School Shootings in Context

Recent school shootings have brought attention to the problem of violence in American society. Contributing to this problem is a value system strongly influenced by militarism and prejudice, argues a San Diego area activist.

by Rick Jahnkow

Much attention has been given to the latest series of incidents involving school violence. Educators, politicians, and professionals who deal with such tragedies have all been struggling to explain why they occur. Almost always their attention focuses on narrow individualistic factors that might combine to provoke a violent outburst by a stressed-out student: factors such as poor parenting, a lack of counseling, the temptation of an accessible gun, and school bullying or other abuse. While these conditions can certainly play a triggering role in such incidents, there are also some deeper, societal causes that urgently need to be brought out and confronted.

My perceptions of this issue come in part from the work I do for the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities (Project YANO), an organization that reaches out to young people in secondary schools around San Diego County. Our activities include promoting social change and peacemaking careers, publicizing alternatives for job training and college financing, and educating young people about the realities of military enlistment and war. One of the schools I have worked in is Santana High School, where 15-year-old Andy Williams is accused of going on a shooting spree on March 5, 2001 that killed two people and wounded thirteen others.

Here are a few facts about the school, the shootings, and the community around the school that hint at the deeper causes of school violence that are normally missing from the analyses we hear. Some of this information comes from news reports; some is based on my own personal experience with the community and the school.

Santee, the California town where Santana High School is located, is in a semi-rural part of eastern San Diego County. It is a very conservative area with lots of gun ownership advocates. Some people in the community refer to it as "Klantee." In the 1970s, the Klan and White Aryan Resistance openly recruited at the school until a group of parents threatened protests.

In the last few years, Santee has been in the news because of a racially-motivated attack in the community that paralyzed an African-American Marine and because of racist fliers that were circulated at the high school -- the student body of which is 85% white.

So far, there have been no statements reported from Andy Williams indicating that he was targeting people of a particular race or ethnicity in the Santana shooting, and there has been no evidence that he belonged to any organized hate groups. However, the statistics do not suggest a truly random shooting: 15 percent of the Santana student body are students of color and only 9 percent are Latino, yet 40 percent of the people who were wounded have Spanish surnames and one of the two people killed was part Asian. School district and community officials have indignantly protested any suggestion of racial overtones in the shooting, but they've given no public accounting for the disproportionate numbers. The lack of an explanation leaves us with prima facie evidence that there was at least subliminal, if not overt, racism at work as the shooter squeezed his trigger.

Project YANO has regularly attended career fairs at Santana High School to counter the presence of military recruiters. The military, especially the Marine Corps, swarms all over the school. The career fair coordinator has frequently used the public address system to urge students to visit military exhibits. She has never plugged Project YANO as an alternative. Santana is one of the very few schools where Project YANO has seen overt hostility from students to its counter-recruitment message.

The school district in which Santana High School is located, Grossmont Unified, had to be sued in the 1980s to allow peace groups equal access to its schools. Grossmont lost a federal appellate court ruling that is now used as a lever for school access by counter-recruitment groups nationwide.

Santana High School has no Junior ROTC program, but that may only be because the Grossmont district is financially poor. When the district discovered about 12 years ago that JROTC was more costly than other school programs, it made a conscious decision to reduce JROTC to a single unit at one of the district's nine high schools.

Before Andy Williams packed his gun and left for school on the morning of March 5, 2001, he chose to put on a US Navy SEAL sweatshirt. That's what he was arrested in, and it leaves us wondering how symbolic it was of what was going through his mind.

On March 22, 2001, there was a shooting at another school in the Grossmont school district, just six miles from Santana High School. Five people were wounded. The student accused of the shooting was angered by a school administrator who he believed was responsible for his rejection by the Navy the day before.

As most of the public continues to look for individualistic reasons to explain not only the violence at Santana and other schools, but in the rest of society as well, they ignore a very basic element that underlies and contributes to the problem: a value system derived from a socialization process that is strongly influenced by militarism and prejudice. These two influences are closely intertwined; they both teach us to define social relationships in terms of "us" versus "them" and to see certain other individuals as less than human. Dehumanization is a crucial part of the process of teaching people to hate others and, as soldiers, to overcome their inhibitions about killing.

Educational institutions are a primary vehicle for socialization and the teaching of values, and, fortunately, the overt teaching of prejudice is less likely to occur today in public schools. The teaching of militarism, however, is being met with very little scrutiny in this country. The armed forces are intensifying their presence across all levels of civilian education, with special emphasis being given to expanding high school JROTC and special elementary and middle school military programs. These efforts, along with aggressive military recruiting activities and the more general intrusion of militarism in our culture (in movies, music, computer games, etc.), are all having the effect of popularizing soldiering and military values.

There should be little surprise when some individuals choose to respond to the pressures of life by resorting to mass violence. Our behavior is motivated in part by our values, and it is inevitable that the strong influence of militarism on those values is going to come out in various ways. Andy Williams, in his Navy SEAL sweatshirt, is just the latest tragic case in point. He won't be the last until we deal with this more basic issue.

About the Author

Rick Jahnkow is the program coordinator of Project YANO, Project YANO can be contacted at P.O. Box 230157, Encinitas, CA 92023; phone: 760-634-3604; e-mail projyano@aol.com.

A copy of the court ruling granting school access to peace groups, along with other counter-militarism material for youths, is available at the following website: www.comdsd.org.

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