Thread: I'm British and Piers Morgan is Damn Wrong

I'm British and Piers Morgan is Damn Wrong

January 11, 2013
By Adam Shaw
americanthinker.com

Many Americans, since the Sandy Hook massacre, have been disgusted by Piers Morgan's snooty condescension toward their great country, and his blatant disregard for the Second Amendment. This culminated in his recent interview with talk show host Alex Jones, that ultimately backfired when his fiery guest wiped the floor with him.

Since the shooting, Morgan has strutted around as the flag waver for gun control, pointing to his native Great Britain as the ultimate example of what these dumb, gun-toting Yanks should try and imitate. Not only did he use Britain constantly in his scathing editorial against American gun laws, but also repeatedly pointed Alex Jones towards the supposed low gun murder rate in the United Kingdom.

As a fellow Englishman living in America, there is no reason I should not be on Morgan's side. I have spent most of my life in Britain -- the supposed gun-free paradise. While I respect the American Constitution I have no particular reason to be persuaded of an argument just because there is an amendment allowing it; and coming from a country where even the police are unarmed, it can seem excessive to English eyes when Americans claim that military assault rifles like the AR-15 are for self defense.

And yet I can say with confidence that Piers is being either intellectually dishonest, or downright ignorant, if he believes that the USA should imitate the diabolical disaster that has been British gun control.

The first thing to be observed is that his very usage of Britain as an example for the U.S. to follow is proof that his claim only to want to ban certain assault weapons like the AR-15 is an outrageous lie. If it were true that he were a mere moderate quite happy to allow Americans to own ordinary guns, then he would have no reason to quote British gun statistics.

For the UK does not merely prevent its citizens from obtaining military guns, but any gun whatsoever (with very few exceptions), including the handguns with which Piers implies he has no quarrel. So to imply that minor gun restrictions in America would result in British-style results is like arguing America should restrict sales of alcoholic drinks with over 40% alcohol, while promising Prohibition era results.

Additionally, Piers' insistence that he is merely focusing on assault rifles is destroyed by his own logic. One of the arguments he put forth to Alex Jones was that the AR-15 should be banned as it is a common feature in the big massacres such as that in Newtown. Yet handguns were used also at Newtown, so surely those need banning too?

Indeed this was the precise logic that led to the banning of handguns in the UK. After the Dunblane massacre in Scotland in 1996, in which 16 schoolchildren and a teacher were killed (and 15 injured) by a man wielding only handguns, Britain's already strict gun laws were enlarged to include them. The newspaper leading the call for this ban was the Daily Mirror -- the editor? A certain Piers Morgan.

If Mr. Morgan wishes to ban all weapons, then he should have the decency to come out and say so. For his argument appears to be that banning just military weapons will stop massacres. Yet the Dunblane massacre he cites proves that it is possible to kill almost as many innocent children with much weaker weapons. Banning assault rifles may change the hardware murderers use, but it won't stop the killing.

So why doesn't Piers just admit it? After all, he keeps nodding to the gun-free nirvana that is our home nation. Why wouldn't Americans want to imitate our harmonious gun laws?

Simple -- Americans wouldn't want British gun laws for the same reason they don't want to join the European Union or eat Black Pudding -- because they're not as good as they look.

Piers may point to the fact that Britain has relatively few gun deaths, but this is like saying that if we banned cars we'd have a lot fewer road deaths -- it would be true, but that would only paint a small part of the picture and would fail to take into account the huge knock on effects that this would have.

Note that Mr. Morgan fails to take account of gun crime in the UK, only gun deaths. If he did, his argument would lose steam. Since the gun ban in 1998, the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has risen by 89%, and in some areas of the country has leapt by as much as 500%. Gang culture once never seen in the UK is now rife -- disproving the notion that banning guns will weed out gang culture.

Additionally, according to a study by UN affiliated European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control last year, it was found that Britain has higher robbery, assault, and burglary rates than America. When criminals know you are unlikely to have a gun, what is to stop them from robbing you, beating you up, or simply breaking into your house?

