American Guns and Paternal Love

The Grim Reality of America's Gun Problems, Caused by Money and the Perversion of the Second Amendment

When the police arrived at the family home on the morning of September 4, 2024, Colin Gray did not wait for them to explain why they were there. Before a single officer could speak, he said three words: “I knew it.”

That admission, spontaneous, uncurated, wrenched out of him before his defenses could engage, is perhaps the most damning sentence ever spoken by a man who would spend the next several months in a courtroom insisting he had no idea.

Colin Gray, a 55-year-old construction worker from Barrow County, Georgia, is not a monster in the cinematic sense. He is something more mundane and therefore more frightening: a man who had every warning, every signal, every screaming alarm, and chose, repeatedly and deliberately, not to act. His 14-year-old son, Colt, had been exhibiting signs of severe mental illness for years. His bedroom walls were papered with photographs and newspaper clippings of Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter who killed 17 people in 2018. Colt had corresponded with C…