Sunday - December 30, 2012

meet the guy who says “confiscate” those guns.

Now onward and you will LOVE this.

As all of you are aware I am certain, a big mouth on CNN who happens to be a Brit, is very angry with Americans and the gun culture and especially angry with the NRA and ALL of you who own assault weapons.  Now then to be fair you should agree that he has a right to opinions of whatever nature. My problem is that as a foreigner, he hasn’t any right to lobby to change what we have.  He hasn’t a right to a platform no matter how many Americans agree with his position.
Mr. Morgan says if he had his way, ALL assault type weapons would be “confiscated.” His word. Confiscated.  Seems to me last time Brits tried that in the old days of colonies, they had a fight on their hands. 

Piers Morgan also writes for papers here and has a weekly magazine column.  This appeared in today’s Mail, and covers a couple of pages in the center.
I’m posting it here because I don’t know if this gets published in the USA also. 

Oh ... there’s a section here that is actually funny. Yeah really.  He knows a few things about guns because some of his kin were in the army. Hey-hey. Is that a qualifier er what? 

Deport me? If America won’t change its crazy gun laws… I may deport myself says PIERS MORGAN

By Piers Morgan

I have fired guns only once in my life, on a stag party to the Czech capital Prague a few years ago when part of the itinerary included a trip to an indoor shooting range. For three hours, our group were let loose on everything from Magnum 45 handguns and Glock pistols, to high-powered ‘sniper’ rifles and pump-action shotguns.

It was controlled, legal, safe and undeniably exciting. But it also showed me, quite demonstrably, that guns are killing machines.

The Sandy Hook massacre brought back such horribly vivid memories for me of Dunblane, the worst mass shooting in Britain in my lifetime.

I was editor of the Daily Mirror on that day back in 1996 and will never forget the appalling TV footage of those poor Scottish mothers sprinting to the small primary school, many already howling with anguish at the thought of what might have happened to their five-year-old children.

It was a slaughter so senseless, so unspeakable, that it reduced even hard-bitten news reporters, including me, to tears.

And as I watched the parents at Sandy Hook racing to try to find their children, I saw the same images, the same terror, that engulfed Dunblane. And I felt the same tears welling up.

Then, 16 five-year-old children were slain in their classroom. Now, 20 six- and seven-year-olds. Beautiful young lives snuffed out before they had a chance to fulfil any of their potential. It made me so gut-wrenchingly angry.

I have four children. And I still remember the blind terror I felt when I lost my son Stanley, then aged two, for half an hour at a cricket match on a field surrounded by a small running creek. I was sure he’d drowned. But I was lucky: he finally emerged from where he’d been hiding – big, cheeky grin intact.

Every parent has a similar story. To even try to conceive of how you would feel if your child was shot multiple times in the head by a Rambo madman at school is just impossible. I honestly don’t know how you would ever carry on with life.

But my anger turned to blind rage when I saw the reaction to this hideous massacre in America.

Sales of the specific weapon used, an AR-15 military-style assault rifle, rocketed at gun stores all over America in the days following the Sandy Hook shooting.

And the country’s biggest gun supplier, Brownells, said it sold more high-capacity bullet magazines in three days than it normally did in three-and-a-half years.

What is behind this apparently insane behaviour? The answer is, mainly, fear.

The well-organised, richly funded, vociferous pro-gun lobby were straight out, on my CNN show and many other media outlets, declaring that the only way those schoolchildren would have survived is if their teachers had been armed. It’s been their answer to every mass shooting.

After the shootings at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, in July – where 70 people were hit, the worst victim-count in such an incident in US history, and 12 people died – sales of guns in the state rose by a staggering 41 per cent in the following month as people bought into the theory that if everyone in the theatre had been armed too, they’d have stopped the shooter. Can you imagine the scene as 200 people pulled out guns and started blazing away in a dark theatre?

The gun-lobby logic dictates that the only way to defend against gun criminals is for everyone else to have a gun, too. Teachers, nurses, clergymen, shop assistants, cinema usherettes – everyone must be armed.

To me, this is a warped, twisted logic that bears no statistical analysis and makes no sense. Do you fight drug addiction with more cocaine? Alcoholism with more Jack Daniel’s? Of course not.

But woe betide anyone who dares suggest this. In the days following Sandy Hook, I interviewed a number of gun-rights representatives and grew increasingly furious as they trotted out these hackneyed old disingenuous lines.

Finally, I erupted at one of them, a man with the unfortunate name of Larry Pratt, who runs the Gun Owners of America lobbying group.

‘You,’ I eventually declared, ‘are an unbelievably stupid man.’

And that was the catalyst for the full wrath of the gun lobby to crash down on my British head.

A petition was created on an official White House website demanding my deportation for ‘attacking the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution’. This, of course, is the one that alludes to an American’s ‘right to bear arms’.

The concerted effort to get me thrown out of the country – which has so far gathered more than 90,000 signatures – struck me as rather ironic, given that by expressing my opinion I was merely exercising my rights, as a legal US resident, under the 1st Amendment, which protects free speech.

