THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410310240
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Adults apparently are a lot more worried about guns in school than most students are. It seems they know the few who are likely to hang out with guns and so avoid them.
Some things don't change. Back when the only guns we saw in a week belonged to Marshal Dillon, everybody in high school knew who were likeliest to get in a fight behind the bleachers or come in drunk to the prom. They had more exotic appeal than the stamp club, but were about as left alone.
Something else that hasn't changed: Worry is what adults do. The older we get, the more fearful we get, usually with reason. And the big reason today is something that has changed: Students' weapons today are deadlier than anybody's fist, and anybody can inadvertently get in the way.
So when the scary stories mounted last week about students and guns, adult alarms should have gone off, and did.
Where do these students get these guns? I'm for Brady, one-gun-a-month, the assault-weapons ban; but they'll keep guns out of all errant hands the Halloween Linus greets the Great Pumpkin. Where do they get the notion that school parking lots are for cruising with booze, .38s, some dope? Where are the common denominators we assume not only exist but offer clues about what to do?
Most of the students involved with guns and Virginia Beach schools come from seven neighborhoods served by Salem High and Tallwood High. These are neighborhoods, too, where merchants and shoppers have complained of mouthy and menacing youths. Is this more a school or a neighborhoods problem?
As staff writer Mike Mather reported last week, these are not, according to census figures, low-income or public-housing neighborhoods, the stereotypical hotbeds of crime. But the census figures are five years old. Income medians for households don't tell us beans about an individual student's household. And a dollar to a donut, his household is where his problem starts. Where the solution starts, too.
Generalities are iffy. Diligent, hard-working parents can have undisciplined, hard-eyed kids. But mostly why a kid is vulnerable to trouble traces straight home. That's where police and school officials, tougher courts and tougher penalties ought to be heading, too.
One generalization is true: What makes news is by definition the exception. Even as we keep our eye on the troubled few, let's not lose sight of the students - and parents - who've got their values straight. That's most of them.
Yet we already lose sight of them in the zeal to deal with students more evidently ``at risk'' - of academic failure, of poverty, of parental neglect. The first consideration in dealing with gun-toting students, however at risk they turn out to be, is how they're putting the others at risk.
The kids say they can tell who each other are. It's time their parents were told as well.
KEYWORDS: GUNS SCHOOLS HANDGUNS
by CNB