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Where the suspected Georgia school shooter got the gun, and more questions answered
A day after the fatal shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, authorities are releasing more information about the gun used in the incident that killed two students and two teachers and wounded nine others.
The suspected shooter, Colt Gray, was the latest to use a type of weapon that has been commonly used in mass shootings, including the deadly school shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, as well as mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and on the Las Vegas Strip.
Here’s what to know about the gun authorities say was allegedly used by the 14-year-old suspect, who has been charged with four counts of felony murder.
What was the gun used in the Georgia school shooting?
Authorities said Wednesday the weapon the suspect used was an AR-style platform rifle. These weapons, based on the AR-15 design, are lightweight, semiautomatic rifles popular with consumers. While often called “assault rifles” — a term gun advocates say is misleading — the “AR” stands for ArmaLite, the company that developed the original AR-15.
The high velocity ammunition shot by these types of weapons can shatter bone, but thousands are sold each year.
How did the suspected Georgia shooter get the gun?
In the Winder, Georgia, incident, CBS News has learned that police and federal agents are investigating if the suspect received the weapon as a gift from his father, Colin Gray, in December 2023, according to four federal law enforcement sources close to the investigation.
The 54-year-old father was arrested Thursday on charges of second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
“These charges stem from Mr. Gray knowingly allowing his son, Colt, to possess a weapon,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said in a news conference Thursday night.
During a 2023 investigation into online threats of a shooting, local police spoke with the suspect’s father, who said he, the father, owned hunting rifles but the teen did not have unsupervised access to them, according to incident reports obtained by CBS News.
Are these guns legal in Georgia?
Georgia law prohibits minors from possessing handguns, but there is no minimum age to possess a rifle or shotgun in Georgia. The state also has few restrictions for adults who wish to carry firearms.
Under both state and federal law, the teenager would not have been legally allowed to buy a handgun, rifle or shotgun. According to the Giffords Center, individuals must be at least 18 years old to purchase handguns in Georgia, while federal law sets the same minimum age for buying shotguns and rifles, as stated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Is there a lot of gun violence in Georgia schools?
Over the past decade, Georgia ranks 10th in the nation for school campus gun violence per 100,000 people, and 16th for deadly school shootings per capita, according to a CBS News analysis of data from the K-12 School Shootings Database and population estimates from the 2020 U.S. Census.
What are Georgia’s gun laws?
Adults in Georgia are not required to have a permit to buy rifles, shotguns or handguns, nor do they need to register their firearms with the government. Additionally, no permit is needed to carry rifles and shotguns, according to the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action.
In 2022, Georgia passed a law allowing permitless carry, which eliminated the need for a license, fingerprinting and a background check to carry concealed weapons in public.
According to a CBS News analysis, Georgia’s laws are among the least strict in the nation.
Does Georgia have a red flag law?
Extreme risk protection orders, which are commonly referred to as “red flag” laws, allow a court to order the temporary removal of guns from someone deemed at risk of harming themselves or others. Twenty-one states have these kinds of laws in place, but Georgia is not one of them, according to Everytown, a gun safety advocacy group.
Georgia state Rep. Gabe Okoye, a Democrat whose district is near Winder, told CBS News that a red flag law in Georgia could have prevented the Apalachee High School shooting.
“If we had a red flag law, i believe this wouldn’t have happened, because the child had been flagged several times before,” he said.
In some states, family members can file extreme risk protection orders. In other states, petitions can only be filed by law enforcement. Petitions filed by law enforcement tend to be successful in front of the judge, said April Zeoli, a University of Michigan associate professor who studies these laws, and the court can require guns to be removed from the home or secured safely in the home or outside.
Petitions filed by family members tend to have more approval challenges as “it’s easier for law enforcement to figure the whole process out more than civilians, as they know what counts as evidence or not evidence,” said Zeoli.
How successful are red flag laws at stopping mass shootings?
Zeoli has been directing a six-state study — the largest in the U.S. — on extreme risk protection orders. Preliminary data gathered by the research team on roughly 6,500 cases filed in states such as Michigan, Vermont and Florida, showed that around 3% of these orders were filed in cases involving juveniles, Zeoli said. Approximately 10% were filed in cases involving people who have threatened mass shootings, and the majority of extreme risk protection orders were filed for suicidal risks or mental health issues.
“What we know is extreme protection orders for mass shootings are not associated with later mass shootings,” said Zeoli. “Those people don’t go on to commit mass shootings.” However, she cautioned, that it remains difficult to quantify whether the extreme protection order stopped the shooting, or whether other factors were involved.
Law enforcement faces challenges on the ground as well, said Christopher Carita, a detective with the Fort Lauderdale Police Department who investigates threats of mass gun violence and other cases requiring the use of an extreme protection order. He said he’s investigated about 30 cases involving juveniles and that invoking a petition can “turn lives around one to two years later.”
Mass shooting incidents where four or more people are killed or injured represent only a small fraction of the numbers of gun deaths and injuries at schools in the U.S. More than 75% of the deaths and 68% of people wounded are in incidents that are not classified as mass shootings and don’t garner as much attention, according to the K-12 School Shootings database.
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Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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