Guns -- for years a scourge of the nation’s high schools -- are a growing menace on college campuses.
Most higher-education administrators have thought themselves immune from the handgun violence in the high schools, where one in 25 students say they’ve brought a gun to school and guards with metal detectors search people at some schools for weapons.
But just since the beginning of this year, at least nine college students have been shot -- two fatally -- by other students. Those incidents and others are convincing a small but increasing number of officials that colleges face a gun problem of their own.
Last month, the Association for Student Judicial Affairs unanimously adopted a resolution urging colleges to support tough rules and laws to keep guns off campuses. In a newsletter last month, the head of a committee of college-housing officials warned her colleagues about growing gun violence. And the director of a national association of black fraternities is studying the causes of gun violence among its members.
“The idea of students’ carrying guns and being ready to shoot them is very different from what we’ve seen before,” says Dorothy G. Siegel, director of the Campus Violence Prevention Center and vice-president for student services at Towson State University.
Most campus police chiefs and student-affairs officials say -- many with fingers crossed -- that they see no evidence that more students are carrying guns. They contend that the high-school students most likely to carry guns are gang members and drug dealers who don’t usually attend college. And while having a gun may be seen as almost fashionable in some high schools, these officials say, the climate on college campuses strongly discourages gun use.
Many experts on violence say college officials are deluding themselves if they think high-school kids who wield guns don’t go on to college, although they agree that students may be less likely to carry weapons in college than they were in high school. They also admit that they lack conclusive data to prove that colleges have a gun problem.
But citing anecdotal reports about shootings and data showing surges in weapons arrests and drug use, some campus-safety officials say it would be surprising if the gun culture embedded in some high schools were not afflicting colleges.
“Ten years ago we were denying that there were gangs and guns in high school,” says James W. Utterback, dean of student services at Dodge City Community College. “It’s very easy and popular to say, `No, we don’t have that kind of problem.’ I think it’s very naive, and it’s very dangerous.”
Gun-related violence is not unheard-of on college campuses. Each year a few students are shot by intruders in robberies gone awry. The sound of gunfire is sometimes heard at dances and parties that draw revelers from off the campus. And every so often, a disturbed student goes berserk and shoots other students or professors. Attacks of that sort erupted at Weber State University last year, Simon’s Rock College of Bard in 1992, and the University of Iowa the year before.
What ties the latest shootings together, distinguishing them from incidents of the past, some observers say, is that they were everyday conflicts between students that exploded into gun violence.
Since January 1:
* A feud between two groups of students at Norfolk State University resulted in shots’ being fired in a dorm room. One student was killed and another wounded.
* One student shot his roommate and lifelong friend to death at East Texas State University. Friends said the student had been drinking.
* Three students at South Carolina State University were shot and wounded by two others after a wrestling match reportedly “got out of hand.”
* A male student at Voorhees College shot and wounded two other students just off the campus grounds, in a fight over a woman.
A fifth shooting occurred at Mission College, where one student wounded another. Police have ruled that it was “probably” an accident, and that there seemed to be no hostility between the students.
Three of the five incidents -- the ones at Norfolk State, South Carolina State, and Voorhees -- occurred at historically black colleges, with black victims and alleged perpetrators. The victim and perpetrator at East Texas also were black.
Some observers who study violence say that isn’t surprising, given the prevalence of black-on-black violence elsewhere in society. They also note that studies have found young black and Latino males to be more likely than other people of their age to carry guns in high school.
Others warn that guns are not a “black” problem, and that it may be a quirk of timing that three of the recent shootings have occurred at black colleges. These shootings, they believe, may simply be early signs that a phenomenon evident among Americans of all races and regions is coming to the campuses: people who have ready access to weapons and use them to resolve conflict.
“Way back when, when two students got in a fight over a woman, someone ended up with a bloody nose or a black eye,” says Carolyn Palmer, an assistant professor of higher education at Bowling Green State University. “Now, one of them either has a gun or goes to get one, and the same situation ends up with someone permanently injured or dead.”
There is no solid statistical evidence that gun ownership or violence among college students is rising. The number of murders on campuses appears to be holding steady, and no one has yet collected statistics on the number of students who own or use guns. A survey by The Chronicle last month did find a 16-per-cent increase in the number of weapons arrests reported by colleges. But the data did not show whether the weapons were guns or whether the people arrested were students.
Without clear statistics, college officials who believe a gun problem exists or is emerging cite other evidence to make their case.
They begin in the high schools.
In a 1990 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, 4 per cent of the nation’s high-school students admitted to having brought a gun to school in the previous 30 days. The conclusions of a survey sponsored by the Joyce Foundation for the Harvard University School of Public Health last year were similar.
