Another school year, another school shooting. This time, at Apalachee High School in Georgia. Two students and two teachers were gunned down this month by a 14-year-old suspect, Colt Gray, using an AR-15-style weapon he’d received as a Christmas gift from his father, Colin.

Less than 36 hours after the incident occurred, Georgia prosecutors filed charges not only against the son but also against the father, the latter for two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children. In so doing, Georgia prosecutors took a page from the novel playbook successfully employed by Michigan officials in prosecuting Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the 15-year-old shooter in a 2021 massacre at Oxford High School in Michigan. In that instance, both parents were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.

It’s no mystery why prosecutors would want to bring such charges. With mass shootings a shockingly regular occurrence in American schools, gun control initiatives repeatedly blocked in state legislatures and Congress, or enacted and then invalidated by the courts, state and local officials are looking for something, anything to do to tamp down the scourge of gun violence perpetrated by disturbed young people.

All too often, these teens have parents who are careless with firearms, inattentive to their children’s mental health, and willfully ignorant of the dangers their offspring pose to the community.

What’s novel about such prosecutions is that the parents are not being charged for doing a positive act — say, providing a gun or flak jacket to their children, or helping them plan the assaults — but rather for failing to do an act, or what the law calls an “omission.” In the case of Colin Gray, prosecutors allege that he “knowingly allow[ed] his son” to have a weapon. And it’s precisely that shift — from charging a positive act to charging an omission — that ought to give us some pause.

Prior to the 19th century, murder and manslaughter charges always required proof that the defendant had actively “killed” another — by shooting, stabbing, strangling, poisoning, or some other active means. Starting in the late 1800s, though, it became increasingly common, especially in the United States, to define the homicide offenses of murder and manslaughter in terms of “causing the death” of another.

This broader “causing death” language, in turn, opened the door to some relatively rare cases of homicide-by-omission, in which, for example, parents have been charged with murder or manslaughter for letting a child starve or failing to get her the urgent medical care she needed.

What makes cases like those against the elder Gray and Crumbleys novel is that they take this death-by-omission approach to the next level. Parents are now being charged with homicide offenses not just for failing to adequately “protect” their children from harm, but also for failing to adequately “supervise” them.

To some, that may seem like an attractive strategy. The Colin Grays and Jennifer and James Crumbleys of the world represent the very paradigm of irresponsible parenting — disconnected, inattentive, selfish and careless, at best oblivious to the ticking-time-bomb offspring living under their own roofs.

But “allowing” one’s child to do harm is not the same as “aiding, abetting, encouraging, advising, soliciting, or procuring” such criminality (the traditional requirements for accomplice liability). Moreover, liability for omissions tends to raise difficult issues that are not present in the case of liability for acts.

One concern is intent. An offender who actively shoots a victim in the head almost invariably intends to cause his death. But a parent who fails to prevent his child from shooting? It’s much harder to say what his intention was. Did he really anticipate that by allowing his child to get a hold of an assault weapon, the child might mow down his peers?

Proving causation is also a problem. As utterly inept as Colin Gray and the Crumbleys were as parents, the voluntary decision to storm a school and kill students and teachers was ultimately made by their children. In the language of the law, it is this voluntary act that “cuts off” the chain of causation otherwise linking the parent.

To point out these problems is not to say that parents like Gray and the Crumbleys should escape criminal liability entirely. In my view, it is entirely appropriate to charge them with lesser offenses like contributing to the delinquency of a minor, illegally providing weapons to a juvenile, or other analogous non-homicide crimes. But murder and manslaughter — the most serious charges the criminal law has in its arsenal — are something else again. Those charges should be reserved for the people who actually do the shooting, or at least who actively support the shooters in their actions — not the clueless parents who passively allow their violent children to commit even the most heinous acts of murder.

Stuart Green (spgreen@law.rutgers.edu) is a law professor at Rutgers University and the author of several books including most recently “Criminalizing Sex: A Unified Liberal Theory.”