her medals -- >> i love gold, it's my favorite color. >> and the olympian who inspired her. >> what an honor to be at the same olympic games as this guy. >> plus the the two women behind gymnastics champ gabby douglas. >> she said, either i can find a new coach or i want to give up doing the sport. this is "piers morgan tonight." good evening from london. we'll get to my interviews with olympians missy franklin and serena williams later in the show. we begin tonight with our big story. the deadly rampage at a sikh temple. law enforcement officers say wade michael page, an army veteran, was a lone gunman in the rampage. neighbors say page played in a far right punk band and an old army buddy of page's talked about what he called racial holy war. i'll talk to him exclusively in a few minutes. joining me now is our first guest. he went to the temple every day. he was on his way there when the shootings took place on sunday. you knew a number of the people who lost their lives. tell me about them. >> yeah, one of my favorite guys in the temple. he was in his late 30s. and i need to tell you, he just brought his family back from india. he spent a lot of time here. for four or five years, he was all alone. and it was just two months he brought his family back. >> it's an atrocity beyond comprehension. when you first realized what had happened, and you discovered it was a man believed to be a white supremacist, what was your reaction to that? have the sikh community been fearing an attack of this nature? have you felt like you've been vulnerable? >> yeah, i think my first reaction was to be honest with you, i could guess it was a case of mistaken identity. but later on what i felt was, you know, maybe we as a community has not been able to, you know, explain to people what we are. had that guy had just an iota of thought about sikh religion or little speck of what sikh beliefs are, i think he would not have even thought of harming us, you know, because we believe in universal brotherhood. we don't believe in -- we don't have any conflict against any nation. we don't have any conflict against any work. i think we as sikhs probably our leadership might have failed somewhere with the public relations. we have not been able to explain what we are. what we do for the humanity. had that guy knew that, i think he would not have gone to that extent. at least coming to the sikh temple. and hitting us with what he thought was appropriate. but, again, i'm so saddened we have been targeted because of our looks and vulnerabilities. because we have long beards. but i think so we as a community has to have i think at some point in time not being able to explain what we are. >> dr. siti, i want to read you a statement. it was one of their reporters received a text message from the shooter's family. i want to read you this and get your reaction. it says, as a family of wade page, we are devastated by the horrific events that occurred sunday in oak creek, wisconsin. while there can be nord woulds of comfort that will make sense of what happened that day, please be aware that our thoughts and prayers go out to all the victims and their families. we share in their grief all who lost their lives and for those survivors. we have been cooperating and will continue to cooperate with the investigation in any way we can. please respect our privacy as we try and deal with the tragic loss of life and family. what is your reaction to that statement from the family of the man that committed this terrible atrocity? >> as a sikh, as a member of the big sikh community, the world, i strongly believed a life lost is a life lost. even i feel so saddened about the life lost by the guy who assaulted and came and killed other people. still it is hard for the family. my heart goes out to the family too. i think they're also one of the victims, you know. we -- because we prayed -- all the time we pray in our prayers that we always call for well being of the whole humanity. my heart goes out. i really appreciate that the family feels so, you know, concerned and they feel they have some kind of remorse or whatever on his behalf. i thinit is a great act, it is great act of courage to admit and be part of the whole scenario rather than being the family of the victim or the family of the assault. a man who has died has died. that's a lot of life. whether it was a sikh or whether it was a -- we, our culture, our history, we have treated both our friends and foes as one. i think we sikh have treated prisoners of war and guys endured in the wars with us, we treat the same way as we treat our own people. i appreciate the fact that those guys also realize, you know, and have been talking good about and praying for all the lives lost. >> dr. sehti, again, my condolences to you and to your fellow sikhs, the community there. i appreciate you taking the time to join me. >> thank you. now, mark potok, senior fellow at the southern poverty law center. membership in two racist skin headbands. mr. potok joins me now. what have you learned about this man in the years you've been tracking him? >> well, basically, he is a guy who describes leaving his home state of colorado with all his belongings packed on to a motorcycle in the year 2000. and at that point, he goes directly into the white power music scene out there. he starts to play with racist rock and roll bands around the country. he played with several very well-known bands. bands like intimidation one and blue eyed devils as a lead guitarist and vocalist. ultimately in 2005 page started his own band which he called, i think significantly, end apathy. he gave an interview several years ago to a particular white supremacist website in which he talked about the name of the band. and basically explained it as