'We didn't plan to be gun-control activists'.

People say you can't fight City Hall. But after spending five years urging the Los Angeles City Council to pass gun-control legislation, we have learned it's worth a try.

We didn't plan to be gun-control activists. We were in fourth grade when Ennis Cosby, the son of actor Bill Cosby, was shot and killed a block from our school in 1997. A few weeks later, two bank robbers wielding assault rifles terrorized our neighborhood when they sprayed the streets with hundreds of bullets in an hour.

These incidents left us frightened, so we started following the issue of gun violence. We got frustrated when we saw ceremonies at City Hall to honor the victims, but no attempt to prevent it from happening again. At the same time, there were a bunch of school shootings around the country. With kids killing kids, it really became an issue for us.

We decided to take action. The first place we went was the library. Some of the books listed organizations that deal with gun violence, so we called them. That's how we learned that 50 kids are killed by guns in Los Angeles each year and that twice as many are injured by guns.

The project kind of snowballed--it was as if we'd been given an assignment, but the fact that we were doing it on our own made it all the more heartfelt for us. We decided that adults were not doing enough to keep kids safe, so we started a group called kidz Voice-LA. We collected more than 7,000 signatures of kids on a petition asking Los Angeles to ban the sale of all ammunition.

We wrote letters and tried to meet with city council members about gun control, but they ignored us. Finally, we learned that we could speak to all 15 council members at the same time during public comment period, a few minutes set aside for the public to speak at the end of council meetings. We spent many hours sitting through meetings so we could get the council to listen to our proposal. Eventually, they began to notice us, and finally a council member took up our cause.

The proposed ban was debated in a subcommittee, which is the first step in the process of creating a new law, and then it was brought to the full council for a vote. On April 3, 2001, the council voted seven to five against banning the sale of all ammunition.

We didn't get our total ammunition ban passed, but last fall we helped the city pass a ban on the sale of .50-caliber sniper rifles. And we learned that even when you don't win your fight against City Hall, you can influence it for the better.

Niko and Theo Milonopoulos, 16, co-founded Kidz Voice-LA. They live in Los Angeles, California where they are in 11th Grade.

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