The Sunday Times May 29, 2022 23
COMMENT
NEWMAN’S
WEEK
“I won’t take monkeypox seriously until Boris
Johnson says it’s nothing to worry about”“I like to think I made my mark:
I vomited on the carpet”“It’s the cost of living — we’ll be
paying for this for ever”Piers Morgan
After Dunblane we said: enough. But
America just keeps on killing its kids
The US is stringently regulated about everything but firearms. So these horrors will happen again and again
have sex, drink alcohol, take drugs,
drive a car, watch violent movies,
gamble or jaywalk. Nor could she buy a
Kinder Surprise chocolate egg anywhere
in America because the little toys inside
are deemed a health hazard by US
authorities. But firing live rounds from
one of the world’s most powerful
military-style weapons was perfectly
legal because under the Second
Amendment of the US constitution she
was deemed to have an inalienable right
to bear arms.
The same right allowed Salvador
Ramos, the Uvalde killer, to legally buy
two semi-automatic rifles and 375
rounds of ammunition when he turned- And yet he couldn’t have legally
bought a beer in Texas for three more
years; nor could he buy more than two
packs of Sudafed, or various French
cheeses like Roquefort because of the
E. coli bacteria in them. America is a
stringently regulated place about
everything, except firearms. It seems
unarguable to me that this ridiculously
easy access to such deadly weapons is at
the core of America’s gun violence crisis.
Of course, many other issues are
involved — from mental illness to drugs
and violent video games. Ramos, like the
Sandy Hook killer, was apparently
obsessed with Call of Duty, a hugely
popular “first-person shooter” war game
that I’m convinced desensitises
disturbed young minds to the reality of
shooting guns and killing lots of people.
But many other countries, including
Britain, have a lot of equally unstable
young men who take drugs and
obsessively play the same games. The
difference is they can’t legally obtain
military-style rifles.
America has followed its usual
Groundhog Day pattern of shock and
outrage, thoughts and prayers, and
shrieking at one another about who or
what is to blame. Democrats scream that
it’s all the Republicans’ fault because
they won’t countenance any new gun-
control laws, which is true. 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.
Invariably after new massacres the
pro-gun lobby calls for yet more guns so
that the “good guys” are able to shoot
the “bad guys”. This makes no sense. Do
you fight obesity with more cake? There
were armed police at the Uvalde school,
but they still couldn’t stop the shooter.
So, inevitably, I fear that once the dust
settles on this latest appalling crime,
absolutely nothing will happen. And I
honestly don’t know what the answer is.
I learnt the hard way after Sandy
Hook that a British man bellowing about
gun control to Americans goes down
about as well as Americans telling us
Brits to abolish the monarchy. This crisis
has to be resolved by Americans, many
of whom are at their wits’ end.
I love America: it’s a magnificent
country in so many ways, and American
people have an inspiring “can do”
mentality. 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 US gun insanity is
surely doing nothing over and over again
and expecting horrific mass shootings
not to keep happening.Piers Morgan is the host of Piers Morgan
Uncensored on TalkTVI learnt the hard
way that a British
man can’t bellow
about gun control
I
got home from doing my TV show
on Tuesday night, poured a glass of
wine and was decompressing in
front of the TV when news suddenly
broke of another mass shooting at a
school in America. Nineteen
children had been slaughtered at
Robb Elementary School in Uvalde,
Texas, by a deranged, hateful teenager
armed with an AR-15-style semi-
automatic rifle.
My heart sank. Not again?
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 five and six. 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
sombre 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.
Sixteen years later I was working for
CNN in New York when 20 kids aged six
and seven were murdered by another
lone lunatic at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Connecticut. For the next few
weeks I got into endless on-air shouting
matches with American gun-rights
activists about what seemed to me to be
the utter madness of the country’s gun
laws or lack of them.
None of it made any difference.
Nothing was done to change any laws or
try to stop another Sandy Hook. And last
Tuesday, ten years and 900 more US
school shootings later (yes, really) theinevitable consequence of that inaction
blew up in Uvalde and the horror was
almost exactly replicated.
The following morning I emailed Pam
Ross, who lost her daughter Joanna at
Dunblane, to say I was thinking of her.
“It’s hard,” she replied. “It’s like this
awful newsreel on repeat, and I
immediately know how 19 mothers are
feeling right now. What they’ll all be
going through. Their lives have changed
in an instant, and the ‘proud’ gun-
owners carry on regardless, thinking
they have that right.”
A few hours later I took my own ten-
year-old daughter to her school art
exhibition and found myself choking up
as I saw her running around excitedly
having fun with her friends without a
care in the world. They were the same
age as the victims in Uvalde, and the
thought of some lunatic infiltrating this
sanctum of peace and happiness to
murder them all in a hail of bullets made
me shudder.
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.
