Georgia school shooting shows importance of preventing children from having access to guns at home, researcher says

The shooting at a Georgia high school this week, which left four people dead, highlights the dangers of having guns in the home, said Matt Miller, a Northeastern University professor whose research focuses on gun violence.

Miller has published research showing that access to guns is linked to an increased risk of suicide, along with mass shootings in public spaces like Wednesday’s tragedy in Georgia, where a 54-year-old father has been charged with providing the military-style assault rifle his 14-year-old son allegedly used in the Apalachee High School shooting.

“This is happening more and more in the United States than in other developed countries,” said Miller, a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern University. “It’s happening here all the time because guns, including the kind of AR-15-style rifles that were responsible for this latest attack, are so easily available, not just to adults but to many children.”

Colt Gray, a freshman at the school, is accused of killing two 14-year-old students and two teachers. Gray received the military-style rifle as a Christmas gift from his father in 2023, three law enforcement officials told The New York Times. The father, Colin Gray, 54, was arrested Thursday and charged with murder and manslaughter for giving his son access to the weapon despite knowing Colt Gray was “a threat to himself and others,” according to arrest warrants. The father and son appeared in court together Friday.

Miller pointed to a similar case in Michigan, where in 2021 a 15-year-old shot and killed four students at Oxford High School with a gun he had on hand at home. In April, his parents were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for failing to secure the weapon and failing to respond to their son’s mental health issues. They became the first parents to be convicted of a mass shooting at a U.S. school.

“A gun in the home is meant to protect the owner and the family, but it’s more likely to put them in danger,” Miller said. “Until people realize that risk — and act on it by removing guns from their homes, or at the very least doing much more to make it very difficult for unauthorized people to get access to their firearms — these terrible events will continue to happen in this country at a rate that is tragically higher than in other developed countries.”

Miller and Deborah Azrael of Harvard contributed to a study by Carmen Salhi, an assistant professor of health sciences at Northeastern University. In a nationally representative survey, one-third of adolescents said they could access a loaded gun they kept at home within five minutes. Half said they could access a loaded gun within 60 minutes.

These revelations are at odds with the opinion of 70% of parents surveyed, who believed that their children should not have access to weapons kept in their homes.

“It was shocking to see that half of the kids in gun-owning homes reported being able to get their hands on a loaded gun within an hour,” Salhi said in a 2021 interview with Northeastern Global News, citing another key finding of his research.

“The number of adolescents who have easy access to a gun in the home is staggering, and it suggests that this is a public health problem.” Miller’s research on the relationship between household gun access and suicide has shown that people who own a handgun are nearly four times more likely to commit suicide than people who don’t — and that storing guns safely could help save the lives of hundreds of children annual.”

“The leading cause of death by guns in this country is suicide, not homicide, and certainly not a mass public murder like the tragic event in Georgia,” Miller said. “There is overwhelming evidence that suicide rates are many times higher for people who live in homes with guns compared to their neighbors who live in homes without guns.”

Miller says his findings also apply to people who are vulnerable to violence against others, as was the case this week in Georgia.

“Locking guns is certainly better than leaving them unlocked,” Miller said. “But the key is not whether a gun is locked or loaded. The key is access: whether a child has access to it. Efforts should be focused on helping parents ensure that children, particularly teens, do not have access to household firearms.”

Miller notes that children might be able to find the key to open a gun cabinet or guess the password to open a combination lock.

“Parents care about their children and what their children do, so it’s not like the only way to motivate parents to make their homes safer for their children is to pass legislation, although that can only help,” Miller said.

“In addition to all the efforts that can be made to help parents realize that they have a responsibility in the eyes of the law to keep their guns inaccessible to their children,” Miller adds, “at least as much effort and resources should be devoted to helping parents understand that suicide and deadly outbreaks like this latest tragedy are impossible to predict — and because of this unpredictability, it is their duty to assume that the worst can happen and [therefore] “Make sure their weapons are completely out of reach of any children in their home.”

The Apalachee High shooting was the deadliest school shooting this year and the ninth mass killing at a K-12 school in the U.S. since 2006, according to Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox. Eight students and one teacher are expected to survive their injuries.

Colt Gray is charged with murder as an adult. Gray was questioned last year about online threats to commit a school shooting, but there was no probable cause for an arrest, according to the FBI’s Atlanta office and the Jackson County sheriff’s office.

“When kids have access to guns, unbearably bad things happen,” Miller says.

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeast.edu.