I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘If I may, let me challenge you on what you just said,’ I replied, trying to control my rising temper. ‘A lot of people who don’t want to strengthen gun control have said this is not the day to debate it. I’ll tell you the day to debate it would have been yesterday, to prevent this happening.’
My voice rose.
‘When you have a young man like this able to legally get six thousand rounds of ammunition off the internet, to buy four weapons including an assault rifle, and for all of this to be perfectly legal in modern America, allowing him to carry out the biggest shooting in the history of the United States, that, I’m afraid, means it’s too late for this debate, for those people who lost their lives!
‘So don’t patronise me about when we should be talking about the gun control debate. You tell me a good reason why we should not strengthen the law now to stop another young man like him going into a store tomorrow, buying four more weapons, six thousand rounds of ammunition on the internet, and killing and shooting another seventy people in America!’
‘Because we don’t even know the full facts of this situation yet,’ Kopel retorted. ‘I know you’ve said many times on the air, “America’s got too many guns.” You want to drastically reduce the number of guns. If your whole point is there’s too many guns, we’ve got to get rid of lots of them, drastically constrict things, and you think somehow that’s going to make it better, well, there’s no real evidence that it will.’
He stared at me defiantly. And I stared equally defiantly back.
‘I respect the Second Amendment,’ I said. ‘I respect the average American’s right to defend themselves in their own homes with a firearm, if they need to. That is a totally different issue from what we’re talking about today. It’s got nothing to do with that right whatsoever.’
And it doesn’t. The Founding Fathers didn’t imagine deranged young students slaughtering fellow Americans in cinemas when they drew up the Second Amendment. They imagined people having muskets to defend themselves against an invading army such as the British.
Well, let’s get real here. The British aren’t going to be invading America again anytime soon. And nor is anybody else, given that the United States has half the world’s military firepower, including a reputed five thousand nuclear weapons.
And if, as some Americans believe, they need weapons to protect themselves against their own government turning tyrannical against them, let me point out the bleeding obvious: a few assault rifles aren’t going to be much good against a nuke.
I came off air feeling utterly incensed.
‘That was brilliantly handled,’ Jonathan said. ‘You were angry but not too angry, and you argued your point really well.’
‘I wanted to punch him,’ I replied.
‘I know. I’m glad you didn’t. You know something – I think you found your voice tonight.’
A rare moment of levity for the Romneys during an intense, bruising, and ultimately unsuccessful election campaign.
CHAPTER 9
MONDAY, 23 JULY 2012
Perhaps the single bravest, most outspoken politician in America on guns is Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor.
Tonight he came into my studio and laid into his more cowardly colleagues.
‘I think there is a perception in the political world that the NRA [National Rifle Association] has more power than the American people,’ he said. ‘I do not believe that.’
I asked, ‘Why do so many Americans not feel angry enough to demand further gun control?’
‘Well, I would take it one step further. I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say, we’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.
‘After all, police officers want to go home to their families. And we’re doing everything we can to make their job more difficult but, more importantly, more dangerous, by leaving guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, and letting people who have those guns buy things like armour-piercing bullets.
‘The only reason to have an armour-piercing bullet is to go through a bullet-resistant vest. The only people who wear bullet-resistant vests are our police officers.’
I asked him what the politicians should do to curb gun violence.
‘Well, the Supreme Court has held that while it’s a constitutional right to bear arms, the government also has the right to have reasonable restrictions. An assault weapon ban would be considered I think by the Supreme Court a reasonable restriction.
‘Not selling guns to minors or to people with criminal records, or psychiatric problems or drug addiction problems, would be reasonable restrictions. So you start out with that.
‘Then we can have guns but not every kind of gun. I think everybody wants to preserve the right of people that want to use guns for sport, hunting or target practice. But that doesn’t mean that you have an assault weapon. That doesn’t mean you have a rifle that’s advertised as able to bring down a commercial airliner at a mile and a half, or bullets that are designed to go through bullet-resistant vests.’
Then he said:
‘I think the first question you might want to ask, if you could get the two presidential candidates sitting here across from you, would be: “Why, Governor Romney, did you sign a bill outlawing the sale of assault weapons when you were governor of Massachusetts, but today don’t believe it’s the right thing? What changed your mind?”
‘“Why, President Obama, did you campaign three years ago on a promise to try to enact legislation that would ban assault rifles, assault weapons? What changed your mind? Why did you not during the last three years do anything?”
‘And I think it’s incumbent on them to explain what changed their minds.’
One of the more stupid arguments gun rights people spout is that there’s no point banning guns because bad guys will always find a way to get one.
The same argument could apply to terrorists, but nobody ever suggests that.
