All it would take is about $100 and finding the right person, and a teenager can end up with a gun, those who work with young people say.

Buffalo’s East Side would be the easiest place to get one, and $100 would buy a teenager a small-caliber semiautomatic handgun—small but deadly.

“We believe that this gun problem is a bigger conspiracy from those who are bent on the destruction of mankind,” said Arlee Daniels Jr., interim chairman of the Stop the Violence Coalition.

Teens can also get a gun by stealing or bartering, with many feeling they need one for protection or to look tough in their neighborhood, Daniels said.

The violence caused by those guns became evident again Friday, when a 15- year-old Lafayette High School student was shot at a bus stop on the corner of West Delavan Avenue and Grant Street. Jawaan Daniels died later that day in Erie County Medical Center.

Police said the gunman fled on a bicycle after making Jawaan the city’s 24th homicide victim of the year. Most were killed with guns.

“We’ve seen people in the City of Buffalo get killed because they stole another criminal’s gun,” Daniels said.

Buffalo police have seen guns stolen in burglaries end up in the hands of the wrong people, concurred Michael J. De- George, a Police Department spokesman.

Another way to get a gun is to trade for it with items ranging from a flashy watch to a large quantity of drugs, especially if the gun seller was also trafficking in drugs, Daniels said.

A young person interested in buying a gun could go nearly anywhere on the East or West Side and simply ask around. The cost would range from about $100 for a small-caliber handgun to upward of $600 to $700 for an assault rifle, said Darnell Jackson, a former gang leader who now heads the East Side Redevelopment Task Force.

“You could give a kid money, and he could come back within 24 hours with a gun. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Jackson said.

The guns for sale are typically semiautomatic weapons, many of them 9 mm handguns or assault rifles. Not many sell revolvers because the semiautomatic weapons make it easy to fire and reload the gun quickly, Jackson said.

“If you don’t have a nine millimeter or an AK-47, you ain’t no real drug dealer. You’re a joker. That’s just the way it is,” Jackson said.

Police could not provide immediate data on gun-trafficking areas in Buffalo or offer specifics on what type of guns are common on the streets.

“It’s tough to answer. If somebody wants to get a gun, they would have several opportunities,” DeGeorge said.

The culture of the streets has changed with the ease of obtaining guns.

Roxy Portes, 18, has seen the shift in street culture. When she was a child, fistfights settled disputes. But today, she fears for her life and the life of her little sister as more disputes are settled by guns.

“It’s not like it used to be, like when they used to fistfight,” Portes said.

In 2009, Portes lost her younger brother, Christian, when he was gunned down as he rode his bike home from a party. Portes and her family believe that Christian, who was 14 when he died, was killed by somebody around his age.

These days, Portes chooses to drive rather than walk. She keeps her little sister close by to make sure she does not end up like her brother.

“I don’t even want my sister walking around, not even to the corner store,” Portes said. “It’s incredible. She’s the only thing I have anymore, I don’t want to loose my little sister.”

Fear motivates most of the young people searching for weapons, said Bob Keubler, who runs the Youth With a Purpose program at Holy Cross Church on Buffalo’s Lower West Side.

At Keubler’s program, youth come in and talk about what they face at home. They tell of teenagers standing on their front porch and watching another teenager ride by on a bicycle and threaten them.

Even if there isn’t an immediate threat, a young person might search for a gun out of a fear of retaliation for other reasons, such as wearing the wrong colors or talking to the wrong person. It’s almost like a “kill or be killed” atmosphere, Keubler said.

“I look at some of our kids who are coming into our center,” he said. “I can understand why they might carry a gun.”