the figure to 186,000. The National Education Association puts the number at 100,000. The only comprehensive data on this question come from a 1990 survey by the Centers for Disease Control that asked high-school students if they carried a gun for protection. As a 1991 summary of the survey explained, "Students were not asked if they carried weapons onto school grounds." Students who answered yes included all those who occasionally carried guns anywhere,
such as in cars when driving at night in dangerous neighborhoods.
Interpreting the data realistically, Kleck, the FSU criminologist, estimates that 16,000 to 17,000 students carry a gun to school on a given day. That figure translates into about 1 in every 800 high-school students. Accordingly, guns play a relatively small role in the overall problem of violence in school. In 1986, for example, there were 41,500 aggravated assaults in schools and 44,000 robberies. Firearms were used in 1,700 of these crimes, a little under 2 percent. (They accounted for 15 deaths and 95 injuries in 1992, according to the National School Safety Center.) Thus, even a program that eliminated all guns would fail to deal with 98 percent of the violent felonies in schools.
Rather than address the real problem of discipline and security in many public schools, gun-control advocates have argued for "gun-free school zones," which make possession of weapons within 1,000 feet of school property a felony. Since the l,000-foot school zone encompasses over half the territory in most cities and towns, the school zone laws are frequently a backhanded way to outlaw the possession of firearms by adults on public property.
These laws can add to the regulatory obstacles that discourage people from using guns for protection. In cities such as Los Angeles and New York, police administrators routinely turn down applications from private citizens seeking permits to carry a handgun for self-defense. About 7 percent of the population carries guns anyway, figuring that it is better to risk prosecution than to risk driving or walking in dangerous neighborhoods without protection. The crime of carrying without a permit is a misdemeanor in many jurisdictions, but gun-free school zones can turn it into a serious felony.
Even when narrowly drafted, school-zone laws are misguided. A comparison of the number of students carrying guns in school to the number of gun crimes committed in school indicates that the vast majority of students who carry firearms do so for noncriminal purposes. "To put it bluntly," one student wrote in a recent letter to The Washington Post, "I think students bring weapons to school to save their own lives. They have a constant fear of being attacked, whether for money, for drugs, or for some other reason." Most students who carry guns are trying to protect themselves on the way to and from school, as they pass through neighborhoods ruled by gangs, or in school itself. To focus on "guns in school" is to miss the larger picture of the violent conditions that make unarmed teenagers feel vulnerable.
While the claims of gun-control advocates about a rising tide of gun accidents and gun suicides are false, there is no doubt that violent crime among teenagers is soaring. From 1985 to 1991 arrests of adults for murder declined, but arrests for murder of 17-year-old males rose by 121 percent, of 16-year-olds by 158 percent, of 15-year-olds by 217 percent, and of boys 12 an under by 100 percent.
Those figures conceal an even more serious problem. The murder arrest rate of whites between the ages of 10 and 17 was the same in 1989 as in 1980 (it dipped in the middle of the decade and then rose to its former level). Meanwhile, the black rate has skyrocketed.
Most of these homicides are carried out with handguns. Yet if there is a relationship between gun density and homicide in the United States, it is an inverse one. The regions with the most guns are the regions with the lowest homicide rates. And while whites have a higher rate of gun ownership than blacks, they have a much lower homicide rate.
One possible explanation for this pattern is that widespread gun ownership deters crime. But it may also be significant that the places with the highest rates of gun ownership tend to be rural areas and small towns, where family structures are relatively strong and communities are often more stable and unified. The problem of violence in American inner cities may have less to do with the fact that guns are available there (as they are everywhere else) than with the fact that so many families are weak or nonexistent and that so little sense of community exists.
The sharp increase in teenage violence that began in 1987 may also be related to George Bush's escalation of the war on drugs. The drug war has intensified violent competition among drug dealers. It has also crowded prisons with drug offenders, making significant punishment of crimes against people and property less likely and deterrence less credible. Texas A&M economist Morgan Reynolds found that, largely because of inadequate prison space, the expected punishment for murder (the average sentence multiplied by the probability of punishment) fell by 20 percent from 1988 to 1990. In 1990 the average murderer could expect to spend 1.8 years in prison. A society that treats violent crime so lightly sends the message to young criminals that they can literally get away with murder.
In addition to improving the criminal justice system, we need to reconsider our legal approach to firearms. Gun-control laws are undermining responsible gun use in a futile attempt to eliminate the tools of crime. In a 1992 survey of young violent criminals from
Washington, D.C., 77 percent of the respondents said they had
acquired a handgun in the district, where handguns are illegal.
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