By David Codrea
“KING 810 has appeared on stage with masked characters dressed in black and armed with automatic weapons. Their first album includes ‘Killem All’ and ‘Murder Murder Murder,’” readers are told.
So the venue didn’t know what the band was about before it booked them? And Chicago’s 700+ homicides to date this year are being committed by metal fans?
For their part, the band is unapologetic.
“Guns are a part of our lives and we’re not going to be caught in [a Bataclan massacre] type of situation,” frontman David Gunn reacted. ““So with all due respect to anyone in this type of situation if anyone ever comes through the front door with an automatic rifle, they’re not going to be able to kill 150 people at a KING show, they’ll probably be shot from the stage.”
That’s the right response. And it looks like Gunn’s recent adventures with the law won’t prohibit him from making good on that. Ditto for bassist Eugene Gill.
Admittedly, many gun owners, especially of older generations, aren’t particularly into metal and don’t especially understand why some artists employ descriptions of violence in lyrics, but that’s hardly the point.
You don’t approve of them? You don’t like anything about them? Hey, if these musicians aren’t your cup of tea, chances are there will be others more to your liking. To cancel KING 810 over the image the promoters were buying before they started to worry about offending people unlikely to attend the show unfairly suppresses the band for something they’re not responsible for. It also insults the fans, as if they’re incapable of separating their entertainment from the way they’ll then conduct themselves.
The clear lesson: It’s not just guns those who stump for citizen disarmament object to, it’s the idea of guns. And as we saw in a tangentially-related development, it’s the idea that Americans can safely coexist with guns, and pass such lessons on to their children.
Just as gun owner rights advocates know the issue we champion isn’t really about guns but about freedom, this is part of a broader effort at ideological suppression we see “progressives” spreading across the country. So we see “safe spaces” at universities, where speakers challenging the orthodoxy are disallowed, and where “Trump’ graffiti is treated as an act of hate. We see the new Taliban tearing down Confederate monuments just as zealously as the old ones went after Buddhist statues. We see renewed efforts to ban books from schools that, up until recently, had been regarded as classics.
Not to wander too far afield, but it’s chillingly reminiscent of a line from the original Star Trek:
Wrong thinking is punishable; right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You will find it an effective combination.
It puts to the lie the oft-repeated lie that “conservatives [are] so eager to throw away all the amendments to keep the country safe… except the second one.”
It’s called projection.
And true to the Opposite Day nature of “progressives,” they’re against the one right that establishes ultimate egalitarian power sharing, the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.