Gregory Kane

Columnist

At approximately 12:40 a.m. on July 20, the shooting had stopped at a theater in Aurora, Colo. Some 12 were either dead or would eventually die; 58 others survived the massacre.

Less than 12 hours later, perhaps even before rigor mortis had set in on some of the dead bodies, editors at the San Francisco Chronicle ran an updated version of an editorial on their website entitled “Tragedy shows more need for gun control.”

I, like the Chronicle’s editors, fervently believed in gun control at one time. That was when I was into fantasies. And before I read the amazingly simple wording of the Second Amendment.

Gun rights are now my passion, not gun control. And I pose this question to Chronicle editors and others that believe in the delusion of gun control:

What makes them think we’d have any better luck at “controlling” guns than we have at “controlling” drugs? If we were going to “control” guns the way we “control” drugs, then I’d have to say to the gun control crowd, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Besides, a couple of U.S. cities — Chicago and Washington, D.C. come immediately to mind — recently had “gun control” laws so restrictive they amounted to virtual gun bans. The laws lowered gun violence in those cities not one iota.

Editors at the San Francisco Chronicle certainly know this, but that didn’t prevent them from piously spouting the following in their editorial:

“The details of the Aurora-theater shooting are depressingly, hauntingly familiar. The crowded public space, this time a midnight screening of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ in a suburban Colorado movie theater. The ‘lone wolf’ suspect, this time a reclusive 24-year-old neuroscience graduate from the University of California-Riverside named James Holmes. The staggering number of victims: At least 12 dead and scores more wounded.

“What also rings all too familiar: the continuing cowardice of this nation’s politicians on the subject of gun control.”

So, in the perfect, gun-free world Chronicle editors would have us live in, politicians that represent constituents like me — the ones who believe the Second Amendment gives us the right to own any firearm we choose — are “cowards.”

The politicians that aren’t cowards are ones that would pass the most restrictive gun control laws, even the ones that run counter to the Second Amendment.

I, for one, say, “Thank heaven for the cowards.”

When I say the Second Amendment gives us the right to own any firearm we choose, that includes weapons like the AR-15 the Aurora gunman used to shoot up the theater.

Gun control advocates — and, these days, even some conservatives — have asked the question, “Why would anyone need an assault rifle?”

If I wanted to give a flippant response, I’d answer, “Because I might need to assault something.” Instead I take them back to events during the 1992 Los Angeles riot.

Several officers that had been accused of beating Rodney King had just been acquitted during a trial held in Simi Valley, Calif. The streets of Los Angeles erupted in rioting.

Los Angeles police either could not or would not protect the businesses of several Korean-American store owners from the rampaging rioters, so they had to defend their lives and their businesses — or, to use another word, their livelihoods — with whatever firearms they could muster.

Now were I in their position, I could defend my life and livelihood with a six-shot revolver. That wouldn’t be very effective with scores, maybe hundreds, of rampaging rioters descending on me.

In that situation, I would need firepower, and lots of it. A weapon like the AR-15 would do the trick. It would send a message to the rioters that they were messing with someone who had the firepower to stop them.

The gun control types don’t want me to have that AR-15. They don’t want me to have that six-shot revolver either. I’d be left to defend my life and livelihood with a slingshot and some spitballs, and they’d begrudge me the slingshot and spitballs.

The premise of gun control is that none of the branches of our government — local, state, federal — will ever fail us.

The premise of gun rights is that at least one of our branches of government just might fail us.

What happened in Los Angeles back in 1992 proves which premise is correct.