a message to his colleagues, his fellows in the white supremacist world, essentially saying "we've got to act now." he really didn't go into any detail. he didn't talk specifically about violence or hating muslims or sikhs or anything like that but it seemed very clear he was itching for action. >> do you believe this kind of extremism, white supremacist, also other forms of extremism, is that on the increase in america, do you believe? >> oh, i think there's no question about it at all. one of the things we do at the southern poverty law center is count the number of groups on the extreme right. and we've had just explosive growth. in particular, militia-type groups. groups we used to call militias in the 1990s. this expansion this amazing expansion, came immediately after the election of barack obama. so i think what is really going on out there is there are an awful lot of people in this country who have heard about the loss of white majority. the census bureau have said whites will lose their majority in this country by the year 2050. and who feel incredibly enough that white people in america are being subjected to a genocide. you know so that is essentially where they're coming from. you know, and that has driven many of these groups out of their minds. >> finally, do you believe this shooter knew that these were sikhs or did he believe they may be muslims? did he care? was it a fact they were just nonwhites? what do you imagine may have been given what you know about his background, his motivation? >> my best guess is he's a fool. he mistook sikhs for muslims and thought he was murdering muslims. when you look into the propaganda of the white supremacist world, as we do every day, you virtually never see writings or rantings about the evils of sikh people. of course the radical right is absolutely thick with propaganda about muslims and posting sharia law in this country. muslim brotherhood infiltrating our government. on and on. i feel pretty certain this man mistook sikhs for muslims. it's certainly true these kind of white supremacists view all people of color, as they would say, mud people, as enemies. >> fascinating conversation. thank you. joining me now exclusively is a man who served with page in the military. thank you for joining me. what is your recollection of the kind of man page was? >> bright, intelligent, very kind individual it i had him over to my house with my family to eat dinner several times. we ate dinner with him several times. we're all part of a really close-knit group of friends. >> right. you served with him between 1995 and 1998. in the alpha company of the 9th cyclops battalion. you knew him for five years, until 2000, when you lost contact. most intriguingly. i understand he used to talk openly to you about a racial holy war. tell me about that. >> yes, sir. to a lot of the people in our group of friends. he would often mention the racial holy war that was coming. you know, we just looked at it as he was trying to get attention to himself. because he was always the loner type of person. even in a group of people, he would be off alone. >> right, but do you believe he was serious in his belief, there needed to be some kind of holy war against, you know, presumably muslims? is that what he was targeting? sikhs? i mean, who were the targets of this holy war as far as he was concerned? >> back then, as far as he was concerned, it was just anybody that wasn't white. i really didn't become concerned till his 2000 motorcycle trip. he told me that he was going across country to visit old friends, you know, that he had lost touch with, and i happened to be one of those. i was living in arkansas at the time. and he stopped to visit me for about a week. i noticed then he had gone through a dramatic change. and did -- his talk about the racist war was even -- you know, it was more like he really did believe it. and after he left, that was the last time i talked to him. i can't say i wouldn't have seen this coming because honestly a couple weeks ago, i was thinking of him. just to see how he's been doing over the the years it and when i couldn't find any contact information, i did start looking for news articles, you know, that something like this might have happened somewhere, and i had missed, you know, didn't hear about it. >> you as i say served in the military with him. he was thrown out of the military for misconduct. do you know what the detail, of that misconduct were? >> basically, he had gotten drunk the night before and showed up at morning formation intoxicated, and that just started the ball rolling to get him moved out of the military. >> do you think he -- from what you know of him or knew of him, do you think he would have known the difference between a muslim and a sikh? would we have try to distinguish between the two groups? >> honestly, i don't think he would have tried to distinguish. like i said, the last time i talked to him, it was all just -- it was anybody that wasn't white. >> and the last time, as you said, you saw him and you were more concerned about the escalate and the way he was talking, did you come away from that encounter thinking that he was now dangerous and that this was not just talk? >> no, i knew that it wasn't just talk, that he had fallen deeper into whatever group he had gotten himself mixed up with. because he didn't have the tattoos when he was in the army. but after denver, he had traveled from denver to arkansas to visit me on his motorcycle. and i think this is the same trip that the guy from the southern poverty group was talking about. and then when he showed up, he had all the tattoos. he had talked about he was in a racist band. and that he was going to meet up with them in florida to do some big racist concert. and so i knew he was into the music part. but i -- even after he left, i didn't think he would be violent. >> well, it sadly didn't turn out that way. thank you for joing me. i appreciate it. when we come back, a man who says guns do not belong in a civil society. deepak chopra. 