Quotes of the day

This week marks the end of Piers Morgan’s show on CNN and his run has been full of effusive praise for liberals and damnation of conservatives. Even before Morgan began his show, back in 2010, he tipped his hand in which ideological direction he wanted to take the show when he revealed who he most wanted to interview: “I’d love to do President Obama. I like what he’s done for the reputation of America abroad, which I’m not sure many Americans fully understand.”

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In contrast, Morgan viciously attacked gun rights advocates and Tea Party activists, while giving better treatment to Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who he once asked how many times he had “been properly in love?”

From oozing that Obama was the “perfect physical specimen” to repeatedly insulting “unbelievably stupid” gun rights activists and comparing the Tea Party to Nazis, the one time British tabloid editor alienated viewers with one progressive punch after another.

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Morgan was not only a ratings disaster for CNN, he was a public relations disaster. For years the left-leaning network had tried to fool audiences into believing CNN is unbiased. Morgan’s unrelenting anti-gun hysteria ripped the mask off the entire network.

It wasn’t just that Morgan was bizarrely desperate to infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of Americans, it was that CNN allowed him to berate guests who disagreed with him, exploit the victims, and obsess over the issue long after the American people had moved on.

Morgan’s anti-gun crusade was also seen by many as nothing more than an attack on rural, mostly-Red State Americans — or just another manifestation of CNN’s well-documented cultural bigotry towards Middle America.

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Georgia illustrates the NRA’s structural advantage on gun control. As if we needed a fresh demonstration of this phenomenon, the gun-rights lobby currently enjoys a fundamental edge in the debate about regulating firearms. In an era of falling crime rates, liberal enthusiasm for gun control simply doesn’t pack much political punch outside certain blue-state environments. Yes, people get riled up, understandably, by mass shootings at schools or movie theaters. Over and over, we’ve seen those emotions fade quickly, giving way to a more sustained counter-reaction from the pro-gun side. The NRA has skillfully responded to calls for stricter gun control by portraying them as evidence that liberals’ real agenda is confiscating firearms—all firearms…

Skeptics of expansive gun rights need to respond intelligently. The smart response is not scorn or exaggeration. For better or worse, gun ownership has come to symbolize a range of deeply felt ideas about culture and government authority. Making fun of people who view their firearms as emblems of liberty and traditional values (however they define those values) will neither change minds nor repeal legislation.

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In the aftermath of a gun tragedy, there isn’t anything wrong with proponents of gun control trying to persuade Americans to change their position in light of what happened. But after Newtown, many gun-control advocates tried to shame rather than persuade, as if the “correct” position was obvious to everyone save retrograde idiots.

On guns, that strategy has never worked.

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Via HuffPo.

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