‘Can you imagine,’ said Bloomberg, ‘if there was a disease that we caught all of a sudden, some epidemiologist found a plague that was going to kill forty-eight thousand people in this country in the next four years? I suspect there would be a lot of yelling and screaming and demanding, and everybody would want to vote money and personnel to try to stop it. This is exactly the same thing. Except we’re not doing it.’
I asked him to explain his interpretation of the Second Amendment text.
‘I wasn’t there, but we have a mechanism under our Constitution that the Founding Fathers put in to answer exactly that question. It’s called the Supreme Court. The judicial system up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has ruled that you have a right to bear arms, but reasonable restrictions can be applied in terms of the kind of arms, the number of arms, who can buy them.
‘And that’s what really matters. It doesn’t matter what you think or I think. It matters what the Supreme Court thinks and what the legislature does.
‘And you come back to the history of the country. We started out with our muskets. And today here we are where some people think everybody should be armed. There was a congressman that I heard quoted as saying, “If we had armed everybody in that cinema, then somebody would have pulled a gun and shot the young kid who killed twelve people and injured fifty-odd. I don’t know that you would want to have your kids in that cinema when everybody starts shooting. It’s a circular firing squad.”
‘We just cannot continue this kind of carnage. Now, someday there will be a shooting, which you would think would trigger in the American psyche this “I’m not going to take it any more” attitude—’
‘I thought it would be this,’ I interjected.
‘Wait a second. Maybe if you shot a president. But Ronald Reagan when he got shot didn’t trigger it. Maybe if you shot a congresswoman. No. Maybe if you shot a
bunch of students on campus. No. Maybe if you shot a bunch of people in a cinema. I don’t know what it is. We obviously haven’t gotten there yet. But we just cannot continue.’
He’s right, what the hell will it take?
TUESDAY, 24 JULY 2012
Michael Moore had vowed not to give TV interviews in the aftermath of any mass shooting, following the release of his stunning movie Bowling for Columbine.
But the Aurora shooting compelled him to break that vow on my show tonight.
And to my surprise, given he’s an arch Democrat, he blamed both sides of the political divide.
‘I think that both conservatives and liberals are half right on this issue,’ he said. ‘The conservatives when they say guns don’t kill people. I would alter that to “Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people”. We do this more than anybody else. Of the twenty-three richest countries, over 80 per cent of all gun murders happen in one country: ours.
‘The left, liberals, believe that if we just have more gun control laws, all the problems are going to go away. Well, I don’t think so. Yes, it will be reduced. There’s no question about that. If that individual in Aurora had not had so many magazines, not so many bullets, not so many people would have been shot. There’s no question that less guns will mean less murders.
‘But it won’t really get rid of the larger problem of our culture. What is it about us as Americans? You know, we’re not any better or worse than you Brits, or the Japanese, or the Canadians.
‘Yet in Japan, less than seven gun murders every year. In Canada, about two hundred. In the UK, around forty a year, in a nation of about seventy million people.
‘So why here? Why us? You can’t say it’s because of the violent movies and the violent video games. Because I got to tell you, those Canadian kids right across the river from Detroit, they’re watching the same violent movies and playing the same violent video games.
‘And yet in that city across from Detroit, most years they have one, maybe zero, murders a year, in Windsor, Ontario.’
‘In Japan,’ I pointed out, ‘they made it law in 1958 that no person shall possess a firearm. The complete opposite, in other words, from America’s right to bear arms. And Japan has barely any gun crime as a result.’
‘Yes, and we hear people say about Americans, we have this violent past. Well, Japan, violent past. Germany, violent past maybe? A history of maybe one thousand, two thousand years from the Huns to the Nazis. Very violent people. And yet they don’t kill each other now. They don’t shoot each other with guns.
‘Why is that? What is it about us that wants to do this?’
It’s a great question.
WEDNESDAY, 25 JULY 2012
I discovered today that Kinder Surprise eggs are banned from American stores, including Walmart, because of the risk to one’s health from choking on the tiny toys inside them.
I’m also prohibited from purchasing more than six packets of Sudafed (in case I’m building a secret drug factory) and a variety of French cheeses (for bacteria-infective reasons).
Yet many of those same stores, again including Walmart, stock myriad guns including AR-15 assault rifles.
I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for why a Kinder egg is deemed more dangerous than an AR-15. There has to be, right?
THURSDAY, 26 JULY 2012
Mitt Romney’s in London for a brief Olympics stopover, and ran into immediate trouble by expressing concern over whether London was ready, questioning the public’s enthusiasm for the big sporting event and ‘security issues’ in particular.
These have been the exact same criticisms hurled at Olympic organisers by many in Britain for the last month. But that’s not the point – you don’t visit someone’s house for dinner and lambast the quality of their curtains, even if they don’t like the curtains themselves.
I interviewed him at an outdoor venue next to the River Thames.
