Charging the Parents of Mass Shooters

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Credit…Pool photo by Brynn Anderson

To the Editor:

Re “Blaming a Parent, Again, for Failed Gun Laws,” by Megan K. Stack (Opinion guest essay, Sept. 9):

I commend Ms. Stack for tempering the feelings that I — like so many others in the U.S. — have for the parents of those who commit school shootings.

I agree with her argument that holding parents legally responsible, while simultaneously trying their children as adults, is illogical. Ms. Stacks’s assertion is that this strategy merely creates a scapegoat and distracts from the true solution — stricter gun laws.

I also believe that gun laws are the answer, but the plague of mass shootings has endured through changes in leadership at the executive and congressional level. We should not wait for, nor expect, meaningful legislation anytime soon.

Instead, we should commend prosecutors for their efforts to do something, anything, to confront this problem. If these prosecutions make just one parent think twice about buying their troubled child an AR-15-style rifle for Christmas, they will have worked.

Peter Bransden
New York

To the Editor:

Megan K. Stack’s essay about the arrest of Colin Gray and his son Colt, who killed four people at his high school, had an online blurb that asked: “Is the problem the man who gave his son a gun, or the gun?” What a silly question!

The answer is that it’s both. As the essay points out, Georgia has some of the most lax gun laws in the country, so there is little control over who has them, what kinds of guns they are and how many someone owns. There were already guns in the home when the F.B.I. questioned father and son last year.

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