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 the statistics are mind-
boggling. The US has just 4 per cent of
the world’s people but almost half of the
world’s registered civilian firearms, and
there are now more guns in America
(400 million) than people (320 million).
And the US leads the world in gun deaths
with around 40,000 a year, of which
half are murders. That is more than the‘A
ll the cameras have left for
another war” is the
devastating line from one
of my favourite poems by
the Polish writer Wislawa
Szymborska. I thought
about that a couple of
weeks ago in a restaurant in
the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro
when I ran into three fellow British
female journalists, all of us long-time
Afghan hands. Immediately talk turned
to Afghanistan. The Taliban had just
announced women must cover their
faces — bring back the burqa — and we
were all in horror.
Like our Afghan friends, we remain in
shock at what happened in August — and
last week’s report by the Commons
foreign affairs committee shows why. It
was scathing. “Missing in Action,” it said.
“A betrayal of our allies.” “A total
absence of a plan.”
When the Taliban seized Kabul on
August 15, Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab,
then foreign secretary, and Sir Philip
Barton, the Foreign Office’s top civil
servant, were all on holiday.
Few will forget those scenes at Kabul
airport as desperate people clung on to
planes as they took off. Yet as his
department struggled to implement a
poorly planned evacuation under intense
pressure, Barton did not think it necessary
to return until 11 days later (by which time
the civilian evacuation was over), a
decision the report described as “difficult
to understand and impossible to excuse”.
It added: “Sadly, it may have cost
many people the chance to leave
Afghanistan, putting lives in danger.”
One Foreign Office whistleblower said
the Afghan special cases team making
life-or-death decisions about who should
be rescued knew so little that they were
literally googling organisations. It was left
to private individuals to charter planes,
negotiate visas and rescue female judges,
MPs, students and those who worked
with the British forces. But many others
are still there at risk, or have been killed.
Make no mistake. This is one of most
damning reports ever issued by the
foreign affairs committee.
Most unforgivably of all, not only did
we abandon Afghans last summer, butThose who did
get to the UK are
stuck in hotels,
as Ukrainians
are welcomed
into homes
we have continued to fail them. After a
few months of rose-tinted talk of a
“Taliban 2.0” — even as they closed girls’
schools and appointed a government of
men, replacing the Ministry for Women
with the Ministry for Protection of Virtue
and Prevention of Vice — they have
turned out just as they were in the 1990s.
Western diplomats keep meeting
Taliban officials. Whatever they are
saying is achieving nothing. As
international aid has been cut off and the
population starves, the Taliban have
done nothing to end their pariah status.
This will come home to haunt us. Not
surprisingly, as the number of migrants
crossing the Channel in small boats
keeps rising, the biggest proportion are
Afghans fleeing the Taliban.
If the government no longer cares
about Afghan women, the fact that
Afghanistan has once again become a
magnet for jihadists should surely be of
concern. Another report popped into
my inbox on Friday, from the UN
monitoring committee, warning that
al-Qaeda now has “increased freedom of
action” in Afghanistan. It also points out
that 41 members of the Taliban on the
UN sanctions list for terrorism have been
appointed to the cabinet and other
senior positions in government.
Meanwhile, those Afghans we did get
to the UK are stuck in hotels, watching
Ukrainian refugees being welcomed into
people’s homes. On Wednesday I
attended a dinner in London with
several Afghan women. A former
ambassador now living in a bedsit in
Wembley. A student who dreamt of
teaching at Kabul University, now cut off
from her family. They are still waiting for
asylum papers. When they call the
Home Office, it is busy dealing with
Ukrainians. I felt ashamed.
In August the cameras will go back for
the anniversary of the takeover and
briefly remind everyone of the girls
deprived of schooling, the women
forced to stay home and the families so
desperate they are selling off children
and kidneys. Even as we blame the
Taliban, Afghans will never forgive us.
@ChristinaLambChristina
Lamb
Afghan exit
was a truly
shameful
moment in
our history
next 23 richest countries combined.
Horrifyingly, more American civilians
(1.5 million) have now been killed by
guns since 1968 than the total number of
US soldiers killed in every military
conflict since the War of Independence.
If the scale of gun violence in the
States is terrifying, then the refusal to do
anything to combat it is completely
mystifying to outsiders. But it’s only
when you live in America for any length
of time that you understand how deeply
embedded guns are in the culture and
how much harder it is to do what we did
in Britain.
One of the most disturbing gun stories
I’ve covered involved a nine-year-old girl
taken by her parents to a gun range
called Bullets and Burgers on the
Arizona border, where a former marine
instructor named Charles Vacca handed
her an Uzi sub-machinegun, loaded with
real bullets — Uzis can spray ten bullets a
second — to shoot at human-shaped
targets. As her parents could be heard
laughing and encouraging her in the
background — it was all filmed on a
phone — the girl lost control, the Uzi
recoiled sideways from her tiny hands
and she shot the instructor dead.
It was against the law for this girl to