When we started, two hazards immediately reared their ugly heads: 1) it was very windy, sending Romney’s hair into a permanent tailspin, not a cool look for a usually immaculately groomed would-be president; and 2) the skies were buzzing with helicopters flying on and off the nearby battleship HMS Ocean, causing filming to constantly stop and start, usually at a crucial moment.
To his credit, though, he saw the funny side.
‘I’ll have to deal with worse than wild hair and noisy choppers if I become president!’
Romney seemed more uptight than the last two times I’d interviewed him, which is hardly surprising given the stakes of this election campaign.
His attitude to guns was curious given he once signed an assault weapons ban.
‘If you had a law saying guns were going to be regulated in some way that would end gun violence, there might be some merit to having that discussion. But the truth is there’s no particular change to the law that’s going to keep people who are intent on doing harm from doing harm.’
‘Shouldn’t a political leader be the one that says actually we’re going to do whatever it takes to make it as difficult as possible?’ I replied, exasperated. ‘That’s what we do with terrorism.’
‘I respect the right of the people to bear arms for any legal purpose. The real question is, what things can we do to prevent the kinds of tragedy from occurring that we saw? And the answer is to find people who are distressed and deranged and evil and do our very best to find them, to cure them, to help them, to keep them from being able to do harm.’
‘But this guy, James Holmes, the gunman in Aurora, wouldn’t have been picked up by anything,’ I said. ‘He had no history of mental illness. He had no history of criminality. He was able to buy four weapons, including this assault rifle. Then, on the internet, thousands of rounds of ammunition. And a gun cartridge that could hold a hundred bullets, which enabled him to fire at seventy people in a matter of a minute or two. And I say to you, where is the movement now by political leaders in America to mean that there can’t be another guy who can do that as easily?’
Romney looked just as exasperated as me.
‘If he didn’t have a gun, he’d have used a bomb! The idea that somehow the instrument of violence, if one can make it illegal, would keep a person from doing something illegal, is not a policy that actually will be successful.’
Not with that attitude from a potential president, it won’t!
I remembered Michael Bloomberg’s question.
‘When you were governor of Massachusetts, you extended a ban on these kinds of assault weapons because you felt there was a qualitative difference between shooting and hunting and the guns you need for that, and having guns where the only capability appears to be mass killing.’
‘Actually in Massachusetts,’ he replied, ‘we had the pro-gun lobby and the anti-gun lobby come together and fashion a bill that both thought was an advance. So it was supported by both sides of the debate. That’s one reason why I was able to support that.’
‘So if President Obama called you up and said look, we need to get together in the wake of this worst ever shooting and do a compromise deal that makes it more difficult for people, would you at least in principle be happy to have that conversation?’
‘Piers,’ he said firmly, ‘I don’t support new gun laws in our country.’
FRIDAY, 27 JULY 2012
Sad news. Jim Walton has resigned.
He’s been a great president as far as I’m concerned – a smart, kind and loyal man, who’s been here for thirty years, since CNN started.
But the network’s had a rough time in the ratings this year, mainly due to the markedly slower news cycle than last year’s mayhem, and I guess he’s falling on his sword for it.
SATURDAY, 28 JULY 2012
It emerged today that the AR-15 assault rifle, as used by Aurora shooter James Holmes, and his hundred-bullet magazine, were both outlawed under a previous assault weapons ban signed by President Clinton in 1994. But in 2004, the ban expired and was not renewed.
The reason?
Numerous Democrats lost their seats after voting for the assault weapons ban in 1994, because the National Rifle Association aggressively targeted them with negative ads.
In fact, so many of them were forced out that the Democrats lost control of the House.
And that’s why they’re all so terrified of the NRA today.
SUNDAY, 5 AUGUST 2012
A white supremacist entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin today, and shot dead six worshippers, wounding four others – including a policeman.
Once again, the gun rights lobby was quick to defend their ‘right to bear arms’.
They always come out fighting in the immediate aftermath of these mass shootings, suppressing any cries for tighter gun control by just making more noise than their opponents.
The big question for America is whether, after the presidential election on 6 November, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will have the guts to stand up, say so and do something about it.
I see absolutely zero will on either’s part to do so.
SUNDAY, 12 AUGUST 2012
The London Olympics ended today, and what a stunning fortnight it was.
I hosted my show from a studio overlooking the Olympic Stadium for a week, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt prouder of my country.
After all the doomsayers’ grim predictions of inevitable traffic chaos, security shambles and performance flops by Team Great Britain – the complete opposite happened. It was a fabulous success for the athletes, and for all the politicians, armed forces, police and volunteers who collaborated to make it run so smoothly.
For a nation of our relatively small size to come third in the Olympics after America and China is quite extraordinary.
The first thing I’d do now, if I was David Cameron, is order at least an hour of compulsory daily sport for every state school child in Britain, and make schools enforce it.
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 23
