The 54-year-old father Friday morning on second-degree murder charges that stem from allegations his 14-year-old son carried out the attack and later told investigators, “I did it.” 

The father, prosecutors allege, was the gun supplier. Gray bought his son an AR 15-style rifle as a holiday gift in December 2023 “with knowledge he was a threat to himself and others,” according to an arrest affidavit obtained by CNN. Then, the boy used that same gun, police allege, to kill his classmates and the two teachers and injure nine others. Like those before it, the shooting left a much wider swath of trauma that District Attorney Brad Smith referred to Friday.

“You don’t have to have been physically injured in this to be a victim,” Smith said “Everyone in this community is a victim. Every child in that school was a victim.”

The charges fall in line with a law enforcement strategy that’s emerged in the last year to thwart a record number of mass school shootings, which federal data show are most often carried out by aggrieved students with guns obtained — either as a gift or without permission — from close family members. 

Prosecutors have turned their focus to the killers’ parents. 

Just months ago, in early April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were each given decade-long prison sentences in first-of-their-kind convictions: They were held directly accountable for a school shooting that was carried out by their 15-year-old son in 2021 that killed four students. 

In both cases, according to prosecutors, parents gave gifts to their kids that were later used to commit mass murder despite knowing that their children were on the brink of acting violently. Still, legal experts said the Crumbley prosecution — which Georgia officials have set the groundwork to replicate — reverses a bedrock legal principle that people cannot be held liable for the actions of others. 

“Look, I thought this case could go either way and still when the result came out I was a bit stunned because it’s such a deep legal principle,” Ekow Yankah, a University of Michigan law professor, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ in February after Jennifer Crumbley’s landmark conviction. 

“Maybe this kind of case will have an effect,” he said. “Maybe parents will be more attentive.”

In Michigan, the shooter — to life in prison without parole after pleading guilty — was gifted a 9-millimeter pistol for Christmas that he later celebrated online as “my new beauty.” In Georgia, that Gray allegedly gave to prosecutors puts his gift weapon purchase just months after investigators questioned the father and son about reported online threats of a school shooting. 

Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation that the then-13-year-old posted on the social media site Discord a threat to “shoot up a middle school.” Local police investigated the tip but failed to link the Discord comments to the teen, even though the account traced back to the boy’s email address. The boy denied making the threats and claimed he deleted the account because it kept getting hacked. Written in Russian, the translated to the last name of the shooter behind the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 

The New York Times reported this week that police searching the teen’s room found evidence of his interest in , particularly the 2018 killings in Parkland, Florida. 

Meanwhile, Colin Gray acknowledged to police he had hunting rifles at home but that his son did not have “unfettered” access to them. 

Charges filed against Gray include four counts of involuntary manslaughter, eight counts of cruelty to children — and two counts of murder in the second degree. His son, whose age makes him ineligible for the death penalty, will be tried as an adult, prosecutors said, and faces life in prison on four counts of murder. Lawyers for the father and son did not seek bail and the two

Though the Crumbley case in Michigan presented a novel conviction, it wasn’t the first time a parent has been held legally responsible for crimes committed by their children —including in helping their child secure a firearm later used in a mass shooting. Last year, an Illinois father pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct on charges stemming from a shooting that his son carried out in 2022 at an Independence Day parade in suburban Chicago. That case centered on how his son, who was 19 at the time, obtained a gun license. 

In Texas, meanwhile, survivors of the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School to hold the gunman’s parents accountable for the carnage. In a civil case filed by survivors and victim’s family members, a jury found Antonios Pagourtzis and Rose Marie Kosmetatos were not liable of negligence after being accused of failing to secure their guns at home and ignoring violent warning signs before their 17-year-old son opened fire at his high school and killed eight students and two teachers. 

Outside of courtrooms, other firearm measures passed at the state level in recent years have sought to tackle parents’ role in mass casualty events carried out by their offspring. now have laws requiring gun owners to keep their weapons locked up or that penalize them if a child gains access. 

Georgia lacks both secure storage and child-access laws, according to an . A new state law, however, seeks to incentivize parental responsibility. 

, the new law who purchase firearm safety devices like gun safes and trigger locks. A similar incentive was rolled out in Virginia in 2023, providing a tax break of up to $300. In its first year, accepted the deal.  

Just two days before students returned to classes at the coastal district east of Orlando, Ivey plans to equip his team of school-based deputies with collapsible rifles strapped to their chests. The move was a direct response to the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers and brought a tragic end to the last school year. Now, as students file back into classrooms across the country, this back-to-school season has come with a heightened focus on school security, with districts increasing the presence of police, installing new and, in one district, bringing in a gun-detecting dog. 

