Piers Morgan

I despise Piers Morgan.  He is a sensationalist, soft-core journalist trying to pretend that he’s a hard-hitting Journalist (with a capital “J”).  His most recent attempt at capital “J” Journalism has been his attacks on gun ownership in America.  His arguments are feeble, and his response to someone responding to his arguments are to typically resort to ad-hominems.  He seems to follow a pretty predictable pattern – he picks out one thing that he doesn’t like, finds a way to present that one thing in the most sensational manner possible, and then hammers it until you’re sick of listening to him. 

One of the more annoying points that he continued to make after the Aurora Colorado shootings was that the shooter had managed to amass over 6,000 rounds of ammunition.  Piers liked to present himself as horrified – simply HORRIFIED – that we Americans are allowed to amass such a huge arsenal of ammunition, and seems to think that somehow, a law could be passed to restrict how much ammunition someone should be allowed to own.  Piers has presented no ideas to date about how he would proceed to enforce such an unenforceable law, but that isn’t the point that I want to make.  The point is that he is hammering this one point here because it sounds so sensational and outrageous – I mean, what could a private citizen possibly want with 6,000 rounds of ammunition?  The facts are a little more mundane.  First, the Aurora shooter used less than 100 round of ammunition in his spree, so a law preventing him from having amassed 6,000 rounds would have done nothing to prevent the shooting.  Piers, of course, doesn’t care, and when that is pointed out to him, he just attacks you as being backward and ignorant.  Second, I’ll bet that I use close to 6,000 rounds every two years with all the shooting I do.  6,000 rounds isn’t really that much.  I can’t really say if I’ve ever had 6,000 rounds in my possession at one point in time because I don’t keep track of such things, but I’ll bet I’ve been close, with absolutely no ill intent whatsoever – I participate in shooting sports, and buy ammunition in bulk when it’s on sale, sometimes having as much as 18 months supply on hand.  One round of sporting clays, which takes less time than a round of golf, takes 100 shots.  I do 20 rounds of sporting clays a year.  That’s 2,000 rounds, just out of my shotguns, and just for sporting clays – that doesn’t take into account the rounds I shoot hunting, or out of my pistols or rifles.  So once again, Piers is displaying his ignorance by sensationalizing the mundane, and he doesn’t even take the time to understand that shooting is a way of life here in America.  I can forgive his ignorance to that fact, since he is British and shooting is far more rare over there, but what I can’t forgive is his unwillingness to try and cure his ignorance, or to even try to understand that his ignorance exists.

The other thing that he likes to hammer is that if a concealed weapons carrier had been in the Colorado Theater at the time of the shooting, that things would have been far worse because we’d have had “the shootout at the OK corral!” (in his own words).  Piers has never taken time to explain why he thinks that a shootout between an armed bad guy and an armed good guy would somehow be worse than an armed bad guy shooting defenseless victims en masse.  He just breathlessly touts his “shootout” theory and expects everyone to understand why it would be so bad without ever once explaining why this would be undesirable.  Well let me be the first to say that I’d rather be killed in crossfire during a shootout than I would being a target in a shooting gallery.  At least the first option has me dying with my boots on instead of cowering under a theater chair, the way in which I would have to presume Piers would rather go out.  This “OK Corral” thing is actually pretty common with anti-gun folks, even beyond Piers Morgan, and it really glaringly belies their more evil intent in the whole matter: tThey would rather that you are unarmed and defenseless against the bad people of the world.  Piers Morgan would rather see you murdered and defenseless than fighting back against evil.  I’m not sure why, but he has obviously convinced himself that a shootout is far worse than a mass slaughter. 

It displays in stark relief, the underlying lack of logic in the entire gun control debate – bad guys are using illegal guns to kill people, and so the solution to that is to disarm the people that the bad guys are trying to kill.  Does that make sense?  Of course, Piers would argue that he is trying, instead, to disarm the BAD GUY, but fails to understand that almost all of them were already disarmed by the law – most of them didn’t possess their firearms legally in the first place – and so the disarmament that he is desiring HAS ALREADY FAILED.

And even if the bad guys do possess their guns legally, I always make this point and it never seems to sink into the brains of guys like Piers, but here it goes again – these are people who are PLANNING TO COMMIT MURDER.  Do you really think that they arre going to wither at the idea of a felony firearms violation when their plan is to commit multiple capital crimes and then kill themselves?  What possible good could adding a firearms violation to their rap sheet after the fact accomplish?