‘Gun Culture’ Runs Deep Among Youth : Violence: Study finds 1 in 5 high school students in high-crime areas owns a gun. Most are obtained illegally, casting doubt on legislative control efforts.

More than one in five male high school students surveyed in high-crime urban neighborhoods acknowledged owning a gun, and 45% said they had been shot at or threatened with a gun on their way to school in recent years, according to a federal study released Sunday.

In another finding that underscores the broad challenge facing current gun control efforts, only 11% of the students with guns said they bought them at gun shops or pawnbrokers. Most said they got them from friends, on the street or by taking them from someone’s house or car.

“Controls imposed at the point of retail sale likely would be ineffective, at least by themselves, in preventing the acquisition of guns by juveniles studied here because they rarely obtain their guns through such customary outlets,” the report said.

The study on the “gun culture” in poor urban neighborhoods was funded by the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. It surveyed 758 male students in 10 crime-troubled high schools in California, New Jersey, Louisiana and Illinois in 1991. It also sampled 835 male juvenile offenders in those states.

Released as the Clinton Administration, Congress and many states explore measures to curb gun violence, it documents the prominent place guns play in poor urban neighborhoods where young people believe they are in constant danger and in need of protection.

The desire for protection from “a hostile and violent world” and the need to arm themselves against enemies were the primary reasons both the students and offenders gave for getting guns.

Once they had them, however, their use was not limited to defense. Of the juvenile offenders surveyed, 63% had committed crimes with guns, and 9% of the students reported having used a weapon to commit a crime.

The students described an environment in which guns are everywhere and getting one is easy. Almost 70% of the students surveyed said there was a gun at home, and 42% said they had friends who routinely carried guns.

Slightly more than half of the juvenile offenders said they carried a gun all or most of the time in the year or two before they were jailed.

There is a “large, informal street market in guns” that supplies young people, the report said, with 14% of the students buying their guns there. Thirty-eight percent got one from a friend, with about 8% acquiring one from a drug dealer or addict.

Since most of the ways the youths reported getting the guns are already against the law, the effectiveness of strictly legislative answers may be doubtful.

“It may matter less where juveniles get their guns than where they get the idea that it is acceptable to use them,” the report said. “The problem is less one of getting guns out of the hands of juveniles and more of reducing motivations . . . for youths to arm themselves in the first place.”

In the aftermath of passage of the Brady bill gun control law and the recent shooting spree on a Long Island commuter train, leading officials of both political parties have been debating whether it is time to consider a national system of gun licensing or registration.

In an appearance on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” New York Mayor-elect Rudolph W. Giuliani said licensing is justified. Referring to the assailant in the train shootings, he said: “The same hatred might still be there, but the level of damage would be less if that man had a six-shooter or if that man didn’t have a handgun.”

Giuliani conceded that stricter laws will not take all the guns off the streets, but he maintained that they would be harder to get.

Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams said on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley” that new laws are needed to cut the supply of guns on the street, particularly assault weapons. And he said a coordinated effort must be made to get a “change in the values of the men and women who live in our country.”

He complained that a lack of consistent attention by the news media to the problem is undercutting the effort to fight it. What people are missing “is the day-to-day carnage in our inner cities,” he said.

“Los Angeles is the most under-policed city in the country, and we spend multimillions of dollars on overtime. We have our officers out working when they’re not even getting paid,” he said. But when the news media focuses on a specific crime, that “does bring the community out. And the community support helps, you know, build up that thin blue line in terms of our ability to try to make arrests and make apprehensions.”

In Los Angeles and other large cities, Williams said, “we need strong infrastructure repair to support the growth of the department as well, and it’s just not clear how much straight time, how much overtime, how much capital, dollars will be there to really help us battle the violent crime in our communities and deal with the social side of changing the views and values of our young people.”