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    It's just before school starts, when they check the pupils for guns. By now, the 1,600 students at Chester High School in Philadelphia have got used to it.
    One by one, they go through a metal detector gate, like the ones at an airport, at the main entrance to their school. The beeper alarm is constantly going off, indicating some metal object in the pupil's pockets. Mostly, it is a key, or coins.

    Such searches-in some schools a regular routine , in others , a spotcheck- are part of the attempt of school authorities in the United States to keep students from bringing into the classroom their knives, revolvers and machine-guns.
    The metal detector checks have already become commonplace in schools in Philadelphia, Detroit, and New York. A school in Fairfax, on the outskirts of Washington, D. C. , will soon begin them.

    School administrators decided that something finally had to be done after the various shootouts and discoveries of weapons in schools around the country had made headlines for weeks running.
    On January 26, at Woodrow Wilson School in Washington, a teenager shot and wounded four others in a fight over a place to sit in the school cafeteria.

    On February 9, teachers confiscated a semi-automatic pistol from two 13-year-olds at a school in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring after they had threatened other students with the weapon. Six days later, a student at Kramer High School in Washington threatened a schoolmate with a sawedoff shotgun. Asked why he did it, the youngster said the other had "stared so stupidly" at him.
    The list of such incidents goes on and,on, and in some cases, they are fatall.

    According to the California-based " National School Safety Centre " (NSSC) in a recent report, there were 360,000 violent incidents in American schools in 1986, the last year for which statistics are available. The incidents ranged from fistfights to shootouts, and 70,000 weapons were confiscated, including 1 , 700 pistols and rifles.
    Since then , says Ronald Stephens , the director of NSSC , the number of incidents involving guns in schools has risen considerably.Teachers and security experts have a hard time explaining why teenagers want to bring lethal weapons with them to school.

    "Some want to impress their schoolmates," believes Stephens."They feel that a gun is a symbol of power and control.Others have a feeling that they need weapons to protectthemselves."
    School authorities see the rise in weapons and violence above all as being connected to drugs in American high schools. Armed youth gangs divide up the drug trade turf among themselves. According to the NSSC , the older gang members use the younger newcomers as "weapons depots".

    Lyn Siper of the National Crime Prevention Council in Washington believes that youths during their puberty lean towards fighting out their conflicts instead of talking about them. Such drugs as cocaine and crack add to their emotional disturbance.
    Siper and Stephens agree that the general level of violence on the streets of big American cities, and the unimpeded access to guns, play a role. America's citizens possess a total of 120 million firearms. Many of the revolvers and rifles which authorities confiscated in the schools had been legally acquired and registered by the students' parents.

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