If a minor commits a crime, how much is the parent's fault?

There were multimillion-dollar lawsuits against gun manufacturers and demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of people to Washington to demand the government take action against violence. To make a difference, Melissa Willey looked to her local community for opportunities to make a difference.

“You should be responsible for your children,” she said.

Her 16-year-old daughter Jaelynn was killed by a 17-year-old ex-boyfriend using his father's gun at a southern Maryland high school in 2018. Willey helped push through Jaelynn's Law last year, which punishes gun owners who fail to secure their firearms, allowing them to fall into the hands of minors.

Such measures are part of a nationwide effort to hold parents accountable for their children's misbehavior. Among those supporting such efforts is Baltimore District Attorney Ivan Bates, who said he is “deeply committed” to ensuring that “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. He also faced charges of weapons possession and assault for his role in the incident. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, with all but five years suspended. He must serve that sentence without the possibility of parole.

The case is special in that the man, 41-year-old William Dredden, actively participated in the crime. He and his 15-year-old son attacked a student who fired a gun and, according to prosecutors, was shot himself along with two other young people.

More commonly, parents and other adults are charged with failing to properly secure guns at home or failing to recognize warning signs of impending danger.

In September, a woman whose nine-year-old grandson used her gun to fatally shoot a 15-year-old girl was sentenced to four years in prison for reckless endangerment and use of a weapon by a minor.

In April, the father and mother of a teenager who killed four students at a Michigan high school were each sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for manslaughter, the first time parents have been convicted in connection with their child's mass shooting.

About a month earlier, a grand jury had indicted the former assistant principal of a Newport News elementary school on charges of child abuse and disregard for life following the shooting of his teacher by a six-year-old student.

“It's not necessarily just the parents,” said Tim Carey, legal and policy adviser at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “As school shootings become more common, we continue to rethink where we stand, who we hold accountable. We're still in uncharted territory here.”

While convictions like those of Dredden and Michigan parents James and Jennifer Crumbley make headlines, Carey doesn't see an increase in cases where parents and other adults are blamed for shootings committed by minors. Just last week, he noted, a jury in Texas found a couple not guilty of their teenager killing 10 people in a high school shooting.

More commonly, efforts to increase parental responsibility come in the form of laws known as Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws, such as the Jaelynn Willey measure in Maryland.

“We have ample evidence that these laws have a measurable effect in reducing shootings and suicides,” Carey said.

According to a recent RAND report, 35 states and the District of Columbia had CAP laws in place at the beginning of the year. The report said that an analysis of academic research on the subject found that such laws were associated with reductions in suicides, violent crimes, and unintentional injuries and deaths.

An estimated 30 million children live in households with firearms, according to RAND. Estimates vary, but a high percentage of school shooters found their gun in a parent or friend's home.

Some say the spate of school shootings – there have been more than 400 since the Columbine massacre in 1999, according to the Washington Post – has provided the impetus for measures that hold parents accountable.

“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 the existing ban on leaving a firearm where a child under 16 can access it. The new law raises that age to 18 and could result in a gun owner losing the right to own a firearm.

State Senator Jill P. Carter said efforts to hold parents accountable may have gone too far and reflected a tendency to rely solely on the criminal justice system to solve 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 already have a huge burden on their shoulders,” she said. “We should help them.”

Carter said more education and support is needed to help both parents and children resolve conflict and manage anger. 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 themselves.

“We have a problem with the proliferation of weapons in our society,” she said. “We have to accept that the weapons are here, that they are lying on the streets and that there are people who live in a society, in a culture, where they do not feel safe without a weapon.”

Herren agreed that there must be guard rails.

“That’s why it’s important to have clear rules,” she said, like Jaelynn’s Law.

Cases like the Carver Vo-Tech incident and the Crumbley shooting stood out because of their “extreme” nature, Carey said.

In the latter case, parents were called to the school the morning of the shooting after their then 15-year-old son Ethan wrote and drew disturbing things on a worksheet that mentioned a gun and “blood everywhere.” The boy was allowed back into school, however. Ethan was charged with four counts of murder, among other things, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Carey said there may be reluctance to bring charges against parents, particularly in cases where the youths have turned the gun on themselves.

“Sometimes there is an unwillingness to punish the parents when the child has committed suicide,” he said. “They have already suffered a tremendous loss. It's hard to say 'x' happened, so 'y' must happen.”