When Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law in 2022 that allowed most Georgia residents to carry a firearm without a concealed carry permit, he celebrated the expansion of gun rights in the state.
The law “makes sure that law abiding Georgians — including our daughters and your family, too — can protect themselves without having to ask permission from state government,” he said at the time.
Republicans in control of state government have steadily loosened restrictions on firearm ownership in recent years. The state does not have universal background checks for gun purchases, safe storage laws or a so-called red-flag law — measures that have been instituted elsewhere in the nation in response to gun violence.
It remains unclear how the 14-year-old suspect in the Apalachee High School shooting obtained the weapon, which the police have described as an AR-15-style rifle.
Last year, officers with the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, Ga., interviewed the suspect and his father during an investigation into online shooting threats, the F.B.I. said on Wednesday. The child denied making the threats, the authorities said. His father told investigators that there were hunting guns at their home, but that his son did not have unauthorized access to them.
“There are too many people who are able to access guns that shouldn’t be able to,” President Biden said on Thursday. “Let’s require safe storage of firearms. I know I have mine locked up.”
“You’ve got to hold parents accountable if they let their child have access to these guns,” he added.
Georgia law prohibits an adult from “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” selling or giving a handgun to a minor. An adult who is found guilty of breaking the law could be charged with a felony and face some prison time or a fine.
There are some exceptions, including if a minor is attending a hunting or firearms course, doing target practice on a range, participating in a competition, or if the minor is at home and has parental permission to access the weapon. But those exceptions do not apply if the minor is convicted of a forcible felony, like murder.
“Firearms are not the enemy,” said State Senator Frank Ginn, a Republican, on Thursday. “The enemy is the mentally deranged, and that’s where I want to try to make sure that we do all we can to get those people help that need it long before they pull a gun.”
Experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions said that by not penalizing negligent storage or imposing any safe storage requirements, the law is less effective at reducing gun violence and firearm-related deaths involving children.
“Georgia’s law is not actually geared toward preventing unauthorized access of firearms by children — it’s instead focused on punishing adults who recklessly or intentionally give children handguns,” said Tim Carey, a law and policy adviser with the center.
Georgia has experienced mass gun violence before, notably in 2021, when eight people were killed in a rampage at three Atlanta area spas. But the attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., in which four people were killed, was the deadliest school shooting in the state’s history.
A State Senate committee dedicated to studying safe firearm storage gathered for a previously scheduled meeting on Thursday, where it heard emotional pleas for the legislature to incentivize the safe storage of firearms, including storing guns unloaded and locked away.
“Are we talking, or are we doing something to try to make sure that legislation is passed in order to give us some kind of relief when it comes to guns?” said State Senator David Lucas, a Democrat.
“It’s just unimaginable that a 14-year-old would go out and do something,” he added, noting that he owned multiple guns. “I would assume that somewhere, somebody missed something.”
Georgia has also not approved legislation for law enforcement to intervene if someone raises concerns about a person using a gun to harm themselves or others.
It is also not among the nearly two dozen states with a red flag law, which allows a judge to sign off on the temporary confiscation of a firearm if law enforcement or, in some cases, a family member, warn about a person’s credible risk to do harm.
“Nobody is taking anybody’s gun, but we can and should create a framework that makes gun ownership safer, not just for the owner, but for the common good,” said Heather Hallett, a representative from the Georgia Majority for Gun Safety.
Jen Pauliukonis, the director of policy and programming at the Johns Hopkins center, said that red-flag laws can enable law enforcement to intervene if a child is seen as a possible threat.
“It’s not always written into the state law that it’s allowed, but quite often it’s done in practice when law enforcement realizes that the parent is not taking the threat seriously,” Ms. Pauliukonis said. Sometimes, she added, parents are allowed to retain access to their firearm, but are required by a judge to keep it away from their child.
She pointed to research that showed that such orders had reduced intimate partner violence, suicide attempts and plans for mass shootings in states where red-flag laws were in place.
Jeffrey W. Swanson, a sociologist at Duke University who has studied violence and mental illness for more than three decades, said that the transition between adolescence and young adulthood, was “a relatively high-risk time, particularly for young men, for not just mass shootings, but violence and aggression.”
The protection law, he added, “is an important policy because it’s nimble, it’s risk-based and focused on individual circumstances.”
But such laws have faced resistance from conservatives, who frequently raise concerns about infringing on Second Amendment rights. A 2022 bipartisan compromise in Congress, which ended a decades-long stalemate on gun safety legislation, did not enforce a national red-flag law, but instead incentivized passage of such measures on the state level.
Rather than restrict firearm access, Republicans instead often favor putting money toward mental health programs and hardening school safety protocols.
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