Date: July 31, 2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(North Salem, NY) The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus issues the following statement in wake of yesterday’s sentencing in Georgia, a judgment with national significance. The court determined that irresponsible gun ownership greatly contributed to a campus mass shooting committed by another person. Thus, the provider of the firearm used in the killings will be held accountable for actions deemed as criminal.
“The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus recognizes the weight, significance and sadness in Georgia as the final sentence in the Apalachee High School mass shooting was issued yesterday. Its reverberation can and ought to be felt across all of America. The time has long come for full accountability when such crimes are inflicted upon our schools. These incidents never happen in a vacuum. While those pulling the trigger are held most responsible, the duty to protect our campuses and kids is collective. Civil society requires we hold all parties in the gun violence ecosystem responsible, especially when the breach is so evident and acute the result is mass murder.
A jury in March convicted Colin Gray, father of teenage mass shooter Colt Gray, on multiple charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for his extreme negligence. Yesterday he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Gray gifted his troubled 14-year-old son a military-style assault weapon at Christmas which the teen then used to murder two students, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, on the high school campus on September 4, 2024. Seven others were injured in the massacre.
“He gave his son the exact tool he would need to accomplish this,” Prosecutor Brad Smith said. “He is the reason four people are dead, seven were injured and countless others were traumatized. And he is the reason a 16-year-old boy was sentenced two days ago to the rest of his life in prison.”
Despite the teen’s obsession with mass killers and school shootings, Colin Gray provided his son the weapon used in the attack. A few months before Christmas law enforcement had visited their home to investigate the teen’s threat to shoot up an elementary school.
In issuing the sentence to the father, Judge Nicholas Primm said, “The weight of your crimes is tethered and tied to the acts of someone else, your son. Two scenarios: You fail the same way in both. You fail to get Colt counseling. You fail to remove the guns from the house.”
It is a point of reflection that a teenager will live out his life in prison while the adult in the room, the parent who provided the means for the massacre, serves a far leaner sentence. The larger message and one to fully embrace is the Georgia court has recognized that gun violence in such cases has a range of culpability. May this judgment serve as a benevolent bellwether for the country, for full and proper examination of gun violence across our society be amplified and advanced. May it serve the overdue acknowledgement, that all those who play a willing or wanton role in such violence do, indeed, have blood on their hands. Only in such reckoning can proper course correction be made for a nation flooded in assault weapons, arming its young and hemorrhaging, daily. Keeping guns off campus is a constant value and principle, but, as the Georgia court determined, it requires sanity, responsibility and common sense from the home to the campus and all points in between.”
Founded in 2008, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus works with K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the country to oppose legislative policies that would force loaded, concealed guns to be carried on campuses. Through education, outreach, coalition-building, and legal action, The Campaign works to foster a safe learning environment for all and is the only national organization of its kind tasked with protecting higher educational institutions and the communities they serve. Follow us on Facebook, BlueSky, X and Instagram.Contact: John McKenna, Executive Director, The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus ([email protected])
