On Sunday, in the wake of the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States in which 11 Jews were murdered and another six wounded, Piers Morgan jumped in again to decry Americans owning guns, tweeting, “Who don’t you just TRY giving up some of your guns, to see what happens?”
Morgan has had a long-standing passion for removing guns from Americans; after the horrific Sandy Hook massacre in December 2012, he consistently attacked gun ownership in America. Arguing with Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, who contended that schools would be safer with more guns, that gun laws promoted violence because unarmed people could not defend themselves, and that gun bans in other countries did not affect violent crime rates, Morgan taunted, “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?”
In March 2014, just before he exited his show on CNN, Morgan still had to get in one last shot at Americans and their guns, tweeting, “I leave with no regrets, many great memories, and one heartfelt hope – that America sorts out its insane gun laws.”
In 2015, Morgan reiterated, “America is a violent place, but Britain has historically been a very violent place, as has Germany, as has Japan, as has Australia. The common denominator of all those countries is that, through the evolutionary process of their societies, all of those countries have, in the end, renounced guns in the belief that guns actually make a society more violent … I speak as someone who loves America and loves Americans. But having been brought up in a country where there are no guns, the one thing that you’re completely struck by when you come to America is the amount of paranoia and fear that infests daily life in almost every sphere of American society because of the presence of guns.”
In 2016, interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show, Morgan was asked if he had any regrets for his outspokenness about guns. He answered:
I don’t actually. In Britain we had our own Sandy Hook in the mid-90’s, at Dunblane; sixteen young children were killed in that classroom. And we banned all guns, assault rifles, assault weapons, all got banned. And I couldn’t see, for me, how a great country like America, and it is a great country, great people, could let 20 first graders be shot dead in their classrooms and the reaction could be absolutely nothing. So I don’t regret standing up for trying to effect change.
In October 2017, days after the Las Vegas massacre, the most deadly shooting in American history, Morgan wrote, “I’ve campaigned for gun control in America since the Sandy Hook atrocity in 2012, when I was working for CNN.”
As recently as February 2018, Morgan got into a shouting match on his “Good Morning Britain” show, snapping, “How many people have to be killed before you believe relaxing gun laws and not having tighter restrictions does not work?”