‘There is no metal shark in the water’

Texas radio host Alex Jones began a White House petition in late December to have CNN’s Piers Morgan sent back to England for threatening your Constitutionally protected right to bear arms. Last year’s string of mass shootings led Morgan, a limey, to promote a federally mandated ban on “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”

He also wants loopholes closed that allow sellers at gun shows to skip background checks.

Morgan invited Jones, whose radio show plays on 140 stations and reaches 3 million listeners, to appear on his show Piers Morgan Tonight, Monday, Jan. 7, to talk out their differences.

“Why do you want to deport me?” Morgan asked.

It was a surreal interview in which Jones dominated the program by spewing a weird stream of subconscious poetry that evoked an enormous boulder careening down a mountainside.

The avalanche of words started slow but accelerated rapidly beyond Jones’ ability to control it.

It went: “We did it as a way to bring attention to the fact that we have all these foreigners and the Russian government, the official Chinese government—Mao said political power goes out of the barrel of a gun, he killed about 80 million people because he’s the only guy that had the guns—so we did it to point out that this is globalism, and the mega banks that control the planet and brag that they’ve taken over in Bloomberg, AP, Reuters, you name it—brag that they’re going to get our guns as well.”

The Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect duck hunting, Jones said, nearly mastering the flow of his own gibberish. “It’s there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs,” he added.

Jones resumed his wanton tirade, reminding viewers that Hitler and Stalin confiscated firearms in their day. He challenged Morgan to a fistfight, invited him shooting and mimicked his British accent. But the main thrust of his harangue came close enough to the surface at times that viewers with pricked ears were able to discern it.

His blistering diatribe, cooked down, reduces to this: Civilians with firepower check the mighty power of the conniving federal government and bring down crime rates overall.

Jones played the notes with more panache, but the song is identical to the one we heard weeks ago from the National Rifle Association: We want guns. But, more importantly, we need them, and there is no possibility of limiting access to them without causing more harm than good.

Inviting Jones to speak on behalf of those who oppose gun laws at first looks like an underhanded trick on Morgan’s part to cast his enemies in a hideous light. More likely than not, Morgan knew better than to anticipate an elegant debate with Jones. He seemed ready from the very beginning to provide Jones the rope with which to hang himself.

By displaying Jones to an audience other than, as political commentator Alan Dershowitz dubbed them, “[Jones’] own little paranoid choir,” Morgan exposed parallels that underpin the hysterical psyche of the remote lunatic fringe and its more organized, suit-wearing political action arm: the NRA.

Viewers learned that at least 1 percent of Americans—most likely a conservative estimate—live under the impression that the gun resting under their pillow is the only thing keeping the nation from falling under the control of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Peter Grier, Washington editor for The Christian Science Monitor, wasn’t alone when, the next day, he posed the question: “Who won the wild debate?”

When you’re walking downtown and you see a paranoid schizophrenic screaming obscenities and shaking his fists at the sun, you don’t ask who won.