Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 21, 1993 TAG: 9307210109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The survey, by the pollster Louis Harris of 2,508 students in 96 schools across the country, painted a bleak portrait of violence and fear among American schoolchildren.
Nine percent said they had shot at someone at some time; 11 percent said they had been shot at in the past year. Nearly 40 percent of the students said they knew someone who had been killed or injured by a gun, and 15 percent said they had carried a gun within 30 days of the survey.
But several experts on guns were skeptical about the results, saying the figures were higher than those in any previous surveys. They suggested either that the students might be exaggerating or that the sample might have been skewed because it was conducted in just 96 schools, so a number of children in a single school could have known of the same violent incident.
"These estimates would imply numbers that dwarf those known to the police," said Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee. "There's a certain romance about violence. I think kids are wildly overreporting."
Harris discounted both criticisms. He said that internal consistencies in the way children answered different questions and previous polling experience with children and drug use persuaded him that they had answered questions honestly. And while it would have been too expensive to survey children in more schools, he said the schools selected were representative.
The poll, conducted by questionnaires handed out at the schools, has a sampling error of three percentage points.
"What we've got here is a whole constellation of confirming evidence that this is a group that are very consistent in their answers," Harris said. "They're reporting a culture, a subculture of guns."
In many questions, a consistent minority of students emerged who said they felt safer carrying guns - about one in six, overwhelmingly boys, according to the poll, which was conducted by Harris' firm, LH Research Inc.
Several experts said they were particularly surprised by the finding that so many students had been shot at or had shot at someone. That figure is far higher than any previous survey.
Another figure that struck several experts as high was the report that 15 percent of teen-agers said they had carried a gun within 30 days of the survey. A 1991 survey of ninth- to 12th-graders conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 2.9 percent of students had carried a gun.
Katherine Keough, a professor of education at Xavier University in Cincinnati who has conducted previous surveys about guns in schools, said the numbers in the Harris survey "sound a little high," and added, "It suggests an alarmist point of view that is out of context."
But other experts said that even though the figures were higher than those recorded in the past, that could reflect an increase in violence.
"What strikes us as high might be quite true, but the truth is painful to accept," said Lawrence W. Sherman, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland.
by CNB