A small number of Fairfax County students said they had brought a handgun to school in the past year, according to a survey co-sponsored by the county government and the school board.
Of 8th, 10th and 12th grade students, 1.2 percent admitted to concealing a handgun on school grounds, while 5.7 percent said they had brought another weapon. One-third of students who carried guns into classrooms said they had done so 40 or more times, compared to just 17.5 percent of students with other weapons, who were more likely to have brought the weapons to school just once or twice.
Outside of school, 7.5 percent of students say they had carried a handgun, and 21.8 percent had armed themselves with another weapon.
The actual number of students bringing weapons into school is probably higher, said Angelica Salazar, a juvenile justice policy associate with the Children’s Defense Fund. “If they suspect their identity could be traced, that they could get in trouble for carrying a gun, they might not want to report that,” Salazar said of the survey data.
“Children make decisions impulsively … so if they have access to a gun and feel like they may be more safe, if someone threatened them or there might be a fight after school,” they may decide to carry a weapon, Salazar said.
School board member Sandra Evans said “the gun data certainly gives me great pause.”
“Certainly we can’t allow any handguns to be in our schools,” Evans said. “We have to do what we need to do to get that number to zero.”
But schools spokesman Paul Regnier called weapons “not really a big problem,” recalling an instance just two weeks ago at Fairfax High School where rumors swirled that a student threatened to bring a weapon to school. Other students told administrators, who tracked the teen and found the gossip to be false.
“Had there been a problem, kids were coming to the administration pretty early on,” Regnier said.
Virginia law mandates that any student caught with a deadly weapon on school grounds be recommended for expulsion.
Nationally, 6.4 percent of suburban students aged 12 to 18 said they could get a gun without adult supervision, according to a 2007 Department of Education survey.
Five percent knew a student who had brought a gun onto school property, while nearly 2 percent had seen a student carry a gun on school grounds.
