COLUMN RIGHT/ JOSEPH FARAH : We Need More Guns, Not Less, for Our Safety : The way to prevent outbreaks like L.A.’s is to arm the citizenry; we can’t rely on the police.

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged, someone once said. If so, what happens to a liberal city that gets mugged?

During the heat of the Los Angeles riots, some normally politically correct residents of the Hollywood Hills barricaded major entrances to their neighborhood with automobiles, patrolled the streets with AR-15s and handed out firearms to any law-abiding homeowner who would take one.

In other neighborhoods, scared single mothers who could smell the smoke and see the fires from the spontaneous insurrection rushed to gun stores, only to find that Mayor Tom Bradley had imposed a total ban on the sale of firearms and ammunition.

And all over Los Angeles--in fact, throughout the nation--people cheered the defiant and courageous Koreatown shopkeepers who stood watch over their property with weapons.

Suddenly, restrictive gun-control laws, 15-day waiting periods and even bans on those nasty “assault rifles” didn’t seem like such a great idea any more. Could it be that the Founding Fathers knew what they were doing, after all, when they drafted the 2nd Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In recent years, gun-control advocates have tried to portray the 2nd Amendment as an anachronism. Sure, they concede, maybe there was a compelling reason to permit average citizens to bear arms in the late 18th Century, but today we have the police.

The single most sobering lesson of the Los Angeles uprising for most people was that the police cannot be counted on for protection in citywide emergencies.

Would the kind of widespread looting and violence Los Angeles witnessed in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict have been likely, or even possible, if more law-abiding citizens were armed? If the looters and vandals thought there was, say, an even chance that the good guys in the community were armed, would they have taken the risk? It’s doubtful. That’s called deterrence. Nobody needs to pull a trigger for it to work.

What is certain is that without a fully mobilized and effective police force, large sections of the city’s unarmed population were held hostage by roving bands of marauding thugs.

Now, some might suggest that this crisis was simply an anomaly, and that good public policy should not be based on its anomalous characteristics. Well, for at least 30 years, Southern Californians have been dreading a natural disaster that most experts agree would, in addition to disrupting normal commerce and government services, severely test the city’s ability to maintain civil order.

Picture this: The Big One hits. Fires are breaking out all over the city. Water and gas mains have burst. Food and medical supplies are slow in reaching the area. Since the damage spreads well beyond the city limits, even the resources of National Guard and military are stretched thin. After the stores are looted, homes are the next target. Who are you going to rely on to protect you then, Los Angeles?

But there are lessons to be learned from this experience that apply, not just to crisis situations, but to normal, everyday life. If you really think about it, a well-armed population might be just what is needed to take back the streets from the hoodlums who plague cities like Los Angeles 365 days a year.

As the outbreak of looting and lawlessness throughout Los Angeles showed us, police can be a deterrent force only if potential criminals have a reasonable fear of getting caught. When that fear was almost completely removed, as it was during the height of rioting and looting, even some normally law-abiding citizens found themselves inexplicably joining the chaos.

In recent years, our paternalistic local, state and federal governments have taken the position that citizens need to be protected from guns. The truth is that bad guys still get guns. Even those much-vaunted waiting periods, rather than saving lives as was their intent, can actually end up costing lives in a time of crisis. They have the effect of forcing law-abiding citizens to live at the mercy of the mob, while other less scrupulous individuals simply knock over a gun store, as the Lennox gang did at the Western Surplus Store in South-Central.

Los Angeles has been mugged by reality. Let’s hope this tragedy provides the whole nation an opportunity to rethink the gun issue.