To enhance child safety, we would do better to control drunken driving on weekends than to turn schools into lock-down facilities with metal detectors. The president's reference to ''three million crimes'' comes from rounding up results of a Census Bureau survey in which teenagers said they were victims of 2.7 million school crimes in 1998. But fewer than one-tenth of these were categorized by the survey as serious. Also included were fistfights, threats and unwanted grabbing or fondling. Certainly adolescents should not fight.
Verbal threats do constitute simple assault.
And while there are no hard data that show bullying on the increase, schools need to devise better ways to address it. For every teenager killed by a gun in school, more than 300 are killed by guns elsewhere. Teenage violence outside the school setting is a serious problem, greater here than in other industrialized nations. But since 1993, there has been a decline in it and in major categories like murder and rape. An exception has been aggravated assault, where the incidence has remained steady.