The debate, or interview, or whatever it was, came across rather as a belligerent rant on Jones’ part. His basic position was summed up in this statement:
“The second amendment isn’t there for duck hunting. Its there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs.”
Nevertheless, he didn’t really get going until a moment later when an amazingly diverse set of topics were fused into one dynamo:
“”Britain took the guns 15, 16 years ago. Tripling of your overall violent crime. True, we have a higher gun violence level, but overall, muggings, stabbing, deaths — those men raped that woman to India to death with an iron rod 4 feet long. You can’t ban the iron rods. The guns, the iron rods, Piers, didn’t do it, the tyrants did it. Hitler took the guns Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns, Fidel Castro took the guns, Hugo Chavez took the guns, and I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! It doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there in the street begging for them to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?
Jones wasn’t polite, of course, with his constant interruptions and his ignoring of the Morgan’s questions. At a couple points, his belligerence got silly:
“”Why don’t you come to America? I take you out shooting, you can be American, and join the republic.”
“You finished?” asked Morgan.
“Yes, I am finished,” he said before jumping out into another rant in which Piers Morgan barely got a word in edgewise.
Upon being asked how many gun related homicides there were in England last year, Alex Jones attacked him directly, calling him a “hatchet man of the new world order” and challenged him to box: “I’ll wear red, white, and blue, and you’ll wear your Jolly Roger.”
“He was the best advertisement for gun control you wish for” Morgan told Politico this morning. “This kind of vitriol, hatred, and zealotry is really scary. I didn’t feel threatened by him, but I’m concerned that someone like him has that level of influence. There’s got to be a level of discourse rise above that happened last night. It was undignified, unedifying.”
What all the madness comes down to, really, is a very fundamentalist instinct: don’t shift your foundations. Just as the Bible is the “infallible word of God,” to many Christians, so is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights a third Testament, sacred literature not to be tampered with. “The second amendment is sacrosanct… because there’s criminals, I don’t lost my rights,” said Jones during the show. And if the scenes in Orwell’s Animal Farm where the Animals Seven Commandments was slowly watered down and changed around has any meaning for us, it isn’t completely madness what mad Jones is saying, but the conservative instinct itself.