COLUMN ONE : Putting Their Trust in the Gun : In crime-scarred Miami, more residents say carrying a firearm is now part of daily life. Florida leads a growing number of states that have widened use of concealed weapons.

The men of Wilbur Enterprises are never at a loss for firepower. At work in their fortified office, out on a job in their company trucks, off for a night on the town, they dress for the occasion and they always pack heat.

Loaded guns lay scattered, in desk drawers and under counters, throughout the light-construction firm’s warehouse on a hardscrabble stretch of 7th Avenue in north Miami. Inside his waistband, the boss, Blair Wilbur, 67, keeps a .38 Smith and Wesson, as essential in its deadly purpose as a light shirt is in enduring Florida’s wilting climate. One son who works at the firm regularly carries a pistol. Another keeps a shotgun in his pickup truck. Even the company’s 71-year-old gofer totes a revolver.

“I took a date out one night and I had the .38 in my shoulder holster,” Wilbur said. “I asked her if she had a problem with me carrying a gun. She says no, she’s used to it. Everyone in Miami’s used to it. That’s probably because everyone’s carrying.”

It has come to this: In a nation where city streets are seen as stalking grounds for violent offenders, the pervasive fear of crime that once impelled Americans to buy guns to secure their homes now persuades growing numbers to take firearms into the street.

According to a Los Angeles Times Poll in January, 22% of the residents of gun-owning households said they sometimes carry their weapons outside for protection--substantially higher than the 13% who said they did so in a 1981 Times survey.

Law-abiding gun owners who want to carry a weapon are often forced to act like secret gunslingers--hiding pistols in purses, pockets and car glove boxes--to avoid arrest under local and state laws.

But in recent years, those prohibitions have begun to fall. Since 1987, Florida and nine other states have passed laws making it easier for residents to carry guns. This spring, as the federal Brady Act imposed a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases, a gun-carrying measure prevailed in Arizona and similar bills gained ground in six other states. In Texas, only Gov. Ann Richards’ veto threat stopped the creation of a statewide firearm-carrying permit.

“More and more people are realizing that the police won’t be there when you need them,” said Jeffrey Snyder, a Washington lawyer who has become a talk-show apostle for the concealed-weapons movement. “Your life is either worth protecting or it’s not. And if it is, it’s worth protecting all the time.”

The prospect of more Americans arming themselves against street crime is recasting the debate that has raged for years over the presence of guns in almost half of the nation’s households. For both gun activists, who insist on the right to protect themselves at home, and gun-control supporters, who depict weapons left in the home as a primary cause of fatal accidents and suicides, the flow of firearms to the streets--where 87% of violent crimes are committed--poses unsettling new realities.

As more guns are carried legally by Americans, will they provide a strong deterrent to crime? Or will they provoke more bloodshed, inflaming minor encounters into lethal shootouts?

Seven years after the Florida Legislature passed a sweeping permit system allowing the law-abiding to carry concealed weapons, Miami and surrounding Dade County have become the ultimate proving grounds for these questions. Violent crime festers here as it does everywhere--but in Miami the average citizen can fight back with the legal right to carry a gun.

The emerging verdict here offers little comfort to either side. The defensive carrying of guns has not resulted in an upsurge in violence, but neither has it demonstrably reduced the city’s crime rates or helped to quell fears.

“We seem to have a whole new class of people on the street who basically are carrying their guns without incident,” said state Sen. Howard Forman, who had opposed the passage of Florida’s liberalized concealed-weapons bill. “In that sense, I guess, it’s working.”

Here, residents over age 21 who have neither a felony record nor a history of drug abuse or mental illness can obtain a permit to carry a gun. They must pass a police background check, pay a $160 application fee and take a gun-safety course. Then, they are given a renewable three-year license to carry guns almost anywhere.

In Los Angeles, by contrast, the city Police Commission has maintained a virtual freeze on concealed-weapons permits for years. Last year, that ban thawed slightly after the city was successfully sued by gun-rights activists. Lawyers have been working out the final terms of a settlement broadening the right to obtain weapons licenses, but Assistant City Atty. Byron Boeckman said new permits will likely be restricted to those who face an imminent threat and “have no other alternatives.”

At last count, 27,636 Dade County residents were licensed to carry guns. That is just 1.5% of nearly 2 million inhabitants, but a meteoric rise since 1987, when only 500 county residents had local permission to carry guns. State officials say 28% of Florida’s concealed-weapons permits are based in Dade County, far outstripping any other jurisdiction.

The motivation is simple: People are frightened they will become victims like the stretcher-bound corpses they see on the nightly news. Other self-defense options--dogs, whistles, blinding sprays, cellular phones--no longer seem adequate. Only a gun will do.

Here, in this resort of the last resort, Brian Geenty, a north Miami resident who works for a general contractor and rents rooms to recovering drug addicts, carries a pistol in a leather belt pouch as he makes his daily rounds through the city. Geenty curses the law that arms him, yet says he is a dead man without it.

“I would use (my gun) only to kill,” he said one morning, driving by crack smokers huddled in the sunlight along north Biscayne Boulevard. “I made that decision the day I bought my gun. God, I wouldn’t want to do that. . . .”

