On Monday a Ventura County jury handed down a guilty verdict in the case of Daniel Elijah Ramirez, a 24-year-old gang member who eyewitnesses said shot and killed two men in Simi Valley, one in 2007, the other in 2003.

The crimes are a striking reminder of how there is no such thing as a nonviolent gang.

Police often remind us how Simi Valley’s two documented street gangs are nothing like those found in inner city Los Angeles, lacking their organization, membership, and propensity for gunplay, but tell that to Angel Luevano and Luis Torres, both of whom were slain by bullets.

Both victims had gang ties themselves; the killing of Luevano, defense lawyers said, was in self-defense.

But Ramirez, who was only 18 when he shot Luevano after a confrontation outside a vehicle on Ashland Avenue, can be counted as a victim in all this as well, a product of a longestablished brotherhood that requires allegiance at all costs. In the world of gangs, giving someone the wrong look or being in the wrong part of town is grounds for retribution.

Few of us can wrap our heads around it, but it’s an everyday reality of life in some of Simi’s oldest neighborhoods.

Had it not been for the work of Simi Valley Detective Jay Carrott, who’s quickly gaining a reputation as the city’s best homicide investigator, and the willingness of the eye witnesses to come forward and testify, these senseless killings would have gone unsolved, and few would have demanded justice.

Like it or not, Hispanic-on-Hispanic violence along Simi’s numerical avenues just doesn’t cause the kind of outcry that would sure to follow this kind of violence if it happened in Wood Ranch or Big Sky. But maybe it’s time it should.

Fortunately, homicides in Simi Valley are rare. But that shouldn’t stop the public from demanding that everything be done to solve those that do occur and that the perpetrators be put behind bars for life.

In the case of Daniel Ramirez, justice has been served. Let’s never stop demanding an end to all gang violence in Simi Valley. Violence hurts everyone in the city, no matter where it happens or who it happens to.