There have been multimillion-dollar lawsuits against gun manufacturers and marches that have drawn hundreds of thousands to Washington calling for lawmakers to take action against violence. For change, Melissa Willey looked closer to home.
“You should be responsible for your children,” she said.
Her 16-year-old daughter Jaelynn was killed in 2018 in a Southern Maryland high school by a former boyfriend, 17, using his father’s gun. Willey helped pass Jaelynn’s Law last year, which penalizes gun owners who fail to secure firearms that then fall into the hands of minors.
Such measures are among efforts across the country to hold parents accountable for their children’s wrongdoing. Among those who support such efforts is Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates, who has said he is “deeply committed” to making sure “parents must be parents and not accomplices to criminal activity.”
Last week, the father of a 15-year-old involved in a shooting outside Carver Vo-Tech High School in Baltimore pleaded guilty to contributing to the delinquency of a minor, along with gun and assault charges for his role in the incident. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with all but five years suspended, a term he will be required to serve without parole.
The case is something of an outlier in that the man, William Dredden, 41, actively participated in the crime, assaulting a student alongside his 15-year-old son, who fired a weapon and was himself shot, according to prosecutors, along with two other young people.
More commonly, parents and other adults have been charged for failing to secure weapons in the home or not recognizing warning signs of impending trouble.
In September, a woman whose 9-year-old grandson used her gun in a fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl was sentenced to four years in prison for reckless endangerment and firearm access by a minor.
In April, the father and mother of a teenager who killed four students at a Michigan high school were sentenced to at least 10 years each for involuntary manslaughter, the first time parents had been convicted in connection to a mass shooting by their child.
About a month earlier, a grand jury indicted the former assistant principal of a Newport News elementary school on charges of child abuse and disregard for life in connection with a 6-year-old student’s shooting of his teacher.
“It’s not necessarily just parents,” said Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser to the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “With school shootings becoming more prevalent, we’re continuing to reevaluate where we are as far as who we hold accountable. We’re still breaking new ground here.”
While convictions such as those of Dredden and the Michigan parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, draw headlines, Carey said he does not see a groundswell of cases of parents and other adults being held responsible in shootings committed by minors. Just last week, he noted, a Texas jury found a couple not liable for their teenager killing 10 people in a high school shooting.
More commonly, efforts at parental accountability take the form of laws known as child-access prevention or CAP laws, such as the Maryland measure named after Jaelynn Willey.
“We have great evidence that these laws have measurable effects of reducing shootings and suicides,” Carey said.
According to a recent RAND report, as of the start of the year 35 states and the District of Columbia have CAP laws. The report said its review of scientific research on the subject found such laws were associated with reductions in suicide, violent crime, and unintentional injuries and deaths.
An estimated 30 million children live in homes with firearms, according to RAND. Estimates vary, but a high percentage of school shooters obtained their weapon from a parent or a friend’s home.
The rash of school shootings — there have been more than 400 since the Columbine massacre in 1999, according to The Washington Post — has provided much of the impetus behind parent accountability measures, some say.
“In particularly egregious cases, people want to know, ‘What else can we do?’” said Karen Herren, executive director of Marylanders to Prevent Gun Violence, which advocated for Jaelynn’s Law.
The law expands on a previous prohibition against leaving a firearm where a child younger than 16 can access it. The new law increases that age to 18, and could lead to a gun owner losing the right to own a firearm.
State Sen. Jill P. Carter said efforts to hold parents accountable have the potential of going too far, and reflect a tendency to rely solely on the criminal justice system to address societal problems.
“There are alternatives to criminalization and incarceration,” said Carter, a Baltimore Democrat who represents the 41st District.
“Parents who are struggling with difficult children are already burdened,” she said. “We ought to be helping them.”
Carter said there needs to be more education and support to help both parents and children with dispute resolution and anger management. She noted that she is not talking about cases like the shooting outside Carver Vo-Tech, where the parent was clearly involved in the crime itself.
“We have a problem in society with the proliferation of guns,” she said. “We need to accept the guns are here, they are in the streets, and there are people who live in a society, in a culture where they do not feel safe without a gun.”
Herren agreed that there needs to be guardrails.
“That’s why it’s important to have bright-line rules” like Jaelynn’s Law, she said.
Cases such as the Carver Vo-Tech incident and the Crumbley shooting stand out because of their “extreme” nature, Carey said.
In the latter, the parents had been called to the school the morning of the shooting, after their son, Ethan, then 15, had written and drawn disturbing things on a worksheet referring to a gun and “blood everywhere,” but the boy was allowed to return to class. Ethan was convicted of four counts of murder, among other charges, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Carey said there can be a reluctance to charge parents, particularly in cases where the youths have turned the weapon on themselves.
“Sometimes there’s been an unwillingness to punish parents when the child has killed themself,” he said. “They’ve already suffered an egregious loss. It’s hard to say ‘x’ happened so ‘y’ must happen.”