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>> piers, what is really interesting is my comment that guns don't belong in the civil society generated so much hostility, anger, rage, ethno centratism, bigotry and racism. these people are the very people who should not be owning guns. the fact they can get enraged at a comment like that is a sign that something very drastically wrong with our culture, which is going through a major shift right now, with new immigrants coming from all over the world. a global identity for our next generation. you know, i have a grandson who speaks five languages because his mother is chinese and his father is indian and his nanny's spanish. this is very threatening to a society which was born in the throes of violence. the second amendment is actually goes back to when militia were relevant for a free state. and therefore the right to bear arms. it has no relevance right now. gun control is a very necessary thing. >> my whole argument about this, ever since the aurora massacre, since gabby giffords was shot as well, is not that you can guarantee you can stop massacres. we saw one in norway. we've had them in britain. seen very many in germany, australia. there are so few gun murders outside of those massacres. what distinguishes america and, versely, is there so many gun murders as a matter of routine every day, every month, every year? >> exactly. and for every 100 people in the united states, we have 88 guns. the next closest country is yemen, with 55 guns per 100 people. you should ask, why do we need so many guns? why can we get assault weapons without having to have a license? why do we need assault weapons that can fire 100 rounds at a time for hunting or self-protection? when is the last time a gun was used for defense? how many incidents are there where gun assailants have been thwarted by a gun for self-defense? so we have to question who we are at this moment. and our political system has to be a little more honest. i heard the comments of president obama. i think president obama offers hope, stability, trust and compassion. but he needs to take a stand on gun control. you know, it's very important right now to be more in the interest of our collective safety and our collective caring for each other and politics needs to come second to that. >> there just has to be something in our system in america which means if you're a skin head white supremacist thrown out of the military for misconduct and you are in a band which advocates violence and racial hatred and all the rest of it, there's got to be something that flags you up when you go and buy a gun legally. my previous guest believes it was probably just as mindless as he assumes they were muslims, this shooter. do you believe that or do you believe as the sikh community fears, it was deliberately targeted at the sikh community? >> he probably assumed that anyone with a beard or a turbin is probably from the taliban. that's also part of the ignorance of a very ethnocentric culture that is totally unaware of what's happening in the rest of the world. so i think people get stereotyped very easily. in this case, it was the beard and the turbinturbins of the sikhs who were probably not targeted especially. my family comes fr a sikh family. none of us believes they were targeted because they were sikhs. it was confusion i think. >> well, it's an appalling day for the sikh community, for all of those who know relatives that were involved. deepak, i thank you for joining me, i really do. thank you. >> thanks, piers. coming next, i'll talk to an olympic athlete. missy franklin. [ male announcer ] this is the at&t network. in here, every powerful collaboration is backed by an equally powerful and secure cloud. that cloud is in the network, so it can deliver all the power of the network itself. bringing people together to develop the best ideas -- and providing the apps and computing power to make new ideas real. it's the cloud from at&t. with new ways to work together, business works better. ♪ 17-year-old swimming sensation missy franklin won four gold medals and a bronze here in london. she proved that when she dedicated all of her races to the people of the home state of colorado in the wake ofshooting last month. we're going to get to your amazing successes in london. i want to start. we've just been talking about this new shooting in america. you come effectively from aurora. you were brought up very near there. you trained there and everything else. what was your reaction when that happened? >> just complete shock. you hear something like that and it just baffles you on why something like that happehappens. it was so senseless. i was in france at the time. the time zone, i was a few hours ahead so a lot of my friends and family were still sleeping. just having those hours of waiting to hear if everyone was okay was just absolutely awful. >> you said that you were going to put your focus on the olympics and hopefully do my best, to shine some light on colorado and make them proud. i think you've definitely done that. >> thank you. >> you must feel great you were able to do so well. >> thank you. i've gotten the most supportive messages and tweets. just saying i've been able to do that. that means more than i can say. >> four golds and a bronze. >> i know, it honestly doesn't even feel real. >> what are you, 17? >> yes. >> you've won five medals including four golds at one olympics. certainly feels surreal, doesn't it? >> without a doubt