The number of male high school students who say they carry a gun in D.C. has doubled in the past two years, a new study shows.

High school and middle school students at D.C. public schools reported in a new nationally administered survey that they are having sex, using drugs and carrying weapons in greater numbers than when the last survey was taken two years ago.

But school officials say that in most cases, this year’s numbers remain far better than those that revealed a crisis among the city’s students a decade ago.

Nearly 58 percent of high schoolers said they had had sexual intercourse, up from 48 percent in 2005. And 31 percent of middle schoolers reported that they had ever had sex, which is 8 percent higher than two years earlier survey.

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In 1997, however, a whopping 71 percent of high school students and 41 percent of middle school students said they were sexually experienced.

The findings come courtesy of the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which every other year asks a sample of students about their habits in areas such as sex, smoking, drugs, depression and weapons possession.

In the District, the results — which have been kept relatively secret since being finalized this fall — will be shared with content experts, school counselors and state agencies, Diane Powell, assistant superintendent of student services. Powell said the goal of distributing the numbers was to help the people working with kids understand the plight of many young people today.

Overall, Powell focused in an interview with The Examiner on the fact that the findings are much more encouraging than in 1997, when nearly every category was at its peak.

But in comparing this report to 2005’s, there were spikes practically across the board. They include the fact that:

» Half of high schoolers now say they have smoked cigarettes at some point, versus 36 percent in 2005. For middle schoolers, the equivalent percentages were 39 percent this year versus 34 percent in 2005.

» More than 14 percent of male high school students indicated they’d carried a gun, which is double the percentage two years ago. In the middle school segment, 37 percent of students reported carrying a weapon compared to 33 percent two years ago.

» In terms of students’ psyches, the survey found that more high school and middle school students reported feeling hopeless and seriously considering suicide. At the middle school level, in particular, almost a quarter of students said they’d thought about killing themselves, and 13 percent had actually made an attempt.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com