In Greek mythology, the king Sisyphus got himself consigned to the underworld due to a variety of theopolitical circumstances that, TL;DR, ended up getting Zeus really peeved. His punishment was to eternally push a boulder all the way up a hill until it invariably rolled back down again, starting the arduous process anew.
This sounds like a great workout but a terrible permanent lifestyle choice. However, the French-Algerian existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, in one of his more notable works, disagreed, arguing that “[m]an stands face to face with the irrational” at every moment and has to find something to keep him occupied. Pushing a stone up a mount, even if you constantly failed, was as good a pastime as any, Camus reasoned.
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus wrote.
If gun control were a boulder, the effort to defend it would be pushing it up a hill, and if Piers Morgan were Sisyphus, I imagine Camus would find him one of the most ecstatic men on earth, were ol’ Albert still here. (Camus lost his struggle with the wreckage of an expensive French sports car he was traveling in back in 1960, alas.)
Morgan, long a fixture in British media, tried to take over for Larry King at CNN, but he is best remembered in that role for a gun control debate with conservative pundit Ben Shapiro in 2013 to which Mr. Morgan came very much unarmed, both in wits and weapons. The viral video remains one of the great moments of the early social media age and still pops up with more regularity than Piers would like.
A decade and change has passed, and Mr. Morgan has shifted a bit, both in terms of politics and jobs. He hasn’t budged on gun control, however, still doing the Sisyphean of pushing that boulder up the hill. The hill, this time, was Tucker Carlson, who he sat down with for an interview last week.
Most of the interview touched on the subject of the Ukraine-Russia War, the United States’ place in the world, and where we should be sending assistance, monetary and military. However, about an hour and twenty minutes into the discussion, gun control reared its head, again.
The topic came as Carlson said the two were more aligned than they thought, including this way: “You do own guns. I know that you do.” (He apparently doesn’t, but as a joke it elicited a laugh.)
This elicited a laughter and some back and forth on arming Ukraine, but Piers had to play Sisyphus yet again.
Is there still time for the U.K. to regain its lost freedoms?
“You know, the thing about guns, I’ll just say this for your audience … the reality is that there’s a complete cultural difference,” Morgan said. “In my country, everybody used to have a gun. Everybody used to, in the old days. Now, very few people have guns. There are incledibly tight restrictions. And the consequence of that is that we have almost zero gun crime.”
Carlson, laughing: “Is London safe now?”
Yes, see, that’s one of the problems: Criminals in the U.K. appear to have discovered the invention of knives, which legislators there are now trying to control. (Do you really need to cut that steak, Mr. and Mrs. Britain? Give them all up.)
Morgan said the U.K. had a knife problem, yes. To which Carlson countered: “No, you have a people problem. … You can’t be trusted with guns now, because you’re out of control.”
And part of that problem is that the U.K. wants total control, as Carlson pointed out.
After Morgan pointed out that “we all used to have guns, too,” Tucker noted that the British, after winning World War II, had “lost all your freedom, and now you can’t even express your political opinions, or they put you in jail.”
“So how did you win? How did you win? Is that what victory looks like? You lose all your rights. Your economy gets destroyed –” he continued.
“You know how we won? We won because I’m not conducting this interview in German,” Morgan said. “I’d rather not speak German. I’d be goose-stepping around my yard in England.”
“But you are goose-stepping!” Carlson countered. “People were arrested for praying.”
“We literally won our freedom,” Morgan continued.
“Where’s your freedom?” Carlson shot back. “You can’t defend yourself. You can’t control who comes into your country, and you can’t criticize government policies, or you get arrested. So how are you free?”
The relevant part begins at 1:15:00:
A dictator is someone who ignores elections and rules by violence. Zelensky meets that definition but Piers Morgan loves him anyway.
(0:00) Why Is Piers Morgan Deeply in Love With Zelensky?
(20:58) Zelensky Is Getting Rich From War
(25:29) Should NATO Be Abolished?
(36:48)… pic.twitter.com/7YAjdOE9z6— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 31, 2025
Again, this is basically true. After the Southport massacre, in which a perpetrator whose parents were born abroad and immigrated to the U.K. killed three girls, the police cracked down so hard that people were sent to jail for social media posts deemed to be impolitic.
There was even vague talk among some officials about the extradition of Elon Musk to the U.K. due to activity on X and his criticism of the British government, although this presumably fizzled for a great variety of reasons. (I doubt the fact we have far more guns was chief among them, but someone somewhere along the line must have figured that one out.)
How, pray tell, is this a free country? Thugs find weapons to kill people with. Laws cannot eliminate thuggery. What laws can do is take God-given freedom from the law-abiding, particularly if they have no effective way to fight back against government tyranny. (See: Amendment, Second.)
Would the British people have risen up with firearms against their government because a number of people got arrested for social media posts? No, probably not — but gun control is a grave symptom, not a proximate cause, of impending loss of liberty.
Not every outrage is met — or should be met — with firearms, of course. But a government that takes away guns from lawful owners means to take away other things. In Britain’s case, that includes political speech. And why wouldn’t we suspect them of doing so? A government that doesn’t trust where you might point an implement of self-defense will not trust how you will direct your language of self-expression — and will seek to regulate both.
It’s been a decade since that great viral confrontation on CNN, and gun-grabbing Sisyphus hasn’t learned a thing — not even after that boulder squashed a fair number of Britons who lived under the misapprehension that the government would allow them the right to an opinion.
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