A comprehensive 2007 study showed that we don't even fare well among our European neighbors. Britain was not only the burglary and assault capital of Europe, it also had higher than average rates of car theft, robbery and sex offences, and came second only to Ireland in the overall crime league.

This is no surprise to anyone who has lived in England for any amount of time. Having lived in Manchester, England, and now in New York City, I can say with confidence that while I am prepared to catch a subway at midnight in Manhattan, I wouldn't have dared take my bus home in Manchester past 10pm. I have never been attacked in New York, but have been mugged three times in Manchester.

Well, at least Britain hasn't had any massacres since the gun ban? Wrong. In 2010, Derrick Bird went on a rampage around Cumbria with a shotgun and a rifle, killing 12 and injuring 11. His casual shooting-fest lasted nearly four hours as he drove around vast areas of land completely unopposed in this gun-free country. Thanks to British leftists like Piers Morgan, Bird knew that there was unlikely to be anyone armed to stop him. Only when armed police were dispatched did he commit suicide. Shocked socialists could only babble about how this proved that the country with some of the strictest gun laws in the world needed more gun control.

If Piers Morgan wishes to use Britain as a model for gun control then he should be honest, not only about his true wishes to ban all guns, but what it has done to our country. UK gun laws have destroyed the freedom of law abiding British men and women, and turned our great nation into a crime hotspot. Americans should not imitate Britain, and instead should learn from our failure to keep our citizens safe.

Articles: I'm British and Piers Morgan is Damn Wrong
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Immigration Group Calls For Piers Morgan to be Fired Over ‘Murder’ Comments

• William Gheen

ALIPAC.us
January 13, 2013

RELATED: CNN’s Piers Morgan to be taken off air? – CNN’s Piers Morgan to be taken off air?
This is over the top and Ive never seen anything like this. People are on the Piers Morgan show on CNN openly joking about murdering Alex Jones with an assault rifle.
Please contact CNN and demand that Piers Morgan be fired for this….
CNN Conctact
CNN.com – Contact Us
Wait for a human operator to come on the line at 404.827.1500
Just found out you can also send in your request for Piers Morgan to be fired to
vcm@cnn.com

Prison Planet.com » Immigration Group Calls For Piers Morgan to be Fired Over ‘Murder’ Comments

Saturday, 12 January 2013 01:58 Ten Piers Morgan Gun Lies, Untruths, and Deceptions

Written by Selwyn Duke






It’s probably not quite true that gun-control advocate Piers Morgan has been “standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook,” as Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro put it. It’s more correct to say that the cheeky Brit has been standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, jumping up and down, and stamping his foot. I can say nothing else about a man who repeatedly combines the Newtown tragedy with lies, misconceptions, and deceptions to push a political agenda. What am I talking about? Well, here’s a top 10 list.

Walmart and the 100-round magazine

Morgan wrote in the Daily Mail, “I can saunter into Walmart — America’s version of Tesco — and help myself to an armful of … magazines that can carry up to 100 bullets at a time.” Perhaps he could.
But he can’t.
Walmart doesn’t carry a 100-round magazine. I’ve never seen such an item at the store, and a search for it at their website came up empty. But, hey, Morgan probably wouldn’t be caught dead in a Walmart, and I’m sure his Harrods-set friends told him the mag was there.

Aurora and the AR-15

One of Morgan’s patent arguments is that the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle was used to inflict the carnage in all our recent massacres, including Aurora, Colorado.
False.
Aurora maniac James Holmes first used a shotgun in his attack, and it appears that most of the wounds he inflicted were made with it.

Banning AR-15s can stop crazies from committing massacres

As the aforementioned indicates, this is untrue. Will a mentally unhinged person say, “I was going to shoot up a school, but this shotgun here just ain’t my style. I’m gonna’ play golf instead”? Not only is a shotgun far more effective in close-quarters attacks on soft targets, but an unbalanced person will grab whatever he can find that serves his ends.
The same appears true of unbalanced journalists.

