YOUTH OPINION : Getting Stabbed--It’s a Laugh! : Facing danger with a shrug has always been a way for young men to get peer-group points. What’s changed is the weaponry.

Last week, some friends of mine and I were sitting around telling funny stories that had happened to us recently. We tried to outdo one another.

Miguel had a good one. He was walking down a street in the uptown shopping district of Whittier when he passed three boys hanging out in front of a store. They looked about 13 years old.

“Wanna buy some weed?” one asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Want some speed?”

“No, that’s OK.”

“Wanna buy a gun?”

“No.”

“How about a gun to your (expletive) head?”

A few days later, Miguel was pulling out of a 7-Eleven driveway when a car full of teen-agers pulled alongside him.

A boy in the passenger seat pulled out a huge handgun and pointed it at Miguel’s head. “I’m gonna kill you!” he said. Then they drove off, laughing. Miguel laughed as he told the stories.

Chris’ story was even better. He was driving by a high school in Hollywood just as school was getting out. A young man jumped out of the car in front of him, ran up to a guy on the campus, pulled out a revolver and shot him in the chest. The shooter ran right by Chris and hopped back in the car.

“Wow,” Miguel and I said. “That’s a hard one to beat.”

These stories amaze and amuse us because we’re just a bunch of twenty-something guys from the suburbs.

We don’t live in high-crime areas and we don’t hang around with gangsters. Yet somehow, we all have a lot of these stories.

I remember the times when my friends and I would tell stories about the biggest crashes we ever had on our bikes or embarrassing experiences we had with girls. Now we joke about being chased down the street by gangs or having knives pulled on us.

Maybe we’ll tell these stories to our kids someday.

Then again, maybe our kids will have even better stories than ours.

A couple of days ago, I spoke with an old high school friend of mine who’d just gotten stabbed 13 times by a guy reaching through his car window at a fast-food drive-through.

I can’t wait to tell the guys.