Those studies portrayed the prevalence of guns as a symptom of a “gun culture” in which today’s youth live. They found guns and gun violence to be deeply embedded in a society in which about half of American households have a gun, and in which gunshot wounds are the leading cause of death of American teen-age boys, both black and white.
In that climate, says Eileen Johnston, safety and security chief at Glendale Community College, near Phoenix, “why we would think that students who carry weapons in high schools would suddenly stop when they come to college is beyond me.”
Many officials, however, believe that students who carry guns in high school just don’t go to college. Michael G. Shanahan, police chief at the University of Washington, argues that most high-school students who have guns deal drugs or belong to gangs. A form of what he calls “social Darwinism” keeps them away from institutions like his, he says.
“People who deal in violence and guns in high school are not your future college population,” says Mr. Shanahan. That view is echoed by many others, who say that while all students, good and bad, must attend high school, those who choose to go on to college -- and clear all the hurdles they must clear to get in -- are a different breed.
But some people who deal at first hand with violent high-school students challenge that reasoning.
Franklin Tucker runs a counseling center for kids who are expelled from the Boston Public Schools for carrying guns. He says that while the “hard core” gun carriers may be troublemakers, “the majority of kids who come through here arm themselves because they want to protect themselves.” Of the 120 students who have gone through the center since 1986, he says, at least a third have gone to college. There’s no reason to think they don’t take their weapons with them when they go, he and others say.
Some campus-crime experts also reject the idea that drug dealers and gang members don’t go to college.
Mr. Utterback of Dodge City Community College is one of the rare officials who admit that their college has a problem with gangs, drugs, and guns. (Others who acknowledge a problem on their campuses asked not to be identified, for fear of attracting unwanted notoriety.)
Dodge City found gang graffiti on its walls, but did not realize the gravity of its problem until a student was shot in a gang fight in Wichita, Kan., in July 1991. Since that time, gang members who are also students have assaulted other students and threatened administrators. Mr. Utterback, an expert by necessity, now spends a lot of time advising other college officials about gangs.
“From our experience,” he says, “there is a lot of drug activity on campuses that is related to gangs, and they have guns.”
Alan J. Lizotte, executive director of the Consortium for Higher Education Campus Crime Research at the State University of New York at Albany, also believes that drugs are contributing to a gun problem for colleges. Drug use among students is rising, and the colleges surveyed by The Chronicle last month reported a nearly 50-per-cent increase in drug arrests from the year before.
“Our studies show that drugs in the community lead to drugs on campus, and drugs on campus lead to gun violence,” says Mr. Lizotte, a professor of criminal justice.
College officials who are skeptical about a presumed rise in student handgun possession say that other factors may limit the presence of guns on campuses.
First, they say, in many cases -- particularly at community colleges and urban universities -- the students are considerably older and are more mature and focused on their studies than they were in high school. Second, college students generally are more independent and less likely to feel pressure to follow other students into trouble, a factor that scholars who study the problem say is a major cause of high-school violence.
Students also feel safer at most colleges than they do in some high schools, these officials say. Says Jose Elique, security chief for the City University of New York system: “We’ve been able to generate a sense of quality of life on our campuses that somewhat discourages the feeling that `I must carry a weapon to school because I may get assaulted in the hallways.’”
Mr. Shanahan of the University of Washington says that while carrying a gun may be a badge of honor in some high schools, “having a gun on this campus would not be seen as meeting the behavioral standards of the community.”
SUNY’s Mr. Lizotte says it is no surprise that college police chiefs have not seen an increase in gun possession.
High schools diagnosed a gun problem, he says, only after surveys of their students in the mid-1980’s began showing that 30 per cent of them knew someone who had brought a gun to school.
“Then security guards start searching people, and guess what? They find guns,” says Mr. Lizotte. “How many colleges have security guards who search people as they go into the dorms? How would they know if there’s a gun?”
Searching students is not necessarily the answer on college campuses, Mr. Lizotte says. But he and others hope that college officials will not ignore the potential gun problem unless it explodes in their faces.
Instead, they say, colleges must institute measures that bar or discourage students from bringing guns to campus, vigorously punish students who own or use guns illegally, and counsel students to find non-violent ways to settle disputes.
They also hope academics will study the situation more closely, so colleges can know for sure whether they have a gun problem.
Until that happens, Ms. Johnston of the Glendale Community College, like many other campus-safety officials, can only speculate about what the students on her campus are doing.
“Do I think they’re carrying weapons?” she says. “Yes, a good preponderance.
“Can I prove it? No.”