Do You Believe Piers Morgan’s Mea Culpa?

Piers Morgan claims that with the benefit of hindsight he should have approached gun control differently while hosting CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” from 2011 to 2014.  

“I would do it differently if I had my time again because I think you’ve got to be mindful if you’re a Brit in a foreign country like America that America has its own culture, and it has a strong gun culture,” he explained to Fox News’ Sean Hannity this week.  

Morgan noted that coming from a country with “no guns” to a country with guns his aggressive tone and tenor on the subject may have been “overbearing.”

“I do think I went about it perhaps in a very overbearing way, trying to tell Americans how to lead their lives, and you’re right, if you try to do that with our Royal Family on British TV, you’d be run out of town … I should be respectful of Americans’ right to lead their lives how they wish to lead them,” he said.

For those that don’t remember, Morgan was the most vocal anti-gun advocate in mainstream media during his tenure at CNN.  

Never once did he apologize for his combative style during that stint.  In fact, quite the opposite, Morgan seemed to double down on it especially when he was confronted with the facts about gun-related violence in America (just a few random facts): 

• Black rifles are not the “preferred weapon” of mass killers
• Criminalizing private transfers will not keep prohibited persons from procuring guns
• In any given city, a small hyper-violent minority is responsible for the vast majority of gun violence
• Gun-free zones are not an effective deterrent against would-be killers
• Two percent of all counties in America account for 51 percent of the nation’s murders
• Research supporting gun control is inherently flawed and unreliable   
• There is no epidemic of mass shootings

Probably the most memorable moment from his show was when Ben Shapiro called him out for his refusal to listen to pro-gun guests and his perchance for bullying.     

“You have been a bully on this issue… I watch your show, and I’ve seen it repeatedly, what you tend to do is you tend to demonize people who differ from you politically by standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, saying they don’t seem to care enough about the dead kids,” Shapiro said.

For Morgan, anyone who argued that they needed an AR to protect their families or to protect the free state from tyrannical forces was a loon or worse, as Shapiro observed, wholly indifferent to the slaughter of innocents.  

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But the truth is Morgan’s anti-gun crusading did not stop after he left CNN.  In 2018, he penned an op-ed in The Daily Mail that urged then-President Trump to outlaw America’s best-selling rifle: the AR-15. 

“I refuse to believe the Founding Fathers would have ever allowed guns like AR-15s to be used by American civilians as killing machines in this horrendous way,” wrote Morgan, after recounting various mass killings involving AR-pattern firearms.

“Nobody needs one for home defense. Nobody needs one to hunt. Nobody needs one, period – other than to kill a lot of people fast, as we are now seeing time and again,” Morgan continued.

There’s little doubt that Morgan still holds this position.  But even if advocates for it in a more polite, subdued manner this time around, the bottom line remains. He wants to see Americans disarmed.  

This means he wants to inhibit our capacity to defend our homes, our families, and our country from those who wish to cause them harm.  He wants us to be more vulnerable to violent criminals. That stance, no matter how nicely it’s articulated, is unacceptable. And so for me, Morgan’s mea culpa falls flat.  What say you? 

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