DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: The most disturbing aspect of this week’s school shooting near San Diego is that the alleged perpetrator is just a child.
He is just a child.
That’s what makes it such a troubling piece of news, that a 15-year-old kid could get his hands on a .22-caliber pistol and open fire in his school, killing two students and wounding 11 students and two staff members in a suburban San Diego high school on Monday.
It was the latest in an unfortunately long list of school shootings that have occurred over the last half-dozen years and was the most vivid reminder of the Columbine shooting during which two teens opened fire in their Colorado high school, killing 13 and themselves.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Charles Andrew Williams began "firing randomly inside a bathroom and around a campus courtyard," reloading "his eight-shot pistol at least three times, firing more than 30 shots that sent students, teachers and staff members diving and scrambling for cover." He finally was cornered by police in a restroom and surrendered.
Other details remain sketchy. The Times said the teen was "disaffected and unhappy," "frequently taunted by his peers" and had promised to "go on a shooting rampage on the campus where he was in the ninth grade."
Watching the news cast Monday night, I was struck by the similarities between Santana High School and Santee, Calif., and Central Jersey.
The Times called Santee, a 60,000-resident suburb of San Diego, a community in which "children are king." The town’s annual median income annual is $50,000 and "homes can be had for $275,000."
"This is a place that offers a family-oriented quality of life, including soccer leagues, Girl Scout troops and an old-fashioned brand of over-the-fence neighborliness that residents say is becoming extinct in the big city," the Times wrote.
Just like much of central New Jersey.
And yet, despite all its relative advantages, Santee, like Littleton, Colo., and other communities before it, is now infamous for the gun violence that has left a giant hole in the center of the community and has once again brought the issues of gun violence and school shootings to the forefront of the national consciousness.
The questions are simple:
What would make a 15-year-old bring a gun to school and open fire? Why didn’t the school, his parents, other adults see it coming? Why didn’t his friends, who say he had threatened such an attack, take his threats more seriously? And how did a 15-year-old get his hands on a gun and ammunition?
The answers, however, are complex. They grow from a high school culture that encourages cliques and hierarchies, that pushes teens who do not fit in to the margins. His fellow students at Santana High say Charles Williams was picked on regularly; students in Littleton said the same about the shooters there.
Maybe the school’s teachers, his parents or other adults should have stepped in, should have realized the teen was a ticking time bomb. Maybe. But who really wants to believe their kid or one of their students has this kind of rage, this kind of violence in him?
The fact is, understanding teens has never been a strong suit for adults, many of whom fall prey to the same biases and prejudices that leave kids like Charles Williams feeling isolated. We focus our attention on athletes and scholars, on the well-adjusted and successful kids because it is easier, because they are the kinds of kids we were or wished we were in high school, because we cannot think of our own kids as anything but smart, cool, centered. And those that aren’t, well, they’re someone else’s problem.
This is no excuse, of course, just a piece of a larger puzzle that also involves the difficult relations between adults and teens, our easy access to guns and a popular culture that glamorizes the avenger, the vigilante (think of the American Western, "Dirty Harry," "Die Hard," Mel Gibson in "The Patriot," rap music).
This violent streak is part of our American mythology, is central to the legend we’ve created about our westward expansion, our growth as a superpower. We believe we always should meet might with might, strength with strength and violence with violence.
Again, this is no excuse. Charles Andrew Williams pulled the trigger, shot at his classmates and teachers and must bear the bulk of the responsibility for his actions.
We could respond to this tragedy by bulking up the police presence in our schools, by installing metal detectors, placing armed guards at the doors and frisking the student body. But these approaches would come with a price. While they might make our schools safer, they would make them more prisonlike.
Or we could find ways to bring the disaffected back into the center of the school community, crack down on bullying behavior, make every student understand that there are better ways to deal with the pain of being picked on.
Santee, Calif.; Littleton, Colo.; Jonesboro, Ark.; Conyers, Ga. the list goes on and, unfortunately, is likely to lengthen in the future.
Our only hope is to take these disaffected kids more seriously, to show them they belong and to make it more difficult for kids to get their hands on guns. And even then, there are no guarantees.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of The CRanbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].