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It didn’t take long for news of another school shooting, this time in Winder, Georgia, to spread across our college campus in LaGrange College. One of my political science and history graduates was an AHS teacher, who lost colleagues yesterday, and it was a tense time waiting for more news to come out. 

It makes you wonder if anything could have been done to prevent yet another tragedy. Supporters of Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws hold parents responsible for the actions of their kids. Do these CAP laws work deter school shootings? It’s definitely worth asking.

“Several policies, we find, do have substantial support in the scholarly literature—with child access prevention legislation, also known as CAP laws, or safe storage laws, boasting some of the most potent evidence about effectiveness,” writes Andrew R. Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and leader of its Gun Policy in America initiative. “Studies make clear that CAP laws decrease self-injuries and suicides among youths in states that adopt them, and also decrease unintentional injuries and deaths. Yet only 19 states have such laws.”

RAND is one of the most respected authorities on the subject, so I had a lot of confidence that the CAP laws might have stopped the tragedy at Apalachee High School, as well as possibly prevent other unfortunate events across the country.

My oldest kid, Asher Tures, volunteered to help with the research. He looked at school shootings with one or more deaths in 2024 (as of the writing of this, there were at least four deaths in the Winder shooting, and more than 30 wounded). I looked at all school shootings by state, and the states’ gun laws, in 2023 to see if there was a difference.

Here is what those CAP gun laws look like, according to RAND. “Child-access prevention (CAP) laws allow prosecutors to bring charges against adults who intentionally or carelessly allow children to have unsupervised access to firearms. CAP laws aim to reduce unintentional firearm injuries and deaths, suicides, and violent crime among youths chiefly by reducing children’s access to stored guns (‘negligent storage’), although weaker laws targeting only reckless provision of firearms to children are sometimes considered alongside CAP laws.”

Data from 2023 came from the K-12 School Shooting Database, compiled by David Riedman, and cited by US News and World Report. Data on CAP laws comes from RAND’s “State Firearm Law Navigator.” However, my research showed that such CAP laws did not reduce school shooting deaths and wounded. The casualty rate for states with no CAP laws averaged 2.721 per million residents. For states with “Negligent Storage” laws, the casualty rate is 2.961 per million residents. States with “Reckless Provision” laws have a casualty rate of 3.72 per million residents.

Asher’s research from 2024 of the GunViolenceArchive.org database tracked 14 school shootings (elementary, middle school, or high school situations) with at least one death. Of these 14 cases, eight had “Negligent Storage” laws, while four had no CAP laws. Georgia is the only state with a “Reckless Provision” law that had a shooting with a death, and it had two (plus one at KSU that did not make our list because it was a college).

One strong reason these laws do not have lower deaths is that many people may not know about the law; I didn’t know what kind of parental accountability laws there were in Georgia, so it may not have as much of a deterrent effect without more publicity. It also seems to be a law for judicial purposes when a case goes to trial, like that case from Michigan where the parents provided their troubled youth a gun. In 2024, they were convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. With more time and public education, these laws might eventually reduce school shootings. The 2023 data show that negligent storage laws do a better job than reckless provision laws at curbing school shooting casualties.

Despite the optimism from other scholarly studies, such CAP laws do not seem to have stemmed the casualties from school shootings. They may assist with finding accountability in court when one asks how an underage person got access to a deadly firearm if the parents either recklessly provided such a weapon or were negligent in securing it first.