CORRECTION: In a previous version of this column, Alan Dershowitz’s involvement with the petition to deport Piers Morgan was misstated. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

After several national tragedies involving firearms, CNN’s Piers Morgan, the one-Englishman-propaganda-machine, favors taking away our gun rights and yells at his dissenting guests. We must reject Morgan’s argumentative style, and we must reject his argument.

Requiring background checks for firearm purchases is a practical measure, but Morgan’s freedom-encroaching firearm purchase restrictions are not sensible.

Morgan’s style after nationally reported gun violence is to invite gun rights advocates onto his show, including people from the National Rifle Association, and pound his fist on the news desk with the vigor of someone who assumes he has moral superiority over gun owners and Second Amendment advocates.

It is in bad taste to use dead victims of violence as political props, but Morgan does not seem to mind. In one segment, Morgan asked gun rights advocate John Lott, “How many more kids have to die before you guys say we want less guns?”

The CNN host believes Americans stand behind him and against organizations like the NRA. In a segment with Alan Dershowitz, Morgan said “a lot of Americans” are “totally behind what I’m trying to do, which is a very specific thing. It’s not to grab anybody’s guns — other than these military-style assault weapons.”

Morgan is out of touch. The public is divided on the issue of gun rights in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy. Fifty-one percent of Americans are against any ban on semi-automatic guns, known as assault rifles, according to a Dec. 27 Gallup poll.

Morgan’s sense of public-endorsed moral superiority is baseless, but he can pretend.

In one segment on Morgan’s show regarding the Sandy Hook shooting, Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, revealed he is against semi-automatic weapon bans. Morgan called Pratt an “unbelievably stupid man.”

By Morgan’s definition, more than half of Americans are unbelievably stupid people. If Morgan moves back to London because he finds us stupid, we should confiscate his umbrella at the airport.

Regarding the Sandy Hook shooting, Morgan also accused Lott of not giving “a damn about the gun murder rate in America.” Morgan must be unaware that comparing gun murder rates among the states reveals a refutation to his argument that gun control is guaranteed to limit mass shootings and other gun violence.

Cross-referencing FBI gun crime data for each state, mass shooting data from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and gun control scores for each state also provided by the Brady Campaign shows gun control levels do not predict gun violence levels.

For instance, plotting a point for each state across a chart — where the x-axis tracks Brady Campaign gun control scores and the y-axis tracks gun murders per capita — reveals a flat trend in terms of murder rates across the spectrum of gun control.

Looking at the scattered points on this chart, it is apparent that light gun control does not guarantee more murder and strict gun control does not guarantee less murder.

Benjamin Franklin warned that those who would give up his or her essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety, but Morgan asks Americans to do something worse than exchange liberty for safety.

Morgan wants Americans to give up the essential liberty of firearm ownership with no guarantee of safety. He, like President Barack Obama and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, demands we curtail essential liberty for nothing.

We must reject freedom-limiting weapon bans and purchase limitations because preserving liberty trumps implementing ineffective, feel-good measures.

Requiring background checks on firearm purchases, as long as privacy is maintained, is acceptable because doing so does not limit our freedom.

Michael Stikkel is a junior computer engineering major and MBA candidate in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mcstikke@syr.edu.

Published on January 14, 2013 at 2:19 am