interviewed the boy in May 2023 after he used the Discord communication platform to threaten to shoot up a school. Making a threat to murder people is a crime. But police concluded they didn't have enough evidence for an arrest. The boy claimed that he had stopped using the platform months earlier and “promised I would never say something [like that].”
Because the police couldn’t directly tie the boy to the messages, the bodycam footage of the interview reveals an officer saying: “I gotta take you at your word.” But why he says that is a mystery. The police knew the IP address of the home where someone made the posts, which is how they found the boy. And while the boy and his father had recently moved from there, all the police needed to know was the posts’ dates to see if the boy lived in the house at the time.
The officers didn’t even need the level of proof required in a criminal case. If a judge finds that someone is a danger to himself or others, there is a range of options, including outpatient mental health care. Gun confiscation or involuntary commitment may also be options.
If law enforcement officers took the boy at his word, how can we blame the father for doing the same?
If anything, the Georgia boy’s mother should be commended. Thirty minutes before the attack, she called her son’s school to warn of an “impending disaster.” “I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him,” said the mother, in a screenshot of the message that she sent to the boy’s aunt.
But the school didn’t act. Isn’t the school mainly at fault for that?
Red flags are always easier to notice in hindsight. Indeed, since 1998, 51% of mass public shooters were seeing mental health professionals before their attacks. But none of the mental health professionals ever identified these murderers as a danger to themselves or others. In many cases, people had raised concerns about these killers before they carried out their attacks, but the professionals never recognized the threat. If experts miss the danger signs, how can we blame a parent for not seeing them?
Should the families lock up their guns so only adults have access? Not surprisingly, crime rates rise when governments prevent people from defending themselves. When people are required to lock up their guns, criminals more frequently invade people’s homes and then are more successful in murdering or otherwise harming their victims.
If locking up guns could have prevented all five of the mass shootings committed by minors since 2000, including this latest shooting, there would have been 25 fewer deaths and 19 fewer people wounded. Of course, these killers may very well have obtained weapons in other ways. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that all those attacks simply would not have occurred. The number of lives saved would still be only about 1/14th of the number of lives lost in just a single year because mandatory locks kept people from getting to their guns in time.
The horrific deaths and injuries from school shootings rightly get a lot of attention. But we don’t hear about the deaths that occur because people can’t readily access guns to protect themselves and their families. Those deaths are no less horrific.
The national media rarely mention defensive gun uses, even when young children use guns to save lives. But dozens of recent cases have been reported by local news outlets.
Fortunately, there was a security officer at the school, though Kamala Harris has argued for banning all guns from schools, even for law enforcement. But even when school resource officers are in the right place at the right time, they have a tough job. Uniformed guards may as well be holding neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” Attackers know that once they kill the security officer, who is the only person with a gun, no one else can stop them.
Having armed teachers carrying concealed firearms takes away that tactical advantage. Twenty states allow this under a variety of rules. Outside of suicides or gang violence in the middle of the night, there has not been one instance of a death or injury from an attack at a school that has armed teachers.
Not surprisingly, the attacks in Georgia and Michigan both occurred in schools that banned teachers and staff from having guns. Other schools in Georgia have armed teachers, but not Apalachee High School.
We could blame law enforcement, schools, mental health experts and the parents. But, politically, it seems to be easier to blame the parents instead of the “experts.” The bottom line is that if we keep failing to identify these murderers, what is the backup plan? Let’s take real action to protect our schools and arm teachers.
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
