Youth Shot on Way to Enroll in School : Violence: Teen-ager is struck outside entrance to Wilson High two hours before Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren speaks against guns on campus.

Just before Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren arrived at a Long Beach high school Tuesday morning to talk about ridding campuses of guns, a teen-ager was shot in front of the school while horrified students ran for cover.

The 16-year-old who arrived at Wilson High School to enroll as a student was shot in the leg after he got into a fight with two teen-agers who were driving past the front entrance of the campus, police said.

The teen-ager was taken to Long Beach Community Hospital and then to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center after the 8:40 a.m. shooting and was expected to be released Tuesday night. Although the youth survived the attack, school officials said it is a textbook example of what Lungren talked about two hours later in a forum: the danger of guns at schools.

“Guns have no place in a child’s hands, much less in a school hallway or a classroom,” Lungren. “Our position must be that we have zero tolerance for the presence of guns at any school.”

Schools reflect what is going on in the neighborhoods that surround them, said Supt. Carl Cohn of the Long Beach Unified School District.

“As far as I’m concerned, things are getting dangerously close to schools, (but) compared to what is happening in our community, our schools are safe,” Cohn said.

Lungren, whose visit was mainly to tout a hot line number for students to report weapons, agreed that schools are affected by crime in surrounding areas and that they have changed since he was a student in Long Beach.

“We lived in Long Beach in a different era,” he said. “We never, ever talked about a shooting on campus or near it. We had gangs then, but as I recall, if gangs got into fights, they used fists.”

School officials were quick to note that Tuesday’s shooting did not occur on campus and that shootings near any Long Beach campus are atypical. The shooting, however, occurred a few feet off school grounds near the campus’ main entrance at Ximeno Avenue and 10th Street.

At least two dozen students were milling about the front entrance, many waiting for the beginning of their second-period classes, when the teen-ager planning to enroll walked out to get his aunt, who was waiting in her car, Principal Lawrence W. Burnight said.

In front of the school, the boy became embroiled in an argument with two teen-agers in a blue car, said Bob Anderson, a police spokesman. One of the young men got out and a fistfight followed, Anderson said. Then one of the teen-agers in the car drew a gun and chased the victim. He fired four or five times, hitting the victim once not far from where the aunt was waiting in her car, Anderson said.

As the shots were fired, students either ran into the school for cover or hit the ground. “The kids just scattered,” said Sakeya Ford, 17, a senior.

“If they had gone toward the tennis courts or near the students, more people could have gotten hurt,” Anderson said.

Police said witnesses identified the suspects, believed to be gang members, but no arrests had been made by Tuesday night. An undetermined amount of cocaine was found on the street, and police suspect that the shooting may have been drug-related, Anderson said.

Although school officials emphasized that the incident was an anomaly, Long Beach school administrators have confiscated weapons from campuses with increasing frequency: During the last school year, officials confiscated 37 guns in the district, which has 82 schools. By comparison, 30 guns were seized during the 1991-92 academic year and 24 in the 1990-91 school year, according to Dick Van Der Laan, spokesman for the district, the state’s third largest. No figures were immediately available for this school year.

At Wilson High, Burnight said, two guns have been confiscated on campus this year.

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Despite the shooting Tuesday, no student who spoke at the forum talked about feeling unsafe at school. Nonetheless, some of the students interviewed later expressed concern about racial tension on their campus that sometimes erupts into brawls.

Last month, a confrontation between an African American student and a Latina student at Jordan High School in Long Beach sparked a number of brawls and an early dismissal of school as dozens of police officers in full riot gear stood by to disperse crowds. Compton, Centennial, Dominguez and Compton high schools also have had racially charged clashes this year.

“I feel safe at school because I have not been confronted with any problems,” said LaDell White, 16.

She said she might feel differently “if I were a black man instead of a black woman,” suggesting that there is greater pressure on teen-age boys to belong to gangs and therefore more likelihood that they would feel unsafe.

“You have to understand,” senior Pheap Ok told Lungren, “that kids today are worried about protecting their image, and that could lead to violence.”

The students disagreed with Lungren that video games and television sometimes create an environment of violence on campuses.

Although the group as a whole did not express great concern for personal safety, a poll of two-thirds of the students at the school last spring showed that about 45% either disagreed or disagreed strongly with the statement “I feel safe at school,” Burnight said. Another 45% said they agreed and 11% strongly agreed, Burnight said.

“I would have expected a higher percentage to say they feel safer, but the numbers may reflect what was happening in the community immediately before (the poll,)” Burnight said, referring to high-profile verdicts in the federal trial of the officers accused in the Rodney G. King beating.

He said that students felt more racial tension in the school and in the community at that time, he said.

“My sense as the principal of the school is that we’re OK on campus,” Burnight said. “The school is the safest place to be in the community--as safe as in their homes, and even safer for some.”

Times staff writer Miguel Bustillo contributed to this story.