Patricia Rodgers, a south Miami housewife, brings her .38 on daily walks through the woods near her suburban home. A year ago, the idea of packing a gun seemed abhorrent. But the world has changed. Her friends now talk about guns obsessively--the models, the training, “the kick” of a gunshot.

From his office window in north Miami, Blair Wilbur points to what he sees as the signs of crime that keep him armed every day--the transients who loiter in the empty lots near his office on N.W. 7th Avenue, the quarter-sized bullet hole in his firm’s aluminum rear door, the vandalized fleet of cars in the parking lot next door.

Wilbur admits to having carried a gun illegally “for years.” When state concealed-weapons licenses became available, he applied. Now he carries the light blue permit next to his driver’s license.

Yet despite the presence of the .38 under his belt, Wilbur, like many law-abiding Miamians who arm themselves, says his fears have not lessened much.

“All this gives me is the knowledge that if someone comes at me, one of us is going to get it and it won’t be me,” he said, patting the butt of his gun.

Sixty-three percent of respondents told The Times Poll in January that they doubt laws making guns more available to citizens would have much effect on violent crime. And while even 59% of those who said they carry guns insist that having their weapons helps them feel safer, 35% said their fears have not been not quelled.

For most gun carriers, the moment of truth may never come. According to Sgt. Richard Bohan, Miami Police homicide supervisor, justifiable gun defenses by civilians account for 1% to 4% of the deaths his unit investigates each year.

“It’s a good indication of how rarely people who carry guns get to use them,” he said.

Gun-rights activists respond that a drop in Miami’s violent crime shows the real impact that gun defenses can have. Last year, robberies dropped to 6,930 from 7,077 in 1992, and reported rapes fell to 305 from 403.

But murders remained unchanged at 131, and police officials note that the liberalized permit law was in effect during the late 1980s, when the city’s violent crime rate was higher.

“It’s really impossible to show a cause-and-effect between defensive handgun uses and the ups and downs of crime,” Bohan said.

Police statistics are meaningless when it comes to legitimate gun defenses, argues Gary Kleck, a Florida State University criminologist whose controversial theories are at the center of the debate over concealed-weapons laws.

Kleck has become an academic hero to gun-rights activists for arguing that residents of 4% to 6% of U.S. households successfully use a gun in self-defense each year--between 1 million and 2.5 million times--in homes, cars, businesses and in street encounters. Critics say those incidents are rare, but Kleck insists they justify the use of guns for self-defense.

Using private polls and results from the U.S. National Crime Survey, Kleck paints a portrait of U.S. justice that few other criminologists accept--a nation where gun owners face down violence daily, yet fail to report their secret moments of heroism to police or the government.

“Cops don’t hear about most defensive gun uses,” Kleck said. “People who actually fire their guns have good reasons not to report it to police. They may not have a license, or they may just not want to take the trouble.”

Kleck’s conclusions have come under fire repeatedly from experts, most recently from Duke University criminologist Phillip Cook, who says data from the federal crime survey shows no more than 80,000 gun defenses each year. The survey reports that victims wield guns defensively in 1.2% of robberies and 1.4% of assaults.

“Most guns bought for self-defense will never get used in that capacity,” said Josh Sugarman, director of the Violence Policy Center, an anti-gun research group, referring to a 1986 Seattle medical study that found guns are 43% more likely to cause an accidental death or suicide than to be used to kill an assailant.

Cook is most skeptical of Kleck’s inclusion of large numbers of cases where guns were reportedly brandished in self-defense but not fired. Kleck argues that “these are legitimate defenses. Whether you fire or not, the fact that you are able to prevent a crime with a gun is something that a lot of gun-control people just can’t seem to deal with.”

But to Cook, they are nebulous encounters, often distorted by the gun-wielder’s fears. “It might be a robbery in the making. Or it might be something completely innocent,” he said. “People often assume the worst.”

Yet it is precisely this sort of vague fear that motivated Caesar Marmolejos, 29, to join five other men at the Tamiami gun shop in south Miami one night to take a firearms course required by the state to obtain a carrying permit.

“I’m tired of sitting at stop lights and looking at my side mirror, then my rear-view, then back again, to make sure I’m not going to get carjacked,” said Marmolejos, an insurance clerk. “Every time some guy walks up to me, I get ready to gun the engine.”

The instructor, Ray Ribas, 54, a bearded former Army weapons trainer, paced in front of a rack of rifles, giving his students blunt advice on how far to stand from a human target, the best places to hide a gun in a car, the most appropriate handgun to use in street confrontations.

“Remember,” he warned, “you can kill anybody with any caliber. Even a .22 is a good assassin’s gun. Two to the head will do it.”

Julio Oliva’s days are too hectic to familiarize himself with the .38-caliber pistol he carries as he oversees the butcher shop and bodega he owns in Miami’s crime-ravaged Overtown neighborhood. He says he has considered applying for a carrying permit, but he forgets as each workday passes. There is never any time for practice.

