But by 8.20 p.m., the car had barely travelled a mile due to the insane traffic caused by multiple police roadblocks for tomorrow’s big day. I began to panic.
‘How far is it?’ I asked the driver.
‘Another mile or so,’ he replied.
‘OK, I’ll walk.’
I got out and began striding in the general direction of where I knew the studio was. But every time I tried to walk down a road, I’d find myself either in a dead end or at another roadblock.
By 8.40 p.m., I was sweating profusely, breathing heavily and virtually running through the cold, dark night.
Jonathan rang.
‘Where are you?’
‘I’ve no fucking idea!’
Fortunately, it turned out I wasn’t actually that far away, and with some directions from a policeman, I eventually arrived at 8.55 p.m.
The makeup department dusted me with a quick powdering, and I used a hair dryer to blow off the sweat, while simultaneously gulping air to try and calm down.
I walked on set at 8.59 p.m., sat down next to Wolf Blitzer, and at 9 p.m. he handed over to me as if nothing had happened.
MONDAY, 21 JANUARY 2013
I got to meet Richard Schiff, who played one of the greatest dramatic political characters in TV history – Toby Ziegler, the tormented White House communications director in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.
In one episode, Toby delivered a devastatingly effective soliloquy about gun control:
‘If you combine the populations of Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Australia, you get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had thirty-two thousand gun deaths last year, they had one hundred and twelve. Do you think it’s because Americans are more homicidal by nature, or do you think it’s because those guys have gun control?’
As we finished our brief interview tonight, he said: ‘Thank you for not asking me about guns.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I would have gotten very upset …’
‘Really? Why?’
He then did indeed get very upset – launching a spectacular rant about gun violence in America. It was searingly articulate, stunningly evocative and utterly uncompromising. Exactly, in fact, like Toby Ziegler.
I also interviewed Stevie Wonder.
‘I heard you on TV talking about the whole gun thing,’ he said. ‘And I said to one of my friends, “You should go with me to get a gun, to show how easy it is for me to get one.” Imagine me with a gun.’
The crazy truth is that in many parts of America there’s nothing legally to stop a blind man like Stevie buying an armful of assault weapons.
TUESDAY, 22 JANUARY 2013
A Washington-based website called the Daily Caller has exposed me today as a shameless and relentless offender when it comes to talking about my brother Jeremy being an army officer.
They’ve gone back over all my debates on the show, and found endless examples of me dropping this fact into my argument.
It’s something that Jonathan’s warned me about before, but I don’t intend stopping the habit.
It’s very hard for the more rabid gun rights protagonists to harangue me for ‘knowing nothing about guns’, when my own brother is an active soldier who’s served tours of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside US troops.
My whole point is that assault weapons and high-capacity magazines belong in the military, not in civilian hands. What better way to reinforce this point than to constantly mention what my brother does for a living?
WEDNESDAY, 23 JANUARY 2013
In an interview set up by Buckingham Palace to improve his image, Prince Harry has hammered the press, bemoaned his lack of privacy when he plays naked billiards in Vegas with complete strangers and boasted of killing Taliban with finger skills he honed playing Xbox.
Can I politely suggest that Harry heed the advice of the late, great Queen Mother about royal decorum: ‘Never complain, never explain, and never be heard speaking in public.’
TUESDAY, 29 JANUARY 2013
Meghan and Steve Krakauer, my digital producer, fell in love last year while working together on promoting the show, and are getting married on Saturday in Houston.
‘Why don’t we do a show from there?’ I suggested to Jonathan this morning. ‘It’s time we went and heard the other side of the gun argument. And I’m going to be down in Texas anyway.’
He agreed, adding: ‘You could go to a range and actually shoot an AR-15.’
‘Wouldn’t that look a bit odd?’
‘No. One of the arguments the gun-rights people use against you is that you don’t understand what these guns are like because you’ve never used one. This is a perfect chance to tackle that argument head on.’
It’s true that I have barely fired a gun before in my life. I shot a few clay pigeons once, and spent a few hours at an indoor gun range in Prague at a friend’s stag weekend a decade ago.
But other than that, nothing.
By the end of the day, we had booked a huge gun store and range called Tactical Firearms on the outskirts of Houston for Monday night’s show.
THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY 2013
Appeared on the Tonight Show on NBC and Jay Leno came for his usual chat backstage.
‘Here’s the problem,’ he chuckled. ‘For you to be telling Americans you want more gun control laws is like you going to Germany and telling them that they suddenly have to have speed limits on the autobahns.’
Jay, a car fanatic who owns more than eighty new and classic vehicles, added: ‘They wouldn’t want to hear it, and particularly not from someone with an English accent!’
I’m sure he’s right, but that’s not a reason to stop.
The latest CNN poll says that the majority of Americans are now in favour of a renewed ban on assault weapons (56 per cent) and high-capacity magazines (58 per cent).
President Obama faces an uphill battle in Congress to turn these numbers into new laws, but no tougher than Abraham Lincoln faced when trying to abolish slavery.
After the show, I asked Jay if he had any advice for me with regard to working with Jeff Zucker.