Ivey took the back-to-school security rush further than most, arguing in the video that “if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed.” 

To help campus cops fight back against any would-be gunmen, Ivey announced that his department with collapsible stocks. Kel-Tec, a Brevard County-based firearm manufacturer, says semi-automatic 9mm rifle “picks up where handguns leave off,” utilizing a folding carbine with “more pistol magazine options than a cat has lives.”  The weapons retail for about $600 each. 

“Sun Tzu says in The Art of War that every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought,” said Ivey, a group of extremist law enforcement officers with . “What Sun Tzu meant was that you must outsmart, out strategize, outtrain and out prepare your opponent long before the battle is ever fought.” 

Mass school shootings have long motivated efforts to bolster the ranks of campus cops and school security, yet as the tragedies continue unabated, there’s little evidence to suggest the strategies are effective in mitigating or preventing bloodshed. Ben Fisher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin whose research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, questioned the efficacy of rifle-toting school resource officers and other school-hardening measures.

“It seems to me like yet another overreaction to the issue of gun violence in schools, one that feels like putting a Band-Aid on a problem that keeps happening rather than addressing the source,” Fisher said. 

In Uvalde, a close-knit, predominantly Hispanic town still reeling from the May rampage, to buildings with 8-foot “non-scalable” perimeter fences, new surveillance cameras and upgraded doors and locks after the security apparatus at Robb Elementary School was criticized for a fatal collapse at multiple levels. Meanwhile, the state Department of Public Safety in Uvalde schools at the district’s request.

The changes come after a into the Uvalde shooting found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” including a culture where doors were routinely left unlocked and a disorganized, chaotic police response. In total, 376 law enforcement officers from the local, state and federal levels — many of them heavily armed — descended on the campus but failed to subdue the gunman for more than an hour, a delay that may have cost lives. Last month, the Uvalde school , the disgraced chief of the district’s tiny police force, and officials “intruder detection audits” at every district across Texas. Last week, state officials announced an investigation into the actions of five Texas Department of Public Safety officers who responded to the shooting, two of whom have been suspended. 

The school security rush this summer stretched across every corner of the country. In Ohio, lawmakers passed a policy that allows teachers to carry guns in class after just 24 hours of training. In Marion County, Florida, the sheriff’s office — a German short-haired pointer that was trained to sniff out firearms and ammunition on campuses. At America’s largest school district, in New York City, officials last week and training of additional unarmed school safety agents and enhance emergency preparedness training for school leaders. It also conducted audits of 1,400 campuses, identifying some 1,300 issues with security features like door locks, panic buttons and public address systems, pledging all would be fixed when schools opened Sept. 8. 

In late June, President Joe Biden signed into law the nation’s first new gun control measures in 30 years, which include an additional $300 million in federal grants for campus security while also allocating more money for student mental health services. 

Meanwhile, Ivey said the in-your-face weaponry being deployed in Brevard County Schools was meant to send a message, offering a “tactical appearance that clearly signifies that we mean business.” 

Yet, the rifles were nowhere to be found on students’ first day of school on Aug. 10. Activists with the local group Families for Safe Schools surveyed parents from across the county about whether they’d seen school-based officers with the new rifles and “so far it’s been a resounding no,” said Jabari Hosey, the group’s president and a father of three elementary school-aged children in the district. 

“It’s just a joke,” said Hosey, who favors armed police in schools but believes the move to equip them with rifles is a step too far. “He put the cart before the horse. Apparently they don’t have all of the equipment they need.”

In an interview, sheriff’s office spokesperson Tod Goodyear acknowledged the rifles hadn’t yet been implemented but will “probably roll out in stages.” 

“It may have been announced out a little bit before everything was really ready,” said Goodyear, who blamed the delay partly on the need to train deputies on how to use the weapons. “All of the rifles weren’t produced and all of that, so that may be a little bit of the holdup.”

‘Do something’

The rush to harden schools post-Uvalde is, in many ways, the continuation of a decades-long trend. Mass school shootings — which are devastating but statistically rare — have consistently prompted increases in school-based police and security infrastructure. 

School security and policing measures generally see widespread support from the public. A recent poll by the education nonprofit PDK International found a resounding 80% of adults favor the presence of armed police in schools, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Whether such efforts make kids safer, however, remains a contentious debate. Existing research “does not, as a whole, yield support for school policing as an effective strategy to improve safety and security,” the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Justice’s research arm, . Similarly, there’s a dearth of research to suggest that school hardening efforts have made schools safer, of security technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As the tragedies generate headlines and fierce political debates, local education officials often face significant pressure to act — often on quick timelines. 

