We’ve Got to Start Somewhere; Giving Up Is No Answer : Gun control: So what if gang members aren’t likely to abide by weapons regulations. Such laws would be an enforcement tool with a long-run payoff.

The scores of cops, probation officers and social workers with whom I’ve discussed the tide of gang violence agree almost universally that there is little or nothing society can do about the dysfunctional families who produce gang members. In many cases, Mom and Dad are gang members themselves. Therefore, gang violence is a fact of life. But there is another way to slash the bottom line of the hundreds of gang-related murders in Los Angeles each year.

The palliative, if not the whole solution, is gun control or, to be more specific, gun regulation.

The National Rifle Assn. has made the arguments against gun control clear: Since hard-core gangbangers--and other criminals--seldom follow society’s rules, only law-abiding gun owners will obey such restrictions on the use of firearms; and such laws would be an infringement on the rights of law-abiding citizens who keep guns for protection. Both arguments are valid. And, oddly, both attest to the need for gun control.

Since Crips and Bloods ignore laws anyway, they can’t be expected to adhere to gun laws. But that’s precisely my point. Each violation of a gun statute would give police officers another enforcement tool to use against gang members.

What about simply making possession of a firearm a felony crime for any person identified as a street gang member? How about a RICO organized-crime statute applying to street gangs? Would the NRA, which claims to stand for law and order by preferring to control criminals rather than guns, object to such a law?

Many of those who see gun control as an invasion of individual rights do so because they live in a city where the fear of crime is not some unwarranted urban anxiety, but an actual consideration in the way people live their daily lives. They recognize that our elected officials have, for whatever reason, failed in their sworn duty to protect us. Since the murder rate from gang killings alone exceeds that of casualties in Northern Ireland, who could suggest that citizens be forbidden to keep a gun in the home for protection? But we should at least regulate the use of firearms as much as the use of automobiles.

To be allowed the privilege of driving a car, one is required to take both a written and practical test. What would be wrong with a written firearms safety test and an hour or two at a firing range before being allowed to own or use a gun? Like road taxes for drivers, the expenses for the firearms qualification could be paid by the owners themselves. Maybe the NRA, with its love of family target-shooting and worship of gun safety, would help in such an effort. Perhaps gun owners should also, like drivers, be required to have public liability insurance.

The availability of firearms isn’t just a side issue in the picture of gang violence. Guns are the very determinant of gang-related crime. Guns make killing easy. The drive-by shooting is the preferred method of murder for the gangbangers. It’s the gun, the effectiveness of the weapon itself, that sets the scene in which stupid, powerless sociopaths can kill quickly and have a good chance of getting away.

At a minimum, gun control would simply make guns less available. And with less iron on the street, the gang cretins won’t be able to kill as often and as effectively. To get guns they would have to steal them and risk getting shot by a trained and able John Q. Citizen wielding his registered and legal firearm. Perhaps we’d see a return to the comparatively halcyon days of knives and baseball bats.

More than a hundred of the half-million residents of South Central Los Angeles were killed in gang-related murders last year. Does anyone actually believe that if society restricted the use of guns as it does, for instance, the use of dynamite, the murder rate in the inner city wouldn’t decline? That at least some lives would be saved?

Any form of strict gun control will not work immediately. It’s going to take a long time to make the gun what it should be in the underworld--a hot potato. In the meantime, entire neighborhoods are cordoned off as narcotics enforcement areas. School campuses are the scenes of murder. The long, arduous process of controlling the use of guns--especially handguns, these concealable instruments designed and made for the purpose of killing human beings--has to start somewhere.

There are 75,000 gang members in greater Los Angeles. If we are powerless to change the adversity that has created them, then we must try to make it difficult for them to kill.