3/29/2014

Note on Piers Morgan ending his show on CNN with a speech on guns


Below is the relevant text of Piers Morgan's comments.  Here a few comments.

1) Doesn't Piers recognize the irony that the Aurora movie theater and Newtown shootings both occurred where guns are banned?  That the movie theater shooting occurred in the one movie theater out of seven showing the Batman movie near where the killer lived?  That these attacks generally keep occurring where guns are banned?

2) Piers directly attacks the notion that more guns mean less crime.  But he never in all his shows dealt with the evidence that when guns are banned murder rates go up, except in one show where he and Christiane Amanpour were dishonest about the facts for the UK.

3) In classic Piers, he attacks his opponents in the most personal terms: "cowardly," "bullied," attacking his opponents as motivated by making profits for gun makers ("death and profits for the gun manufacturers").  What is gained by Piers constantly attacking his opponents this way?  He may never understand that is what many found objectionable.

With Piers continually repeating the same first two points over and over again, you would think that he would be embarrassed that he doesn't have a direct response to these two points.
This is the final episode of Piers Morgan Live. After 3yrs, 2months, 11 days and over 1000 shows, I am departing to spend more time with my cricket bat.  . . .
And I want to say something more about that before I bow out. . . .
As my brother, a British Army colonel, says, “You’d always want an American next to you in a trench when the going gets tough.”
But that’s where guns belong – on a military battlefield, in the hands of highly trained men and women fighting for democracy and freedom. Not in the hands of civilians. The scourge of gun violence is a disease that now infects every aspect of American life.
Each day, on average, 35 people in this country are murdered with guns, another 50 kill themselves with guns, and 200 more are shot but survive. That’s 100,000 people a year hit by gunfire in America.
Now, I assumed that after 70 people were shot in a movie theater, and then, just a few months later, 20 first-graders were murdered with an assault rifle in an elementary school, the absurd gun laws in this country would change. But nothing has happened. The gun lobby in America, led by the NRA, has bullied this nation’s politicians into cowardly, supine silence. Even when 20 young children are blown away in their classrooms.
This is a shameful situation that has made me very angry. So angry, in fact, that some people have criticized me for being too loud, opinionated, even rude when I have debated the issue of guns. But I make no apologies for that.
As Sir Winston Churchill said: “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.”
My point is simple: more guns doesn’t mean less crime as the NRA repeatedly says. It means more gun violence, death and profits for the gun manufacturers. And to those who claim my gun control campaigning has been “anti-American”, the reverse is true. I am so pro-American that I want more of you to stay alive. . . .

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1 Comments:

Blogger Will in Austin said...

We'll said, John. At the end of the day, when it came to guns, Piers Morgan Live was a microcosm of equivocation, appeals to emotion, ad hominem, goalpost-moving, cherry-picking, false compromises - take your pick. Candidly, this twitter photo best sums up the last 3 years: http://twitter.com/illwill_ATX/status/449895871644057602/photo/1 #goodriddance

3/29/2014 7:10 PM  

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