We’ve always loved the name Aurora. It means dawn. It’s Latin. It’s one of those words that speak of an earlier time in America, when we could seize for our newspapers — or our towns — the most wonderful names. When we were launching the Sun we thought of naming it American Aurora. It would have been a tip of the hat to Bache’s Aurora. It was issued at Philadelphia between 1794 and 1824. It was the most famous of the newspapers that the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed to suppress. This Aurora had sided with the French in the almost-war at the start of the 19th Century. The Aurora was with Jefferson and against John Adams and his Federalists. Its editor, Benjamin Bache, was sent to prison. He died of yellow fever while he was out on bail. We might have named the Sun the Aurora, too, save for the fact that our sympathies lie with John Adams and his mentor, George Washington. Even many of Bache’s critics came to view his newspaper as a symbol of the importance of respecting the First Amendment and the other noble constitutional principles, including when they were shielding disreputable characters such as Bache.

This is something to think about as all eyes turn to Aurora, Colorado, where President Obama is due to extend — on behalf of us all and no doubt with his usual eloquence — condolences to the family and friends of those slain while watching Batman. Details of this crime were still coming over the wires when statements and editorials started calling for the weakening of the Bill of Rights. Some want to impose new ratings codes, or worse, to deal with Hollywood’s penchant for violence and gore. Others are blaming the violence on the separation of church and state that has permitted the rise of a strong streak of secularism in America. Still others are reacting to the killings at Aurora with calls to weaken the Second Amendment, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. Mayor Bloomberg and the Times jumped right in on this. The Daily News actually asserted that, because President Obama and Governor Romney have shown some deference to the Second Amendment, they were standing at the killer’s side “as he sprayed bullets and buckshot into a crowded movie theater.”

We would be surprised if that is how the people of Aurora, Colorado, see the President and Governor Romney, even at this moment of unimaginable grief. It was the same way at Tucson. The American people have a tendancy to maintain their senses — and they are attached to their rights. They know that the way one shows light in painting, and the other arts, is to show darkness next to it. So they understand the role of the Joker. They understand the role of violence in film, as they do of violence and the grotesque in literature. There is nothing in Batman more gruesome than in Dante. Curbing Hollywood is no way to honor the dead in Colorado. And curbing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans is no way to remember them, either. The mayor and the left-wing editorialists keep ruing the failure of Americans to enact the kind of gun control they insist is needed. Maybe the Americans in the states that have preserved the Second Amendment understand that the strictest gun control regimes — look at Norway — fail to stop all the mad men and that the America is still a nation of the dawn of the day.