It is entirely natural, whether explicitly or implicitly, for every parent to accept a significant degree of responsibility for their child. The parent may moan and groan about the commitment such responsibility imposes but will rarely choose denial when called to account for mistakes or misdemeanours by that child. A key issue, however, is where such commitments are tested to the limit.
At the outset, I doubt there are many parents who consider that, in the appropriate circumstances – perhaps in any circumstances – they should go to jail for their child. Unless it’s to visit them! That would certainly be an occasion for the parent’s head to hang low, while muttering almost silently – I take some responsibility for this; but what are we going to do now?
The reality is that, in some countries of the world, parents are now sustaining very substantial jail sentences for criminal offences by their young ones. And by young ones we are talking about minors – usually young people under 18 years of age. In the state of Georgia in the USA, a father, Colin Gray, was recently sentenced to 15 years in jail for his then 14-year-old son’s fatal shooting of two teachers and two students in 2024. That’s an enormous penalty. But it was, of course, an enormous crime. Yet, while the size of the crime added a few years to the father’s penalty – while the prosecution had been seeking an 80-year sentence – that was not the justification for the sentence itself. It was the multiple shooting murders by Gray’s son taking place after the very clear risk of that kind of behaviour having come up on the parental radar, not only in the home but also following a police assessment and notification. Instead of taking those indicators as serious warnings, with remedial treatment being vital for the son, the father handed him the gift of a rifle. Was that crazy!
There can be no doubt that the gun laws in the United States should also take some responsibility for what is happening. Unfortunately, you can’t also lock up a gun law for 15 years, but you could impose the ‘death sentence’ on the guns themselves.
That, unfortunately, is never going to happen. What then makes the presence of guns in a society so relevant to the issue of mass killing? It is quite simply because if your mind is seriously disturbed and you want to pursue some crazy retribution on people that have done you no harm at all, the easiest weapon with which to do it is the gun.
The key factor with gun crime is the absence of ‘up close and personal’. It is simply a wild swipe at the society you think hates you and that you hate too; and only with an automatic rifle can you carry out a mass killing. You do see occasional knife attacks – so horrific that the 2024 fatal stabbing of youngsters in a dance class ignited massive urban riots throughout the UK and where no punishment was imposed on the parents despite their being partly responsible.
Though for obvious practical reasons, knife attacks can never be as extensive as mass shootings. There have in recent history been mass murders with exploding devices, but those have thankfully disappeared from the scene, together with the extremist Islamic behaviour against the ‘infidel’. The United States has by far the highest number of mass shootings of any country in the world. That is for two very simple reasons: The gun laws are relatively lax and too many people have guns already. You could almost imagine that guns came with the people into that country. Not exactly accurate, but it surely makes the point. And when you have a society where millions have got guns, it would be very difficult to get acceptance of a law that required all to surrender them.
Millions of Americans have been brought up with guns in the house and would suddenly feel very insecure once weapons were confiscated. A secret market would probably emerge to quell the fears of the average citizen. The irony is that it takes a huge amount of self-confidence to open up defensively with a firearm, simply because it raises the stakes very substantially and the assailant might be much sharper with a gun than the victim. You have a much better chance of surviving a home invasion or being held up elsewhere if you react peacefully and thus sensibly.
What belongs at the very essence of dysfunctional behaviour by minors is the lack of comprehensive guidance and exemplary personal behaviour of the parent as the child grows up. No one is born bad.
If there is seriously abusive behaviour within a household or bullying outside the home, it will have a marked effect on a child. The absence of love, care and attention also has serious implications. That, of course, rarely results in mass killings, but it is certainly not to be recommended. May we finish with the golden rule, now so popular among the discerning – “what you put in, you get out.” Equally applicable to gardening and growing maize, but let’s start with the children.
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