Piers Morgan signs off from his CNN show

The final edition of CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” aired Friday night, and the British host closed out his run as the cable giant’s replacement for Larry King with more thoughts on gun control.

“For those who claim my anti-gun campaign has been anti-American, well, the reverse is true. I’m so pro-American, I want more of you to stay alive.”

Mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., among others, led Morgan to devote many of his programs to the issue of gun violence, and his advocacy of stricter gun laws in the U.S. earned him many critics.

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But Morgan did not shy away from the issue, and in his closing comments quoted Winston Churchill: “‘If you have an important point to make, don’t try and be subtle and clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once, then come back and hit it again. Then, hit it a third time. A tremendous whack.’”

The host’s run on CNN spanned, as he calculated it, “three years, two months, 11 days and over 1,000 shows.”

“We’ve won some, we’ve lost some, but we gave it everything we had and I’ve loved every minute,” Morgan said. “Well, almost every minute.”

After debuting in 2011, Morgan’s show consistently suffered from disappointing ratings, and CNN announced its cancellation in February. At the time of the announcement, the show was seen by an average of just 270,000 people nightly.

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A series of fill-in hosts, including Don Lemon and Jake Tapper, will anchor the show’s time slot for now.

“Thank you and God bless America,” Morgan said in closing. “Oh, and while I’m at it, God bless Great Britain too.”

Morgan may continue to work for CNN, he has said, but focus on bigger interviews instead of a nightly show.

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