Yet Oliva is as battle-tested as any police officer. Twice, the 63-year-old Cuban emigre has wounded armed robbers inside his bodega, the Economeat Market, firing with the gun he hides inside the pocket of his blood-stained smock.

The first time, a year ago, two armed men tried to rob him as he was closing up. When one turned away, Oliva slipped the gun out of his pocket and shot him three times in the back. The other assailant fled.

Two months ago, as Oliva walked to his car just after closing up, a gunman ordered him back inside. The gunman forced Oliva into a back office, patted him down for weapons, but somehow missed the pistol. When the intruder moved toward the cash register at the front of the store, Oliva made his own move, wounding him in the side.

“I am lucky two times,” Oliva said. “But the third time?”

These days, he tenses when neighborhood teen-agers crowd into the store, pawing boxes of grits and rat poison, venting obscenities and pestering countermen for the prices on clearly-marked merchandise.

“I’m scared,” Oliva said. “All the time. I don’t want to shoot nobody. But I don’t want them to shoot me, no?”

The Florida gun-carrying law was passed over the objection of those who raised the specter of urban anarchy. Traffic arguments would erupt into shootouts, they predicted. Street-corner brawls, they said, would end in fusillades.

“We told people that once this law was passed, there would be trouble. And the killings that have gone on in our highways and streets are testimony to this,” said Joe Shutt, a southern Florida gun-control leader.

These days, Dade County is jolted regularly by fatal traffic shootings. Just last month, Miami resident Rudolph Cooper, 33, was gunned down after arguing with three men after a collision in Overtown--less than a block from Oliva’s bodega.

Yet state officials report that only 17 concealed-weapons permits have been revoked since 1987 because of firearms crimes--out of 114,000 valid licenses.

Last summer, applications to carry guns surged across Florida in the wake of the high-profile slayings of several European tourists. In the last 10 months of the fiscal year, more than 44,000 residents received permits--10,000 more than in any year since 1987, said Susan Harrel, a Florida Department of Licensing official.

This spring, the public’s renewed obsession with crime seemed to give new momentum to the gun-carrying movement across the nation. Proposals for liberalized permits were debated in legislatures in six states--Wyoming, Colorado, Missouri, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Texas--and passed in one--Arizona.

Over the past eight years, eight other states--Idaho, Georgia, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Oregon and Washington--have enacted gun permit systems similar to Florida’s.

“This is clearly an issue whose time is ripe,” said James Milner, a National Rifle Assn. lobbyist who worked for concealed-weapons laws in several states this year.

In Texas, a gun-permit measure introduced by Rep. Ron Wilson, a liberal Democrat from Houston, gained enough bipartisan support to pass. But the measure never came to a final vote because of opposition from Richards, who scoffed that she had yet to see a purse that had enough room for a handgun.

Richards vetoed a proposal for a referendum on the issue, citing Texas’ falling crime rate, opposition from police agencies and her own concern that “economic development would be jeopardized by the perception that Texans would be carrying six-shooters in real life,” said Sam Russell, her legislative deputy.

“We just don’t want to follow Florida’s lead,” Russell said.

In Miami, Brian Geenty sympathizes with that worry. Despite the constant tug of the snub-nosed revolver he hides in a black leather belt pouch, the 55-year-old landlord says he wishes that Florida had never legalized the carrying of concealed weapons--and that there was no reason to carry a gun at all.

In a perfect world, the streets Geenty drives in his Mercury Grand Marquis would be swept clean of guns. No longer would he worry about the drug addicts who show up at his house seeking rooms. No longer would he have to nervously eye the hustlers who congregate near the Biscayne Boulevard Shell station where he buys gas.

But Miami is not a perfect place, and even for someone of Geenty’s measured sensibilities, it can lead to the assumption that there is only one choice. One recent morning, Geenty set out, as he always does, with everything he needed for his day--a briefcase filled with papers, a daily calendar, a loaded gun.

When the day is done, he keeps the pistol lying nearby. Always within reach, it has become his dreaded steel shadow.

“It’s not that I want to carry it. I would rather society never allowed me to have the choice,” Geenty said. “But if it comes down to my life or someone else’s, unfortunately, I want it with me.”

Times researchers Anna Virtue and D’Jamila Salem contributed to this story.

Armed in America

State laws on carrying a gun vary. A breakdown of various laws:

No Permit needed: Vermont

Very Easy to Obtain Permit (Typical rules are, must be 18, pay a fee, not be convicted of a felon or mentally unstable):

Arizona

Florida

Georgia

Idaho

Maine

North Dakota

South Dakota

Washington

West Virginia

Carrying gun prohibited:

Alaska

Arkansas

Illinois

Kansas

Kentucky

Missouri

Nebraska

New Mexico

North Carolina

Ohio

Tennessee

Texas

Wisconsin

Can get a permit to carry, but need to show cause (i.e transporting money):

Alabama

California

Delware

Hawaii

Indiana

Iowa

Louisiania

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Montana

Minnesota

Nevada

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New York

Rhode Island

South Carolina

Utah

Virginia

The others: Remaining states’ regulations vary according to local law

Source: HandGun Control Inc.