Piers Morgan - Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney

Contents

About the Book

Despite many wanting him to fail, Piers Morgan took over from US TV legend Larry King at CNN in 2010 and went on to cover some of the most shocking news events in recent US history, such as the killing of Osama bin Laden, the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy and horrific shooting rampages including the Newtown school massacre.

In Shooting Straight Piers shares the diaries that he kept in this rollercoaster period of his life.

Thrown right into the maelstrom of the US media, Piers finds himself rubbing shoulders with everyone from Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen to the US president himself. Not to mention Oprah, Rod Stewart, Meryl Streep, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Janet Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, the Dalai Lama and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As Piers gets more and more drawn into commenting on American culture, one issue gun control provokes the most incredible and heart-rending response of all, dividing the country dramatically. And, as usual, Piers is in the thick of it.

About the Author

Piers Morgan worked as a gossip columnist for the Sun before going on to edit the News of the World and then the Daily Mirror , until he was sacked in 2004 when he published photos of British soldiers apparently abusing Iraqi prisoners of war. He has since presented a number of TV shows including The Dark Side of Fame , You Cant Fire Me, Im Famous for BBC1 and Britains Got Talent for ITV and written for GQ . He shot to fame in the US as a judge on the top-rated Americas Got Talent and by winning Donald Trumps inaugural series of Celebrity Apprentice . He currently hosts a primetime talk show in America, Piers Morgan Live , and the UK chat show Piers Morgans Life Stories on ITV, as well as writing a weekly column for the Mail on Sundays EVENT magazine.

For Spencer, Stanley, Bertie and Elise.

FOREWORD

On the Saturday morning of 8 January 2011, congresswoman Gabby Giffords was holding a meet-and-greet with her constituents in the car park of a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. Without warning, one of the men standing in a queue to talk to her rushed forward, came up to the table where she was sitting, put a gun to her head, and pulled the trigger. Pleased with himself and the ease with which he was able to shoot a member of Congress, he decided, for good measure, to shoot another eighteen people, killing six of them, including a nine-year-old girl. Giffords, miraculously, lived.

In the days and weeks that followed, there was a lot of national mourning and hand-wringing and pronouncements about the strength of the American spirit to rise above such tragedies and carry on. But there were no calls by political leaders to enact stricter gun laws and no such bills were proposed or introduced. Even President Obama remained silent about taking any measures, the kind of which might have prevented the bloodletting in Tucson.

It was in this environment, just one week later, that the British journalist and TV personality Piers Morgan debuted his new nightly chat show on CNN. Entitled Piers Morgan Tonight , he took over the 9 p.m. time slot from the legendary Larry King on the granddaddy of the cable news channels. Although he had served as the editor of numerous British tabloids and had written several books, the American public only knew Piers Morgan as the winner on Donald Trumps Celebrity Apprentice and as a judge on Americas Got Talent . What no one saw coming was that the loudest, clearest, most passionate voice against the two other things Americans had talent for gun violence and mass shootings was about to unleash his rage against this senseless barbarity in a way that would make everyone sit up and take notice.

For the following two-plus years, Piers Morgan has, week after week (and sometimes night after night) taken on the National Rifle Association, the United States Congress and numerous gun lovers, gun nuts and gun evangelists. On one infamous show, he confronted in his polite but unforgiving English way the popular radio host and defender of the Second Amendment, Alex Jones. Jones, offended by the suggestion that perhaps America had a problem, began screaming at Morgan and looked as if he were about to pick up his stool and clobber this foreigner with it (I assume he couldnt have shot him, as Time Warner security wont allow six-shooters or gunfights in their New York headquarters).

Angry gun owners, alarmed at the success Morgan was having in reaching millions of Americans (in part, by educating them on how his native Britain had significantly reduced gun violence and virtually eliminated mass shootings after a massacre that took place in 1996 in a school gymnasium in Dunblane, Scotland), began a campaign to remove Morgan not just from the airwaves, but from the US itself. A petition was launched on the White House website to have Morgan deported. Over one hundred thousand Americans pleaded with the President to put Piers Morgan on the next boat back to England. Obama was actually forced to respond to the outcry and did so by reminding the public that this alien, Mr. Morgan, enjoyed the same free speech rights as us gun-toting Americans.

Sadly, the gun violence and mass shootings continue. But after months of relentless badgering and rallying Americans to respond to this from our better side, public opinion has shifted (nearly 90 per cent are now in favour of some form of stricter gun laws) and the President sent a bill to Congress to require background checks at gun shows. It failed. But that hasnt stopped Piers Morgan from using his nightly bully pulpit to rail against this madness and (thankfully) it doesnt look like hes going to give up and return home for tea any time soon.

Michael Moore
August 2013

The front page of the Daily Mirror after the Dunblane school shooting massacre in 1996 that changed Britains gun laws for ever.

PROLOGUE

It was a quiet morning at the offices of the Daily Mirror in East London on Wednesday, 13 March 1996.

I had been Editor-in-Chief of Britains second biggest selling newspaper for four months.

Then, just after 10 a.m., the newsdesk alerted me to a shooting incident in a small town called Dunblane in Scotland.

I turned on the television to see anguished parents sprinting towards the gates of a local primary school, and it soon became apparent that this was a terrible atrocity.

An unemployed man named Thomas Hamilton had walked into Dunblane primary school armed with two 9mm Browning HP pistols, two Smith & Wesson M19 .357 Magnum revolver handguns, and 743 rounds of ammunition.

All legally purchased.

Hamilton opened fire on a class of twenty-nine five- and six-year-old children, killing sixteen of them, and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, and wounding all but one of the rest.

He then shot himself dead.

My eldest son Spencer was just three years old at the time, and the horror of what had happened to so many innocent kids just a little bit bigger than him moved me to tears and rage. A huge national debate about guns began in Britain in the aftermath of the shooting, and the Daily Mirror was at the centre of it. I was determined that something meaningful would be done to try and prevent anything like this from happening again. The Mirror campaigned vigorously, and relentlessly, for new gun control legislation.

Eighteen months later, the British government, under enormous pressure from both the media and an almost unanimously united public, passed a ban on the private ownership of all handguns, and all small-bore pistols giving the British some of the toughest gun laws in the world. All fully automatic guns are banned too, as are all semi-automatic centrefire rifles. To even own a shotgun or rifle for hunting and sport shooting requires extensive background checks and paperwork.