Jay, of course, was moved by Jeff at NBC to 10 p.m. to let Conan O’Brien take over the Tonight Show, then returned to his old slot within a year.
‘Jeff’s a great guy,’ he replied, ‘but if he offers you 10 p.m. at CNN, don’t take it!’
Then he fell about laughing.
I told Jeff. ‘That is very funny!’ he replied.
FRIDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2013
Flew to Houston and had dinner tonight with our booker Shant and Juliana at a great restaurant near the hotel.
The maître d’ was a well-spoken, smart guy in an expensive suit, and we got chatting about guns. As I seem to with almost everyone at the moment.
‘Do you own a gun?’ I asked.
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got a lot of guns, including two AR-15s.’
‘Why do you need those?’
‘I go hog hunting with them.’
‘Hog hunting?’
‘Yes. We go out with night-vision goggles on, sometimes in helicopters, and shoot wild hogs with AR-15s. They’re the best gun for it, because they’re light, easy to use and don’t have much recoil.’
‘What kind of magazine drum do you use?’
‘As big as I can get, but at least thirty rounds. You need them that big because the hogs come in large packs.’
‘And why do you need to kill the hogs?’
‘They ruin crops. There are millions of them and they cause billions of dollars of damage to crops each year.’
I’ve only been in Texas a few hours, and I’ve already heard a completely new argument for the ‘need’ to have an AR-15.
There’s clearly a massive difference culturally between big East Coast cities like New York and rural areas like this.
I got back to the hotel and Googled hog hunting. The maître d’ had been entirely accurate.
The US Department of Agriculture estimates there are four million to five million wild hogs in America, and they cause between $1 billion and $2 billion worth of crop damage every year.
Food, quite literally, for thought.
MONDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2013
Brad, who’s been setting up tonight’s show at Tactical Firearms, rang at lunchtime.
‘Alex Jones just tweeted that you’re going down there, and he’s joining you, so there could be a reception committee.’
Christ, that’s all I need. That lunatic confronting me at a gun store. But it’s too late to change plans now.
‘The store has security, and we’ve informed the local law enforcement too,’ Brad added. ‘It should be fine.’
The word ‘should’ is always so discomforting in these situations.
By the time I arrived at 5 p.m., there was a small but noisy group of protestors wearing combat clothes, carrying rifles and shouting through megaphones.
No sign of Alex Jones, though.
My car sped past them, and I met the Tactical Firearms owner, Jeremy Alcede, a large, thick-set man who was in a very good mood.
‘We’ve increased our sales four to five times [since Sandy Hook],’ he boasted. ‘We were doing about $1 million a month and we started doing $1 million a week until we sold out. Right now, it’s impossible to get guns in, and ammunition.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘My customers feel they’re going to be banned and need to go get them now while they still can.’
We went through to the range, and he gave me instruction on a variety of guns that I was going to fire, including a semi-automatic and automatic AR-15, both with thirty-round magazines.
I picked up the semi-automatic. It was amazingly light. Jeremy showed me how it worked, and it seemed extraordinarily easy to use.
We set the cameras, and I was about to start firing it, when there was a commotion at the door, and suddenly Alex Jones was standing in front of me, clutching a video camera.
‘I’ve come to see you fire guns!’ he cried jubilantly.
‘Well, we’re actually doing it for my show tonight, Alex, so I’ll have to ask you to leave I’m afraid.’
He was hot and sweaty, and very overexcited. And I assumed he’d been tipped off by Jeremy, who knew Jones well.
But no matter. Jones tried throwing a few questions at me, but I batted them away as politely and calmly as I could.
‘Will you shake my hand?’ he yelled.
‘Sure,’ I said, and I shook his hand.
This seemed to take the wind out of his puffed-up sails, and he eventually walked back out.
I picked up the AR-15 again and began firing at the target. My first few shots were slow, as I got the hang of it. Then I began to pump the trigger much faster, and pretty accurately.
I imagined one of these in the hands of James Holmes at Aurora, or Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook. It was the same weapon both used in their murderous rampages.
It made me feel uncomfortable and nervy. But I continued firing.
The bullets were exploding out, creating massive noise and exuding an air, and smell, of raw, deadly power. That maître d’ had been right. Very little recoil, and frighteningly easy to use.
It took me about a minute to unload the full magazine. And this was the first time I’d ever fired an assault rifle.
‘How many rounds could someone who knows what they’re doing, like you, fire in a minute with one of these?’
‘If I had multiple magazines, maybe two hundred. But the true cyclical rate, if you had an unlimited magazine, is about four hundred rounds a minute.’
Staggering.
‘You can buy these at Walmart. Do you think that’s a good idea?’
‘For law-abiding citizens, I think it’s an excellent idea. If you start banning one particular anything, I don’t care if it’s a particular type of ammunition, firearm, magazine, where is it going to stop? You give anybody an inch, they’re going to take a mile. If you’re a law-abiding citizen, there should be no more bans on anything.’
I fired the fully automatic AR-15, which is illegal unless it was registered before 1986, and it was much faster, as I expected. But I was much less accurate.