Morgan only wants AR-15s banned and respects the Second Amendment

Morgan made this claim while debating Breitbart’s Shapiro. Yet he said in another recent interview that the Constitution is “basically, inherently flawed. Hence the need to amend it,” the implication being that the Second Amendment was the flawed element.
As for only AR-15s being in Morgan’s crosshairs, consider what fellow Englishman Adam Shaw tells us:
After the Dunblane massacre in Scotland in 1996, in which 16 schoolchildren and a teacher were killed (and 15 injured) by a man wielding only handguns, Britain's already strict gun laws were enlarged to include them. The newspaper leading the call for this ban was the Daily Mirror — the editor? A certain Piers Morgan.

Britain has a lower murder rate because of gun control

This is another of Morgan’s patent arguments. Yet Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for all of the last 200 years, during most of which neither nation had strict gun control. Moreover, as Shaw also tells us, “Since the [British] gun ban in 1998, the total number of firearm offences in England and Wales has risen by 89%, and in some areas of the country has leapt by as much as 500%.”

Gun control/murder rate link

Morgan claims there is an inverse relationship between number of gun-control laws and murder rate. Not only does his own country’s history not bear this out, but as Thomas Sowell recently wrote:
[Gun-control zealots ignore] other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.
You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.
…The rate of gun ownership … is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
…Guns are not the problem. People are the problem — including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

Only America has a problem with gun massacres

Morgan often avers so, but as I recently wrote:
Untrue. As John Fund writes:
Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s [during the “assault weapons” ban] to 26 in the first decade of this century.
The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.
Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.
Then there is Norway, where in 2011 Anders Breivik murdered 77 people. In contrast, while I don’t have precise figures, let’s very generously estimate the number of people killed in American mass murders during the last 30 years to be 500. Given that our population is 310 million and Norway’s is only 5 million, this means that Norway’s mass-murder rate is almost 10 times as high as ours.
Beware of Norway, the mass-murder capital of the world.

The AR-15 is an assault weapon

In repeating this untruth, Morgan has a lot of company. An “assault weapon” is a gun with a “selective fire” feature, meaning it can be fired fully automatic, semi-automatic, in three-shot bursts, or possesses some combination of two of those features. Yet such weapons have generally been unavailable to the public since the National Firearms Act of 1934. The AR-15s one can readily acquire are simply semi-automatic firearms — meaning, every trigger pull releases one shot — like most guns owned in America today.

Morgan’s footage of the AR-15’s function

Despite the above, Morgan once illustrated the alleged function of the AR-15 by showing a gun with its appearance (M-16 perhaps?) being fired fully automatic. But this is par for the course: Morgan was fired from the UK’s Daily Mirror for publishing fake photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.
Hey, why be truthful when you can be effective?

Piers knows firearms

Responding in his Daily Mail piece to accusations of ignorance, Morgan wrote:
Well, I do know a bit about guns, actually [as much as he knows about authenticating photographs, anyway]. 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.
And Oprah Winfrey grew up in a poor family so she must be … oh, wait. Either Morgan doesn’t know guns or he does and is simply lying to push an agenda. Which is it? My bet is on large-caliber arrogant ignorance fed with fully automatic superciliousness and high-capacity intellectual dishonesty.



Ten Piers Morgan Gun Lies, Untruths, and Deceptions


You want some accurate crime data..here is a good one

Choose Your Own Crime Stats




Published on Dec 31, 2012
Crime stats they'd rather you not hear.
https://www.facebook.com/AmidstTheNoise
https://twitter.com/AmidstTheNoise
Sources:
FBI Uniform Crime Reports Table 1
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

FBI Uniform Crime Reports Table 16
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

FBI Uniform Crime Repots Table 8
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Crimes Detected in England and Wales 2011/2012
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/researc...





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooa98...&feature=share

Piers Morgan and CNN Plan End to His Prime-Time Show

The Brit gun ban has been an abject failure at disarming drug gangs. Since 2009, some Brit cops have been forced to carry sub-machine guns in the more dangerous areas.