In the wake of the tragic shooting at an Oxford, Michigan, high school that killed four students and injured eight others, calls for stricter parental responsibility laws with harsher penalties are emerging from all levels of government and advocacy organizations throughout the private sector.

James and Jennifer Crumbley, parents of Ethan, the 15-year old shooter, have been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter for allowing their son unfettered access to his Christmas present, a 9mm Sig Sauer SP2022. James bought the gun on a November 26 shopping trip, while accompanied by Ethan. The parents were keeping the gun in an unlocked drawer in their bedroom. Now, they are each being held on a $500,000 bond.

The Crumbley’s post-shooting egregious behavior, including their arrest while hiding out in a Detroit building, helps explain the manslaughter charge. Up to now, parents of school shooters have been charged with child abuse, violating gun laws and negligent manslaughter, but, according to the New York Times, charging parents with voluntary manslaughter after one of their children shot someone is “almost unheard of.”

A Michigan prosecutor charged the Crumbleys with involuntary manslaughter on December 4. The crime is defined in the state as “manslaughter without malice, or murder without intent to kill.” To convict them, the state will be required to prove that the Crumbleys were grossly negligent when they allowed their son access to a gun and when they failed to intervene on the day of the murders, even after they were shown Ethen’s violent drawings and messages by school personnel. If convicted, each parent could face up to 15 years in prison.

Gross negligence, explains Danny Cevallos, an MSNBC legal analyst, means more than just being careless. It means “willfully disregarding the results to others of their failure to act.” A voluntary manslaughter charge may lead to “heightened parental responsibility standards,” Cevallos said, something that might be acceptable to both sides of the gun control debate.

In addition, he adds, the state will also have to prove that the negligence was both the factual and proximate cause of the students’ deaths. That means the deaths would not have happened if their actions had not occurred and that the actions by Ethan’s parents were sufficiently related to the deaths so that the court could say they caused the deaths.

Eve Brensike Primus, a University of Michigan Law School Professor told The Washington Post, “It’s really hard to show that parents have a disregard for human life, and they could actually foresee their child doing this. That’s why charges are so rare.”

Another reason is a 1925 Supreme Court holding that said parents have a fundamental right to rear their children without undue interference from the government, although subsequent cases have said the government can make children attend school. Since the shootings in Columbine in the late 1990s, states have stepped up efforts to curb gang violence and other crimes committed by youths by holding parents responsible. But recent studies suggest that parental responsibility laws are “infrequently enforced and of dubious effect,” according to The Criminal Defense Lawyer.

And parental responsibility laws have additional problems. When California passed a law in 1988 that sought to control gang violence by stating that “every person who commits an act or fails to perform any duty that causes or tends to cause a minor to do a prohibited act is guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor under the California Penal Code and subject to a maximum fine of $3500, one year in jail, or both. But the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU) filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law. Others say that any parental responsibility laws are unfair to low-income families because parents, who often must take two jobs to support their children, cannot always be home to supervise them.

The majority of states, however, now have laws that aim to prevent children from having access to firearms. These fall under the category of laws that punish parents for what they have not done, rather than for what they have done. The website of The Giffords Law Center explains that laws to prevent child access to guns are “an incredibly effective tool to curb gun deaths and injuries among children.” Holding gun owners responsible for safe storage and imposing liability for failure to take safety precautions work, the Center says. Yet Kris Brown, president of the Brady gun-control advocacy group, told the AP, “Our laws haven’t really adapted to the reality of school shootings, and the closest we have are these child access prevention laws.”

Currently, there are no Child Access Prevention laws (CAPs) at the federal level, although there are proposed laws to require safe storage. These laws immunize handgun owners from some civil actions based on misuse by third parties. But, there is some movement by Congress to do more. H.R. 4301, the School Shooting Safety and Prevention Act, now in the House Committee on Education and Labor, would collect data that will help “communicate, track, and respond to” the tragic crimes that made Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine and now Oxford household names. The Senate has a companion bill, the School Shooting Safety and Preparedness Act, which will require the Secretary of Education and others to “publish an annual report on indicators of school crime and safety.”

Certainly collecting data and publishing annual reports are necessary steps, but in light of current events, one must wonder if that is enough. President Biden has indicated it will “re-engage on the issue,” according to a report in Florida Politics.

State actions to hold parents responsible for school shootings are more encouraging. In addition to 23 states and the District of Columbia having some form of secure storage laws, last June, for example, Michigan state Sen. Rosemary Bayer, whose district includes Oxford High School, introduced a bill that would hold parents accountable if they failed to secure their firearms. A parent who did not follow the law could face up to five years in prison if a minor accessed and used a gun to injure or kill others.

Many commentators, legislators and parties on both sides of gun control debates will be watching the Crumbleys’ case with great interest. It is likely to have a major effect on the future of parental responsibility laws that go beyond controlling access.