‘About twice as fast, and you missed the target so many times,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s why they are called spray and pray. You spray bullets and pray it hits the target. Because they’re not very accurate at all.’
‘How many bullets can it fire in a minute?’
‘About six hundred and fifty rounds.’
I fired several more guns, including a ludicrously large Browning M2 anti-aircraft machine gun that looked like something even Rambo would blanch at. I had to sit down to use it, and it blazed away in a shocking orgy of noise and smoke.
‘How many rounds can this fire?’
‘About nine hundred a minute.’
‘These are illegal, right?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Jeremy, ‘because it was made before the previous assault weapon ban. If you pay me twenty-five to forty-five thousand dollars, you can buy it today, and take it home once you’ve passed a few background checks.’
‘Other than home defence, why do you need assault weapons?’ I asked.
‘The way the world is going, the military and United Nations are going to come in and try to take our guns.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ I said.
‘Anything’s possible.’
‘Could you honestly imagine US marines charging onto your property to try to steal your guns?’
‘I would hope not,’ he said. ‘But if it’s an executive order … who knows?’
‘Do you think the American military would attack its own people?’
‘If they’re forced to, I don’t know. I would think at least 40 to 50 per cent would.’
‘Do you think that’s what many Texans feel about why they need a weapon like this?’
‘They want it because they are law-abiding citizens and they know it’s legal to purchase now, but won’t be later. So they’d rather buy it now to be legal than do something illegal. Because these are law-abiding citizens we’re talking about.’
At the end of the show, Brad came up to me and said: ‘We have a slight problem. Alex Jones has got a load more of his supporters outside, and he’s shouting stuff about you through a megaphone.’
I got into the car and we drove past the ‘protest’. There must have been fifty large Texans, some armed with guns, baying abuse at me. I toyed with getting out and remonstrating with them on camera. But I actually think one of them might have had a pop at me. They looked mad enough.
We sped away, and I was relieved to get back to the hotel in one piece.
WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2013
Bobby Kennedy’s daughter Kerry was just four years old in 1963 when her Uncle John, then president of the United States, was assassinated, and eight when her dad too was gunned down.
I interviewed her tonight, and suggested it was time America’s politicians showed some of the bravery of her father, a legendary campaigning senator and attorney general.
Particularly as a million more Americans have been shot dead since Bobby died and, in the fifty-five days since the Sandy Hook school massacre alone, the gun-related death toll already stands at a staggering sixteen hundred.
‘It’s tough,’ she replied, ‘because the NRA is very strong and very threatening. But one of the women at this event I attended today, whose daughter was wounded at Virginia Tech, put it so eloquently when she said, “You want to know what courage is? Courage is standing in a classroom and seeing a guy with a gun, and wondering what’s going to happen to you, and if you’re going to survive that moment, and being six or seven years old. Courage is not standing up to the NRA. So let’s get this into perspective. If you lose your seat because you vote for this legislation and that saves a life, I think you’ve served well. You’ve served our country well.”’
THURSDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2013
A deranged ex-policeman has gone on the rampage in Los Angeles, in apparent revenge for being fired from the LAPD five years ago.
Christopher Dorner shot dead the daughter of his old police captain, and her boyfriend, then murdered a policeman who tried to apprehend him, and wounded another. He posted a bizarre, rambling, twenty-page, eleven-hundred-word ‘manifesto’ on Facebook, in which he listed the names of forty more people he wanted to kill – and expressed his admiration for a host of politicians, celebrities and media figures, including Barack Obama (‘Mr President, I think you’ve done a heck of a job’); Charlie Sheen (‘You’re effin’ awesome!’); and me.
‘Give Piers Morgan an indefinite resident alien and Visa card,’ Dorner wrote, before addressing me directly: ‘Mr Morgan, the problem that many American gun owners have with you and your continuous discussion of gun control is that you are not an American citizen and have an accent that is distinct and clarifies that you are a foreigner. I want you to know that I agree with you 100 per cent on enacting stricter firearm laws, but you must understand that your critics will always have in the back of their mind that you are native to a country that we won our sovereignty from while using firearms as a last resort in defence and you come from a country that has no legal private ownership of firearms. That is disheartening to American gun owners and rightfully so.’
He then went on to endorse the main gun-control suggestions that I have campaigned for on my CNN show, and which President Obama is trying to push through Congress.
All of which now seems utterly, obscenely preposterous given his very next action after posting the manifesto was to go and shoot a load of innocent people.
MONDAY, 11 FEBRUARY 2013
I interviewed Lorraine Kelly for my Life Stories show tonight, and among her guests were two parents who lost their five-year-old daughter in the Dunblane massacre.
Lorraine covered the story as a young reporter in Scotland, and became so close to Pam and Kenny Ross that she was asked to speak at the memorial for the devastating massacre.
She broke down and wept as she recounted to me how she’d gone to see the dead body of Joanna Ross in her bedroom. ‘I just lost it,’ she admitted, ‘seeing that wee beautiful girl lying there in her bed.’
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 30
