COLUMN RIGHT / J. NEIL SCHULMAN : Joining Forces Against a Common Foe : Gun opponents and advocates already agree that violent criminals are the enemy.

There are about 200 million guns in America in the hands of about 60 million Americans. The sale of guns nationwide after the Los Angeles riots has reached record levels, many of them to first-time buyers. Firearms-training classes are filled to capacity. The National Rifle Assn. has 2.8 million members, 10 times the membership of the American Civil Liberties Union, and expects to exceed 3 million by the end of this year.

Advocates of gun control and advocates of gun rights agree that there is an epidemic problem with the criminal use of guns in America. But every time a gun-control advocate points to the latest atrocity committed with a firearm, the gun-rights advocate will surely ask: Why was there no armed citizen who could have tried to stop the criminal?

The difference between the advocate of gun control and the advocate of gun rights lies in a perception of the cause of the criminal use of a gun. Those who advocate gun control think the cause is the wide and easy availability of guns. The advocates of gun rights think the cause is a legal system that leaves criminals free to prey on a public that is socially discouraged, and often legally forbidden, from using guns for personal defense.

The war over gun control is fought with news reports. Gun-control advocates have no shortage of reports proving that guns in the hands of criminals are a plague on our society. Advocates of gun rights find, however, that the use of firearms to prevent or stop a crime often goes unreported by the media, worried that such reportswill encourage vigilantism.

The war over gun control is fought with statistics. The number of gun attacks in the United States is easy to compile: Just count up the thousands of bodies in the morgues and the hundreds of thousands of gunshot victims treated in hospitals. The number of times a gun is used for defense, however, has a built-in problem: The use of a firearm to deter, prevent or stop an attack goes unrecorded, most often because the defense was accomplished without pulling the trigger and, less often, because the person using the gun for self-defense was legally forbidden to be in possession of it, and thus did not report the incident.

The gun-control war is fought with historical debates about the intent of the Second Amendment. Gun-control advocates say that the Supreme Court has never interpreted the 2nd Amendment as protecting the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense. Advocates of gun rights say that the original intent of the 2nd Amendment, and the 14th Amendment, which applies it to the states, is indisputable, and that it is a politicized Supreme Court that does not have the courage to enforce it.

It’s also unlikely that a final Supreme Court ruling on the 2nd Amendment would end the issue. A ruling in favor of an individual-rights interpretation would probably coalesce gun-control advocates into a movement to repeal the amendment. A ruling against would radicalize the millions of Americans who believe in that right as firmly as the advocates of abortion rights believe in theirs.

As long as the advocates of gun control write laws and courts issue rulings that abridge the right of private citizens to buy, own and carry firearms for defenseive and sporting use, gun owners will continue to be alienated and radicalized, and become more and more willing to engage in civil disobedience against such abridgments.

Gun-control advocates need to realize that passing laws that honest gun owners will not obey is a self-defeating strategy. Gun owners are not about to surrender their rights, and only the most foolish of politicians would risk the stability of the government by trying to use the force of the state to disarm the people.

If gun control does not acknowledge the right of the people to keep and bear arms for individual and civic defense before it attempts to remove guns from the hands of those who abuse them, then sensible gun laws will be out of reach, and the criminal plague of gun victimizing will continue.

Can’t advocates of gun-control see the advantage of recruiting gun-rights advocates to a joint cause of eliminating gun tragedies? We can all agree that guns need to be kept out of the hands of the violent criminal and the lunatic. We can agree that the solution to gun accidents is safety training. We can agree that people who own and carry firearms for protection must take responsibility for knowing how to use them safely and appropriately.

Surely, instead of fighting one another, we can join forces to fight our common enemy: the armed criminal.