Just a couple of weeks ago, a special panel of state senators in Georgia convened to study potential laws aimed at keeping firearms safely locked up and out of the hands of children.

A day after a 14-year-old was charged in a deadly shooting at his Georgia high school, that same panel gathered again Thursday to discuss safe gun storage policies. The lawmakers are still talking about the issue because — like many legislatures across the U.S. — they have been unable to agree in recent years on whether new gun safety measures provide a solution to the all-too-frequent occurrence of mass shootings at schools and public places.

The Georgia school shooting marked the 30th mass killing in the U.S. so far this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 127 have died in those killings.

Under federal law, no one younger than 18 can legally purchase a rifle or other long gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Yet authorities say Colt Gray used a semiautomatic assault-style rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School near Winder, just outside Atlanta. Nine people were injured.

His father, Colin, was charged Thursday with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in connection with his son’s actions and for “allowing him to possess a weapon,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, are wrestling with what to do.

“While we sit here and mourn the families and the kids, what are we doing about it?” Sen. David Lucas, a Democratic member of the study committee, rhetorically asked. “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?”

Republican Sen. Frank Ginn, a panel member whose district includes Apalachee High School, said he agreed that “we need to take some action on things.” But Ginn said the focus should on be on mental health.

“Firearms are not the enemy,” he said. “The enemy is the mentally deranged.”

A recent report by the RAND Gun Policy in America Initiative found supportive evidence that safe gun storage laws reduce firearms injuries and deaths among youths.

Twenty-six states — including Democratic-led California and New York and Republican-led Florida and Texas — have laws requiring gun owners to lock up firearms or penalizing them if a child gains access to an unsecured gun, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a national advocacy group that works to fight gun violence. Georgia is not among them.

But Georgia lawmakers have considered a variety of firearms storage proposals.

In February, the Georgia Senate passed legislation that sought to promote safe firearms storage by exempting gun safes and other firearms safety devices from state sales tax.

A couple of weeks later, the House passed legislation to create a state income tax credit of up to $300 for the purchase of gun safes, trigger locks, other firearms security devices, or the costs of instructional courses on safe firearms handling.

But neither chamber signed off on the other’s approach.

Republican Rep. Mark Newton, a lead sponsor of the proposed income tax credit, said Thursday that he hopes senators will take a close look at the plan during the 2025 legislative session.

The Senate Safe Firearms Storage Study Committee is considering proposals for next year.

This year’s rival bills “had strong support and demonstrated the desire to incentivize gun safety,” Republican Kay Kirkpatrick, the sponsor of the Senate version, said Thursday. “I am certain that we will be continuing the conversation next session.”

Meanwhile, Democrats gained little traction on legislation that would have created a misdemeanor crime for negligently failing to secure firearms accessed by children.

Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, called the shooting last week “our worst nightmare.” But he declined to discuss what state government could have done differently.

“Look, we’ve done a tremendous amount on school safety,” Kemp told reporters Wednesday night outside Apalachee High School.

State lawmakers and Kemp have approved multiple rounds of school security grants in recent years, totaling $184 million.

The state budget that began July 1 includes more than $100 million in ongoing funding, enough to provide $47,000 a year to each public school to address safety needs. Schools can use that for whatever security purpose they believe is most pressing, although Kemp said previously that he wants it to help underwrite a security officer for each school.

Apalachee High School had recently equipped teachers and staff with wearable panic buttons as part of its safety efforts. A school employee used the alert during Wednesday’s shooting, automatically summoning authorities to the scene.

The school safety company Centegix said its CrisisAlert system is used at about 12,000 sites nationwide, primarily in K-12 schools.

Legislatures in some states, including Iowa, Nebraska and Tennessee, passed laws this year expanding the potential for armed personnel in schools. It’s been legal for Georgia school districts to let employees carry guns for years, but very few of the state’s 180 districts are known to have enacted such policies.

In some states, concerns about the potential for someone to cause harm with a gun can provide grounds for authorities to temporarily remove firearms from a home. Twenty-one states have extreme risk protection laws, sometimes referred to as red-flag laws. Georgia is not among them.

The teenager charged in the Georgia shooting had been interviewed by a sheriff’s investigator following a tip from the FBI that the boy, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school.”

The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to a Jackson County sheriff’s report obtained by the AP.

The boy denied making the threat, and an investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account.

Resistance to such laws has grown in Republican-led legislatures. After a deadly shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee pushed for a statewide measure that would allow some version of extreme risk protection orders. But the GOP-led Legislature declined to pass it.

An AP analysis found many U.S. states barely use their red flag laws, a trend blamed on a lack of awareness of the laws and resistance to enforce them.