States increasingly are attempting to hold parents responsible for the mayhem unleashed by their children in school shootings.

Georgia authorities this month quickly issued murder charges for the father of the 14-year-old suspect in a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School near Atlanta.

Courts in Michigan and Virginia have already sentenced parents to years behind bars after their children opened fire on students and teachers.

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Charging parents with felonies is a new tactic prosecutors are deploying to apply state laws against parents for reckless or negligent supervision of their children.

“We have now seen this happen twice in a relatively short period of time,” said Andrew Willinger, executive director at Duke Center for Firearms Law. “There is this intuition when you read about what happened in these cases that the parents should be suffering consequences of some kind.”

Georgia

Prosecutors charged Colin Gray, 54, with involuntary manslaughter and second-degree murder after his 14-year-old son Colt, gunned down two students and two teachers last week at Apalachee High School in Winder, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. Nine other people were wounded.

Colt, who reportedly used an AR-15 style rifle, is also charged as an adult with murder.

Authorities said Mr. Gray allowed his son to have access to guns despite knowing he was a threat. Law enforcement in 2023 had flagged a threat on social media tied to Colt and asked Mr. Gray if he secured access to guns from his son.

According to the transcript of that exchange, the father said Colt “knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them.” Mr. Gray said he and his son hunt together.

Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said Mr. Gray’s charges “are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”

Brad Smith, the prosecutor on the case, said he is not trying to send any sort of message with the charges.

“I’m just trying to use the tools in my arsenal to prosecute people for the crimes they commit,” Mr. Smith said.

Georgia’s law on second-degree murder can be used against anyone who causes the death of another person while “in the commission of cruelty to children in the second degree.” It carries a punishment of 10 to 30 years behind bars.

The state’s law on involuntary manslaughter says someone is liable if they cause the death of another person by an unlawful act, even if the killing is unintended. It carries with it a punishment of between one and 10 years behind bars.

Tim Carey, law and policy director at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, said it’s likely that prosecutors are charging Mr. Gray with second-degree murder in addition to manslaughter because he gave his son an AR-15-style rifle for Christmas.

“The four involuntary manslaughter charges arise from the two teachers that were murdered, as well as the two children in case the second-degree murder charges don’t stick,” Mr. Carey said.

“Prosecutors are exploring whether the unique emphasis in Georgia law on the cruelty to children dimension of second-degree murder can hold the shooter’s father liable in this case. If successful, they would be the most severe conviction of any school shooter’s parent.”

Michigan

Michigan was the first state in the country to convict parents of a school shooter of murder charges.

Earlier this year, James and Jennifer Crumbley were convicted of involuntary manslaughter based on their 15-year-old son having killed four students at Oxford High School, roughly an hour outside of Detroit, in 2021. They’re appealing their convictions while serving 10-year prison sentences.

They did not know that their son, Ethan, was planning a mass shooting. But school officials had told them that he had drawn a gun and blood on one of his assignments with the words, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me. My life is useless.”

They did not remove him from school on that notice, and he later committed the shooting. Neither the parents nor the school checked Ethan’s backpack in which he kept the handgun.

The gun was a gift from his father.

Virginia

In December, Deja Taylor was sentenced to two years in state prison for felony child neglect after her 6-year-old son shot his teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Virginia. The teacher survived.

Federal prosecutors already charged Taylor with being in possession of marijuana and lying about it when she purchased a firearm in 2022. That firearm was used by her son and in a separate shooting by Taylor against her son’s father after seeing him with his girlfriend, according to reports.

She was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison on the marijuana and gun charges. The federal and state sentences total nearly four years behind bars.

There was no indication that the gun had been kept in a lock box, according to ABC News.

Legal experts say there’s no evidence at this time that prosecutors’ filing felony charges to hold parents accountable is decreasing school shootings since it is a relatively new phenomenon.

“I am not aware of data informing the impact of using negligence crimes to hold parents accountable for contributing to the reasonably foreseeable crimes committed by their children. It would be an interesting angle of future study,” said Mr. Carey of the Johns Hopkins Center.

But studies on safe storage laws do show a promise of curbing fatalities. According to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 26 states have laws to hold adults accountable if they do not properly store their firearms in a safe manner. The laws aim to keep gun owners responsible for safekeeping to avoid firearms ending up in the hands of a minor.

Daniel W. Webster, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said there are some studies that show child access prevention laws have decreased homicides.

“The research, some of which I have led, has shown that [child access prevention] laws reduce the risk of teen suicide, unintentional shootings of children and teens, and homicides committed by juveniles,” Mr. Webster said.

• This story is based in part on wire service reports.