Wednesday, December 26, 2012

When “Assault Weapons” Saved Koreatown

When “Assault Weapons” Saved Koreatown
By Ryan James Girdusky 
December 23, 2012
Human Events

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of beating the now-deceased Rodney King.  During the five days, mobs around Los Angeles looted stores, burnt 3,767 buildings, caused more than $1 billion in property damage, and led to the deaths of more than 50 [sic; more than 60] people and left another 4,000 injured.  A story that has been forgotten since then is that of the brave storeowners in Koreatown who fended off mobs with handguns, rifles and assault weapons.

On the second day of the riots, the police had abandoned much of Koreatown.  Jay Rhee, a storeowner in the area, stated to The Los Angeles Times, “we have lost faith in the police.”

With the cops nowhere to be found, hundreds of people marauded through the streets towards Koreatown.  The neighborhood suffered 45 percent of all the property damage and five fatalities of storeowners during the riots.  Having had enough of waiting for police, Korean storeowners assembled into militias to protect themselves, their families, and businesses.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “From the rooftops of their supermarkets, a group of Koreans armed with shotguns and automatic weapons peered onto the smoky streets…Koreans have turned their pastel-colored mini-malls into fortresses against looters tide.”

Rhee claimed that the storeowners shot off 500 rounds into the sky and ground in order to break up the masses of people.  The only weapons able to clear that much ammo in a very short time are assault weapons.  Single shot pistols or rifles might not have been able to deter the crowd hell-bent on destroying the neighborhood.

By the end of the day storeowners had slain four looters and fended off the mob.  It would be 24 more hours until the National Guard arrived and another two days before the riots were completely put down.  Had the riots occurred just a couple of years later when the Congress banned assault weapons, many of these storeowners may not have been so lucky. It’s situations like the LA riots, which, while being rare, can occur anywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to far off countries during the Arab Spring.

Assault weapons are legal for this reason: they protect people from extreme cases of assault.

Many liberal pundits like talk show host Piers Morgan, who immigrated to this country several years ago, cannot see a reason why assault weapons might be practical to be owned by civilians. Had he been a Korean immigrant in South Los Angeles in 1992, he would have been decrying, “from my cold dead hands.”

In the wake of the recent tragedy in Connecticut, it is important to focus discussion with a more broad perspective on lawful gun ownership. Instead of creating a media blitz that fails to remember the day when a neighborhood was saved by an assault weapon.  But lest it be forgotten, assault weapons don’t save neighborhoods, people save neighborhoods.

Ryan James Girdusky writes from New York City. Follow him on twitter @Ryan_JamesG. If you enjoyed the article please #RememberKoreaTown on twitter.

1 comment:

  1. I recall in the newspaper the day after that the Koreans had set up a Combat Information Center and appeared to be using ham radio type HT walkie-talkies to coordinate defense. Note that LA County's response was to shot down firearm and ammo sales to prevent people from conducting personal and militia defense resupply. The Koreans ran low on ammo as they were using gunfire for deterrence applications.

    The lesson here is that you can NEVER have too much ammunition and an arsenel is far superior to having just one gun. A Ruger 10/22 with a couple of thousand rounds of .22LRs will allow for sustained battle. This is when Charlton Heston states his gun controller Hollywood friends were asking him for defensive guns. The massive number of Mexican invaders in California has brought with them a body politic fully supportive of gun control; that'll teach those Republican low wage illegal alien importers, huh?

    Last, Koreans are feisty people that don't take sh*t from anyone. The movie May 18 ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0800341/ ) is about the real life event where in 1980 the Gwangju massacre in South Korea occurred in which the ROK army killed a hundred(s) of demonstrators and the populace raided the local armory for weapons and shot back at the army.

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