witnessing violence at home, in the community or in
the media;
easy access to weapons.
While all of these conditions can certainly play a triggering or facilitating role in violent behaviour, they
don't really speak to the deeper, societal influences that come into play when people elect violence as their
response to the stressful conditions that surround them.
For example, the mere presence of a gun at home may make it easier to commit violence, but it does not
explain what inspires a student to take it to school and actually use it. To understand this, one must look
more deeply at the culture and values that are instilled in people beginning at an early age. In particular, it
is important to acknowledge and take into account the dehumanising influence of militarism on the
socialisation process.
The relationship between school shootings and militarism has become more apparent to me personally
because of the work that I do in the United States for the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities
(Project YANO). It is a small educational organisation that reaches out to young people by visiting high
schools in San Diego County. San Diego also happens to be the location of one of the largest military
complexes in the world.
Project YANO
Project YANO's goals are to promote careers in social change and peacemaking, and publicise non-military
alternatives for job training and college financing. With the help of anti-war military veterans, we also
educate young people about the realities of war and the military that are not revealed by the armed forces
recruiters who are present in every US high school on almost a daily basis. One of the schools I have
visited in this work is Santana High School, where 15-year-old Andy Williams is accused of killing two
people and wounding 13 others in a shooting spree in March 2001.
Subliminal racism
Here are a few facts about the school, the shooting and the community around the school that hint at some
of the deeper societal causes of school violence that are usually ignored by the politicians and behavioural
"experts":
Santee, the California town where Santana High School is located, is in a semi-rural part of San Diego
County. It is a very conservative area with lots of privately-owned guns. Because of a history of local
activity by the racist Ku Klux Klan, some people in the community refer to it as "Klantee". In the 1970s,
the Klan and another racist group, White Aryan Resistance, openly recruited at Santana High 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 that paralysed an
African American soldier, and because of racist fliers that were circulated at Santana High School— where
85 percent of the students are white.
So far, there has been no overt evidence that Andy Williams belonged to any organised hate groups or was
targeting people of a particular race or ethnicity in the Santana shooting; however, the statistics do not
suggest a truly random shooting. Non-white students—of African, Asian and Latin American descent—
make up 15 percent of the Santana student body, with the Latin American students totalling nine percent.
Yet, 40 percent of the 13 wounded people were of Latin American descent, and one of the two students
killed was part Asian. School district and community officials have protested at any suggestion of racial
overtones to the shooting, but the lack of an alternative explanation for the lopsided numbers suggests that
there was at least subliminal, if not overt, racism at work as the shooter squeezed his gun trigger.
Counter-recruitment
Project YANO has regularly attended career fairs at Santana High School to counter the presence of
military recruiters. The military, especially the US Marine Corps, swarms all over the school. The career
fair co-ordinator frequently uses the public address microphone, which carries messages—usually routine
school ones—all over the campus, to encourage students to visit military exhibits. We have never heard her
urge them to visit Project YANO's display for alternative information. Santana is one of the very few
schools where Project YANO has experienced overt student hostility to its counter-recruitment message.
During the 1980s, the Grossmont High School District, which includes Santana High School, had to be
forced with legal action to grant peace groups the same access to its campuses that the military enjoys. The
resulting court ruling is the main reason why Project YANO is able to visit many schools.
Before Andy Williams packed his gun and left for school on the morning of 5 March 2001, he put on a shirt
emblazoned with the logo of the US Navy's elite commando unit, the SEALs. He was wearing it when he
was taken into custody.
Seventeen days after the Santana incident, at another school in the same Grossmont district, a student
brought two guns to his campus and wounded six people before being subdued. He told police that he had
intended to shoot a school administrator who had been responsible for the US Navy rejecting his enlistment
a day earlier.
Militarism and prejudice
Behavioural scientists who have studied the phenomenon of rage shootings in US schools have identified a
profile that they say is common to most of the attackers. Two of their traits are a sense of victimisation and
an interest in the military.
One study of 18 young shooters (Class Avenger, by McGee and
DeBarnardo, 2001;
http://www.sheppardpratt.org/sp_pdf/classavenger.pdf) found that all of them shared these two
characteristics. Despite the implied link to the violence, the "experts" never look at where these traits come
from or treat them as possible causal factors. In their failure to do so, they ignore a very basic element that
underlies and contributes to the problem: the existence of social values broadly influenced by militarism
and prejudice.
Both belief systems condition people to define social relationships in terms of "us" versus "them", and to
see "them" as less than human. And teaching people to hate each other for their differences is a crucial part
of the dehumanisation process that makes war and violence not only
possible, but inevitable.
Members of the US military's high school Junior Reserve Officers
Training Corps (JROTC), preparing to march in a Martin Luther King Jr Day
parade in San Diego. The JROTC programme, which includes classroom
instruction and, in some cases, markmanship training, is present in almost
3000 public schools in the US.Photo: Rick Jahnkow,
Project YANO
A powerful presence
There is profound irony in schools being attacked in the US by students fascinated with the military. As
primary instruments for socialisation and the teaching of values, educational institutions in the US have, for
the last decade, been the main focus of efforts by the military to extend its domestic influence.
The armed forces have been expanding high school military training programmes and developing new ones
geared for lower level schools. In addition, official partnerships between individual military units and
schools are increasingly being established to facilitate student tours of military bases and classroom visits
by uniformed personnel.
Retired aircraft carriers and battleships are being converted into floating war museums, to which entire
school student bodies are being brought for propagandising. These various efforts, along with aggressive
military recruiting activities and the more general intrusion of militarism in the culture (via movies, music,
computer games and the general media), are further popularising military values and soldiering among
young people. In any country where the military is allowed to have such a powerful presence in the
educational system, there should be little surprise if even a relatively few students decide to respond to the
pressures of life by resorting to mass violence. Our behaviour is motivated in large part by our values, and
it is inevitable that the strong influence of militarism on those values is going to come out in such a way.
Andy Williams, wearing his Navy SEAL sweatshirt, is just one of the latest tragic examples. There will be
many more until the problem is confronted from this perspective.
Rick Jahnkow is the Programme Co-ordinator of Project YANO.
A copy of the court ruling granting school access to peace groups in the US, along with samples of counter-
militarism material for youths, is available at the following Web
site: http://www.comdsd.org Project YANO, PO Box 230157, Encinitas, CA 92023, USA (email
projyano@aol.com).
