Piers Morgan speaks about American gun laws far more than any foreigner should and the television personality thinks he has it all figured out after Sunday’s shooting at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.
The British journalist wrote a lengthy piece for the Daily Mail published on Wednesday in which he fires off on the gun debate and puts the pressure on Trump to take action in the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in United States history.
REUTERS/Andrew Burton
Morgan, unsatisfied by Trump dodging questions about gun control, starts off by criticizing “craven support for, and from, the NRA.”
“Has there ever been a BETTER day to discuss gun control?,” Morgan begins. “If we can’t discuss it when nearly 600 people are shot by one man armed with 23 guns he apparently bought legally–then when CAN we discuss it exactly?”
“The sickening truth, of course, is that the NRA doesn’t ever want us to discuss gun control, and they certainly don’t want THEIR President discussing it.”
Morgan then rattled off everything we know about the 64-year-old shooter named Stephen Paddock who killed 59 people and left upwards of 400 injured after his attack on the Route 91 Harvest Festival on Sunday.
“The only ‘fact’ we don’t know yet is why he did it,” Morgan writes. “But the rest of the facts seem pretty bloody clear to me. So forgive me, Mr. President, but I think this is absolutely the right moment to be discussing this.”
Morgan noted that he and Trump have debated gun control on “numerous occasion” and has come to three conclusions on the president’s views.
1) If you have guns, other people are less likely to use them against you.
2) If someone fires a gun, it is safer if everyone else in the vicinity has guns to fire back – and uses them.
3) Guns aren’t the problem, crazy people are the problem.
“But the massacre in Las Vegas utterly destroys those arguments, doesn’t it?,” Morgan asks, noting that law enforcement and others were carrying firearms that night and if those people fired back it could have led to more deaths. However, he fell short on that last point and turned back to the gun laws, outlining the changes he would propose before taking aim at Trump again.
“This is YOUR call, President Trump. This happened on YOUR watch. Silence, apathy and kicking this can down the road are not an option,” he wrote.
REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
“Cowardice in the face of the NRA’s disgusting and ruthlessly commercial bullyboy tactics is not an option. Waiting for the next Stephen Padddock to open fire on a crowd of Americans is not an option.”
“It’s time to put the rights of your fellow citizens not to be shot dead over the rights of men like Paddock to by 47 guns and annihilate a crowd of country music fans.”