- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Students
at the biggest risk of opening fire at school are likely to be friendless
boys, aged 16-18, with easy access to guns and who are seeking revenge
for bullying, according to a student survey released on Tuesday.
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- The survey of 2,017 students in grades 7-12 nationwide,
looked at what teen-agers thought about school shootings, who was most
likely to commit them and whether they ever felt driven to shoot other
students themselves.
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- ``We found students seem to know who in their schools
have the potential for violence and what might drive them to shoot someone
in school,'' said Edward Gaughan, a psychology professor from Alfred University
in New York, who lead the study.
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- Since 1974, Gaughan said, there have been at least 37
lethal incidents in America's schools and countless ''near-misses'' in
U.S. classrooms that were never documented.
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- One of the most devastating massacres was at Columbine
High School in Colorado in April 1999 when two heavily armed teen-agers
went on a rampage, shooting 13 students and staff before taking their own
lives.
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- The survey found students at the highest risk of committing
violence were boys in the 11th or 12th grade who felt alienated both at
home and at school, were bullied and mistreated by their peers and who
felt ignored by teachers, Gaughan said.
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- The survey, which had a margin of error of plus or minus
2 percent, found 37 percent of respondents said they knew someone in their
school who might shoot someone, and about 20 percent said they had actually
heard others say they had plans to shoot someone.
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- One out of five said they had heard rumors of a student
planning to shoot another student. Asked if they had ever thought of shooting
someone at school, 8 percent said they had, and another 10 percent said
they had thought about how they might carry out a shooting.
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- ``In other words, they had actually planned how they
might be able to do it,'' Gaughan said. ``Far too many have thought about
doing it themselves.''
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- Using results from the survey, the researchers calculated
that 12 percent of the student population had a ``propensity toward violence''
that might lead them to open fire at school.
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- When they looked at how many students had access to a
gun, that came to 2.6 percent of the school population. ``In a high school
of 800 students, that's 20 students we think are most likely to carry out
a school shooting,'' he said.
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- Sixty-one percent of the respondents said they knew someone
who could bring a gun to school and 24 percent said they could easily bring
a gun to school themselves if they wanted to.
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- Asked how school shootings could be prevented, students
said teachers needed to intervene more to stop verbal, physical and emotional
abuse, said Jay Cerio, a co-investigator in the study.
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- ``We cannot just slough off the verbal, physical and
emotional abuse to which our children are exposed in school as 'just being
kids,''' Cerio said.
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- Despite the incidents, researchers stressed America's
schools were among the safest place for children and there was less than
a one in a million chance of a school shooting.
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- ``Schools are safer than homes, but the problem is the
unpredictability of where the next one (shooting) will be,'' Gaughan said.
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