The Necropolitan Sentinel

This man is a journalist. Take him seriously.

Piers Morgan's tedious excuse-making lecture in The Mail brought to mind a couple of posts by King Shamus. As Shamus puts it:

The Left is not calling on gun control because it’s proven to be effective. There simply isn’t an overwhelming amount [of] scientific data to suggest that an assault weapons ban would’ve prevented a shooting like the Newtown tragedy. They are simply reflexively reacting to a gut-wrenching crime.

And reflexively react Piers does. He is, in fact, almost all reflex. Emotional reflex, that is. His piece is chock-a-block full of emotionally-loaded words: "slaughter", "terror", "snuffed", "gut-wrenchingly", "furious", and on and on. You can practically feel the tears of rage as they drip off of the monitor.

And he apparently believes he is perfectly justified in his rage-induced demand that we change our fundamental laws to suit him Because of the Chill Drun — specifically, his child. Or so he claims. Raise your hand if you believe that, regardless of gun control, Piers Morgan would send his child to a school without armed security. I know I don't.

Morgan's rationalizing justification for his irrational demand is the typical litany of statistical manipulation and selective misinterpretation of the 2nd Amendment. To him, the 2nd Amendment merely "alludes to an American’s ‘right to bear arms’" which has "unfortunately ambiguous wording". I'm going to guess here that it's that danged comma between "state" and "the" that makes, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," into an ambiguous allusion. It's a grammatical error, or something. To paraphrase Penn Jillette: yeah, the Founders got everything else just right, but somehow they fucked that one up.

They got the 1st Amendment so right that it must be read so broadly as to include flag burning and Piss Christ. For the 2nd Amendment, though, the Founders were sleepy or extra drunk at the time, so we have to spend decades pondering the Whichness of the Why regarding every letter, space, and comma in it. And, BTW, a bunch of old white men with wooden teeth and sclerotic thinking couldn't possibly have foreseen humans inventing newer and better weapons. Nobody in the Enlightment thought that improving technology through invention would be a going thing anyway. Especially not this guy.

I was going to go after all of Morgan's factual errors, but it's just not worth it. The only thing I'll say along those lines is something I find myself repeating over and over these days:

AN AR15 IS NOT AN ASSAULT RIFLE!!!!11!!ELEVENTY!!!!! Calling it an "assault rifle" doesn't make it one. Nor does calling it an "assault-style rifle". Nor "assault weapon". Nor "military-style". Nor any of the other made-up Orwellian terms the anti-gun zealots can pull out of their hats. Moreover, barring a special license from the federal government, it hasn't been legal for civilians to own an assault rifle in the United States of America for over 70 years. End of story. Full stop.

Funnily enough, I ended up at a New Year's Eve dinner with a few liberal educators (yeah, I know…redundant) who eventually got around to Sandy Hook and the absolutely, completely, and dagnabbitly stupid idea of arming teachers. I kept my mouth shut until one of them started going off on "people owning automatic weapons" when, as politely as I possibly could, I corrected her and explained that the Sandy Hook shooter didn't use an automatic weapon and, furthermore, it isn't legal for American civilians to own automatic weapons. She looked at me as though I had just farted (I hadn't) and then another woman came to her rescue explaining that, oh, no, she meant "semiautomatic".

IOW, "automatic", "semiautomatic", whatever…there's no discernable difference in their minds.

For Morgan, it's the same. He doesn't care about facts beyond the ones he makes up. I don't think he's ignorant — or, if he is, the ignorance is on purpose — he just hates our laws and the way we run things in the US, yet he insists that the problem is us. I try to avoid "my way or the highway" arguments, but in this case, I'm going to have to go with telling Piers Morgan that if he doesn't like the way we do things over here he is free to GTFO whenever he wants. Being a non-citizen, that should be a pretty simple process for him.

I don't, however, think he should be deported. The petition is an amusing gesture but I want him to stay a while longer. (BTW, if Morgan believes that we believe he thinks he'll get deported based on a popularity contest, as though he's a contestant on a shitty TV talent show or something, then he really does think Americans are stupid.) I want Morgan to stay and continue to talk until the dozens of remaining septuagenarians who still watch The Show Formerly Known As Larry King Live finally get fed up with his bullshit and abandon him, and he discovers that, like Keith Olbermann, all he has left is his Twitter "celebrity". That would be a fitting end to his career in the US.

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