“If horrific enough, these incidents can lead to increases in funding with a short spending window,” the Johns Hopkins report notes. “This curbs the ability of districts to conduct even limited evaluation and frequently results in the purchase of technology to demonstrate a strong commitment to ‘doing something.’” 

The school security industry was with business growth largely dependent on the frequency and severity of mass school shootings, according to a recent report by the market research firm .

While armed police have become a regular presence in U.S. schools, officers are generally equipped with pistols, a reality their proponents argue leaves campus cops at a tactical disadvantage during active shootings. That has led to a push, in Brevard County and elsewhere, to fight firepower with firepower. Leading supporters of school-based police say the development is necessary to ensure officers aren’t out-gunned, but critics say it’s the latest escalation of school militarization and could put students at greater risk of harm. 

The collapsible stock on the rifles being deployed in Brevard County schools puts the deputies “on par with what we’re facing,” without being overly cumbersome, sheriff spokesperson Goodyear said. Goodyear went a step further in contemplating the everyday drawbacks to arming school police with heavy weaponry, including AR-15s, the assault-style rifle favored by many mass shooters. 

“Unless you go down to a submachine gun, maybe you could carry that, but then now you’re talking about putting an automatic rifle into somebody’s hands,” Goodyear said. “But with an AR-15 or along those lines of that type of weapon, it’s a fairly large weapon and the only way you can carry it is on a sling over your shoulder. It’s not practical, your hands aren’t free, it’s going to get in the way.”

In Madison County, North Carolina, the sheriff found a compromise, AR-15 rifles in safes at each of the county’s six campuses — a move that gun control advocates “absolute insanity.” But Sheriff Buddy Harwood said the semi-automatic rifles were critical to keep kids safe. 

“Having just a deputy armed with a handgun isn’t enough to stop these animals,” Harwood said in . With the AR-15s, “my school resource officers will not have to wait, retreat or have to leave the situation to get the weaponry to deal with the threat.”

The approaches in Brevard and Madison counties each have pros and cons, said Mo Canady, executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“I’m not sure that, as a society, we’re generally ready to see law enforcement officers on a consistent basis walking around with a long gun strapped onto one shoulder” while patrolling school hallways, he said. Storing rifles in safes gives school-based police additional weaponry during an active shooting — but only if they have a chance to retrieve them. While he opposes giving school-based officers an “overly militaristic look,” he said a collapsible rifle like the Kel-Tec could be a “happy medium” if it’s “not something that’s sticking out there obvious all of the time.” 

But he said that rifles, which are generally more accurate than pistols, could grow more common as schools continue to be confronted by heavily armed gunmen. 

“If you have to take a shot in a school environment,” he said, “you’d darn well better hit your target.” 

‘A militarized vibe’

Kel-Tec markets its collapsible SUB2000 rifle for its convenience, noting on the company website that “it tucks away nicely in situations where space is limited, but it’s quick to deploy in situations where time is of the essence.” 

But the same features that could make it an attractive option for school-based police could be exploited by mass shooters. In fact, the weapon has already made an appearance at . After a gunman opened fire on an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, authorities found the suspect also had . Last year, a student at Daytona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — just 60 miles north of the Kel-Tec headquarters in Cocoa —  was to “enact a Columbine” on campus. When police stopped the suspect outside his apartment, he reportedly had a SUB2000 concealed in his backpack that he’d recently purchased on Facebook Marketplace. 

Kel-Tec executives didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Hosey, of the Brevard Families for Safe Schools group, said he generally supports school-based police, but he and other parents were caught off guard when the sheriff announced the new Kel-Tecs. 

“It gave us a militarized vibe,” he said, and could lead students to fear their school resource officers because people often associate heavily armed police officers with active-shooter situations. “What we don’t want is kids to see this and assume that they’re in danger and that there’s an imminent threat.” 

When asked about the presence of rifles in Brevard County schools, district spokesperson Russell Bruhn said in an email that “the sheriff’s office is our security expert,” and declined to comment further. 

School-based police have long been positioned as members of school communities who foster positive relationships with students. But having a rifle so visibly present on deputies’ chests sends “messages about aggression and the potential for violence when we know that violence in schools, especially with guns, is exceedingly rare,” said Fisher of the University of Wisconsin.  

In fact, there’s a lack of research to suggest that a school shooting was particularly fatal because campus police lacked “military weaponry,” said attorney Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law. Despite the police failures in Uvalde, she said the push to arm school-based officers with rifles is just the latest escalation in campus hardening and isn’t a far leap from “tanks going down school hallways.” 

“Generally with an arms race, nobody wins,” Rollin said. “I have to say, this is no exception.”

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”