But no matter.

It’s no exaggeration to say that America’s unique fondness for guns pretty much got cemented by hatred of us Brits and the War of Independence. But the main reason the more fervent gun-rights activists give is a fear of their own US federal government using its army to impinge on their freedom. The problem is that America’s historical love of guns means the country is now awash with them – and with gun death.

The bare statistics say it all. There are 311 million people in the United States and an estimated 300 million guns in circulation. (Between four million and seven million new firearms are manufactured in the US every year.)

Take out children from the population figure, and that’s comfortably more than one gun per person.

Each year, on average, 100,000 Americans are shot with a gun. Of these, over 31,000 are fatalities, 11,000 of them murders and 18,000 suicides. More than a million people have been killed with guns in America since 1968 when Dr Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.

The US firearm murder rate is 19.5 times higher than the 22 next most populous, high-income countries in the world. And a staggering 80 per cent of firearm deaths in the combined 23 countries occur in America.

My campaign against America’s gun laws didn’t begin two weeks ago when Adam Lanza committed his carnage. It began a week before I went on air for CNN, in January 2011. A US Congresswoman called Gabby Giffords was shot in the head by another deranged young man at an outdoor event in Tucson, Arizona, and miraculously survived. Six others, including a nine-year-old girl, were murdered.

Okay ... so he was sticking his unwanted nose in our business even before we knew he was. 
Interesting he doesn’t mention any stats on guns that were used to defend the home and person.  Or maybe he wasn’t interested in looking that up.

(Six of America’s 12 worst-ever mass shootings have occurred since 2007, when I first came to America to work as a judge on America’s Got Talent.) And I’ve been shocked at how America’s politicians have been cowed into a woeful, shameful virtual silence by the gun lobbyists and the all-powerful National Rifle Association in particular.

The NRA targets pro-gun-control politicians on every rung of the political system and spends a fortune ensuring they either don’t get elected or get unelected. It’s been a concerted, ruthless and highly successful campaign. And to those, like me, who stand up to them, they sneer: ‘You don’t know anything about guns. Keep quiet.’

alright, here comedy with our newest comic.
Heeeeeeerrs Pierce.

Well, I do know a bit about guns, actually. My brother’s a lieutenant colonel in the British Army and has served tours of duty in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. My sister married a colonel who trained Princes William and Harry at Sandhurst. My uncle was a major in the Green Howards.

I had an uncle who was a green sailor once. Yeah, he got pie-eyed and rather sickly on some bad hooch.  I don’t know but I’d bet he and some buddies made it themselves.  My uncle wasn’t a major though.  Hmmm.  Maybe uncle was only puce colored. I know he told us he was ill for a bit. I’ve no idea if that counts for anything but as we see here, Mr. Morgan is certainly well qualified to speak on guns and stuff, what with all those military folk he knows.
I don’t know who trained my uncle.  Another was in the air force in WW2 but that doesn’t count. Another uncle and a cousin were in the army.  The cousin was in the K-9 corps and got to keep the dog. Never forgot him. Jackie.  That was the dog. But I can’t speak on that subject cos Jackie never said a word about his experiences. He did get a medal though.

Obama should follow up by launching a Government buy-back for all existing assault weapons in circulation (as worked successfully in Los Angeles last week).

I would go further, confiscating the rest and enforcing tough prison sentences on those who still insist on keeping one.

Either you ban these assault weapons completely, and really mean it, or you don’t.

He should also significantly increase federal funding for mental health treatment for all Americans who need it. It’s the lethal cocktail of mental instability and ready gun availability that is the key component in almost every American mass shooting.

Nor do I think Hollywood or makers of violent video games should avoid any responsibility – their graphic images can surely only twist an already twisted mind.

I will not stop in my own efforts to keep the gun-control debate firmly in people’s minds, however much abuse I’m subjected to.

The ‘more guns, less crime’ argument is utter nonsense. Britain, after Dunblane, introduced some of the toughest gun laws in Europe, and we average just 35 gun murders a year.

Japan, which has the toughest gun control in the world, had just TWO in 2006 and averages fewer than 20 a year. In Australia, they’ve not had a mass shooting since stringent new laws were brought in after 35 people were murdered in the country’s worst-ever mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996. Fewer guns equals less gun murder. This is not a ‘pinko liberal’ hypothesis. It’s a simple fact.

In conclusion, I can spare those Americans who want me deported a lot of effort by saying this: If you don’t change your gun laws to at least try to stop this relentless tidal wave of murderous carnage, then you don’t have to worry about deporting me.

Although I love the country as a second home and one that has treated me incredibly well, I would, as a concerned parent first – and latterly, of a one-year-old daughter who may attend an American elementary school like Sandy Hook in three years’ time – seriously consider deporting myself.

MORGAN in the Mail

Posted by peiper     on 12/30/2012 at 10:11 AM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control • USA •  
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