Piers Morgan is hailing the United Kingdom responding to a 1996 Dunblane, Scotland, primary school shooting with strict gun control that "removed most guns from civilian hands and ensured there hasn't been a school shooting in the U.K. since then."
Morgan's missive came in an opinion piece for The Sunday Times headlined, "After Dunblane we said: enough. But America just keeps on killing its kids."
"The worst day of my 40-year journalism career was March 13, 1996, when a madman burst into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and shot dead 16 children aged 5 and 6," Morgan wrote. "I'd become a father two years earlier, so it hit me unusually hard, and I wept in my office at the Daily Mirror as I watched footage of desperate mothers sprinting frantically to the school.
"When the full horror emerged, a somber gloom enveloped the newsroom. And then we resolved to do something about it, and the Mirror helped lead a successful bipartisan gun-control campaign that removed most guns from civilian hands and ensured there hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since then."
Morgan blasted the U.S. for not evolving after Columbine high school shooters gave way to a Dunblane-like maniac who murdered first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, ultimately delivering the horror of this week's Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting that left 19 children dead along with two teachers.
"Nothing was done to change any laws or try to stop another Sandy Hook," Morgan wrote. "And last Tuesday, 10 years and 900 more U.S. school shootings later (yes, really) the inevitable consequence of that inaction blew up in Uvalde and the horror was almost exactly replicated."
Morgan hailed school security in the U.K. because of gun control measures.
"Thankfully, we don't have to worry about school shootings in Britain because of the decisive action we took to prevent them by introducing some of the toughest restrictions in the world," Morgan wrote.
"It's now very hard to buy a gun in this country, and the punishments for illegally possessing or importing them are severe. As a result, we have one of the lowest gun violence death rates anywhere, though sadly we have a far less impressive record on knife crime.
"But in America, where guns are almost a religion, the statistics are mind-boggling. The U.S. has just 4% of the world's people but almost half of the world's registered civilian firearms, and 40% of homes have a gun. There are now more guns in America (400 million) than people (320 million). And the U.S. leads the world in gun deaths with around 40,000 a year, of which half are murders.
"That is more than the next 23 richest countries combined."
Morgan did recognize "how deeply embedded guns are in the culture" in the U.S. and "how much harder it is to do what we did in Britain."
"America is a stringently regulated place about everything, except firearms," he continued. "It seems unarguable to me that this ridiculously easy access to such deadly weapons is at the core of America's gun violence crisis."
Morgan admitted the proliferation of guns in the U.S. even makes heavily restricted Democrat-run gun areas the most frequent target of mass shootings and gun deaths and taking guns away like the U.K. did "unfeasible."
"Republicans scream back that Democrat-run states with the toughest gun laws, like New York and California, have surging gun violence, which is also true, and that, with so many guns in circulation, any demand for them all to be removed is unfeasible, which it is," Morgan wrote, noting a voice outside of the U.S. cannot change America's ways.
"I love America: It's a magnificent country in so many ways, and American people have an inspiring 'can do' mentality," Morgan concluded. "That's what makes their chronic inaction over gun violence so baffling.
"If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then the definition of this U.S. gun insanity is surely doing nothing over and over again and expecting horrific mass shootings not to keep happening."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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