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Why Santana Happened

An observation on school shootings

The Santana High School shooting happened on Monday, March 5, 2001, in the city of Santee, California, a suburb of San Diego. On that day, I was living in a hotel room about five miles south, in El Cajon, looking for a place to rent. My heart sank with every new bit of news emerging from the incident. It's quite possible, I wouldn't doubt, that the shooting and its fallout hardened in my mind my opinion of San Diego, and through San Diego California. My heart sank because everything the media reported confirmed all my fears and suspicions on why this, or any, school shooting happened at all.

But on late Tuesday night, I got the key piece of news: the evidence on record to support my conclusion. KUSI TV 9's News at Ten aired interviews with some of the students of Santana High. One of the students said that Andy Williams, the shooter, had a bad home life. he said that the only time he and his father talked was when his father yelled at him. His mother was divorced and living in South Carolina.

Only two things will prevent school shootings, and the responsibility for ensuring those things rests squarely on the parents' shoulders: open communication between parents and child, and a solid instilling of the value of, and respect for, human life.

Open communication is vital in a child's upbringing. Parents must talk, parents must listen, and parents must stand up and support their children at school, at home, and at play. Without support and communication at home, children turn to other sources of support. Sources such as TV, video games, and the Internet. Sources that lend the blame-everything-else advocates the false credence that they've wallowed in any time something bad happens.

Children in decent homes, who have that open communication, use such sources as mere entertainment. They turn to their parents for answers on right and wrong, behavior, respect, and generally how to be adults. Andy, on the other hand, was living in a fractured home and getting no support from his parents, not even the one he lived with. The only communication, if you can call it that, was the bad kind.

Everyone needs to be respected, but people get respect only when they give respect, so children must earn respect by learning respect. Nothing in this world is more valuable than human life, and instilling respect for all human life, not just one's own, is nothing less than the most important part of being a parent. Andy's father may have done most of everything else right, such as locking up his guns, but he failed to instill respect in Andy.

Andy was clearly not the most well-liked of students; he was frequently picked on and made fun of, and the entire school knew about him. I've been in Andy's situation before, being the kid everyone picked on, so I know better than most people how that feels and what an overwhelming amount of stress that puts on a teenager. But my parents instilled in me the point of this observation, so I was eventually able to "get over it" and press on with becoming what I wanted to be in life. The wind of ridicule that howled over Andy strengthened.

There are, however, a great many differences between Andy and me, but the greatest by far was at home. I was blessed with parents who knew the tremendous role open communication plays in both marriage and parenthood. I asked them questions and they gave me what answers they knew. I asked them to help me and they helped me as best as they could. I told them what I felt and how I felt and they used that to make me grow up a better person. The door of communication between Andy and his parents was closed long before he shot up the school, and every time he tried to open it, his mother punished him with her isolation and his father with his harsh words and deeds. No shelter from the wind, not even a lee.

With respect for human life, and the self-discipline that goes with it, no amount of violent TV shows, no amount of violent video games, no amount of hunting and gun training, and -- most importantly -- no amount of stress, will ever turn a child into a murderer. But Andy, without that respect, defeated all of his father's precautions, stole his father's gun, and took it to school with him on a clear Monday morning. Defeating the school's security as well.

Without an open door of communication, Andy's father never had a chance of teaching and instilling respect for human life. Without that respect, the stress of being every bully's whipping boy pushed him down the dark path to becoming a murderer. With all support gone, he snapped like a weak twig in a strong wind, and he shot to kill everyone he hated.

That's why the Santana High School shooting happened. That, and not turning schools into prisons, is how to keep all the Columbines and Jonesboros and Santanas from happening. Today's parents have forgotten, and today's children are never learning, and that's why nothing on this Earth could have prevented it.

November 25, 2001 (C) Don Thornton II. Permission to link to this page or include this page within a web frame is granted. For non-Internet media, such as print, radio, and television, permission is granted to reproduce the article's textual content in full. Except for these terms, all rights reserved.