So many mass shootings have happened in the last years in the States, by teenagers as well, that one might wonder whether there is some responsibility of parents for such actions taking place.

What is more, you might question whether parents can plead guilty instead of their children. In order to find out what parent can and cannot do, you might want to read this article further!

Parents Liability Limits

Parents’ liability applies to civil and criminal acts of their children. Thus, in the case of civil lawsuits, you might simply need to pay for the damage done by your kid to other people, but in the case of criminal lawsuits, the punishment will depend on the severity of the situation that happened.

Civil lawsuits are usually about the negligence of a child and the consequences for which the parents must pay. Negligence lawsuits consist of four parts, all of which need to succeed in order for the case to be prosecuted by the judges:

• Duty: responsibilities of parents before their children or of children before the victims;
• Breach: parents’ and children’s act or failure to act that breached the duty;
• Causation: what actions or inactions resulted in a lawsuit being filed;
• Damages: what problems those actions or inactions bring to other people.

Criminal lawsuits are, of course, more serious in their causes and consequences. In the case of children, there are also criminal negligence lawsuits being filed, and the following points need to take place in order to prove that the lawsuit should be authorized:

• The actions of a child caused someone to die;
• The actions were dangerous to other people and were done without thinking about the consequences to others;
• The child knows that his or her actions are dangerous to other people.

And in the case of shootings done by underaged teenagers, studies show that between 70% and 90% of shootings made by kids were done with the help of guns found in their family and friends’ houses. Thus, according to Child Access Prevention Laws, parents can even be sued separately from their children for an inability to restrain their kids from unsupervised access to guns.

However, the requirement of a lawyer to act in accordance with the burden of proof both for civil and criminal cases, meaning the need to prove that it is more likely than not that the parents caused the criminal action, complicates the court process. Of course, it might be easy to prove this point in civil cases, but as for criminal ones, not so much.