King 810 aren't sorry for gun use

King 810’s David Gunn says they won’t apologise for carrying weapons at their shows – after their Chicago gig was cancelled due to their “excessive use of guns and violent imagery.”

A talent buyer from the city’s Thalia Hall delivered the news to the band, saying Chicago had experienced record levels of gun-related crime this year. They say they made the call after receiving several complaints from locals over the Flint band’s scheduled appearance.

But Gunn says firearms are part of the band’s “culture” – and they won’t be going anywhere.

He says: “The gun thing’s part of the culture where we’re from, it’s inherently part of the band. It’s not something we apologise for or regret or anything like that. I don’t think there was any excessive use of guns, we’ve never used guns on anyone at shows, we’ve had hundreds of shows and they went off perfectly fine.

“Excessive use of guns to me is something like what happened with Dimebag, or just this year what happened in Paris – that’s excessive use of guns. Guns are a part of our lives and we’re not going to be caught in those types of situations.

“With all due respect to anyone in those types of situations, if anyone ever comes through the front door with automatic rifles they’re not gonna be able to kill a 150 people at a King 810 show, they’ll probably be shot from the stage. So the guns aren’t going away and we don’t apologise for anything.”

Watch his video below.

Gunn recently described how King 810 aim to ‘break down that wall’ between themselves and the crowd in their forthcoming performance art shows in support of their latest album La Petite Mort Or A Conversation With God.

King 810 tour dates

Dec 15: Cleveland Agora Theatre, OH
Dec 16: Valparaiso Big Shots, IN
Dec 17: Detroit St Andrews Hall, MI

GALLERY: Behind the scenes of King 810's new video

Former TeamRock news desk member Christina joined our team in late 2015, and although her time working on online rock news was fairly brief, she made a huge impact by contributing close to 1500 stories. Christina also interviewed artists including Deftones frontman Chino Moreno and worked at the Download festival. In late 2016, Christina left rock journalism to pursue a career in current affairs. In 2021, she was named Local Weekly Feature Writer of the Year at the Scottish Press Awards.