RUSH: Starting to the phones with Sierra in Las Vegas. Hi, Sierra, you’re up next on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It is an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Okay, so here’s my point. As a very conservative college student, I feel very comfortable saying this, and if the true reason that this gentleman decided to shoot up Virginia Tech was due to his hatred of the United States, I feel comfortable blaming the liberal professor he probably listened to that preached that idea.
RUSH: Hey, hey, hey, hey! Folks, this is an excellent question. Let me rephrase it in host terms, okay?
CALLER: All righty.
RUSH: I would say this. ‘If this guy writes this note and rich kids and American debauchery,’ in other words, our culture, ‘sent him over the edge, then who in the world taught him this?’ is what you’re saying. You’re suggesting that he might have been told day in and day out as a student by not just college professors, but maybe when he went to high school — he’s been here for 14 years — he’s been told how America sucks.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Maybe he’s been told all of these things about America that are inequitable, unfair, unjust and all that. Who put these ideas in his head? Did he notice these things watching television? Did he drive through the nice areas of Virginia and see big houses he couldn’t live in? What caused this?
CALLER: That’s right!
RUSH: That’s a very valid question that you ask.
CALLER: In fact, I think I would challenge the media to go in and sit through a couple of his professors’ lectures and listen to what they have to say, and maybe we can place blame somewhere.
RUSH: Ha ha! Let me ask you something, Sierra, you think that’s going to happen?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely not.
RUSH: You think the Drive-By Media, even if they did it and found what you think they will find, do you think they would report that? Why, that would shoot this whole agenda sky high.
CALLER: Yeah, I know. No. Heavens no, they won’t report it. You can do it, Rush.
RUSH: Yeah, I don’t have to do it because we already know, just as you do.
CALLER: Right. (giggles) That’s true.
RUSH: It may well be. We know what he was a student of. We know what he was studying, and we know other things. If somebody wants to get what he’s written — I don’t know how much of it would be publicly available, given these circumstances. It’s still an interesting thing to ponder. A guy has this much dislike for the country, where do you learn it? It had to be learned. Because otherwise he wouldn’t have come here if he thought of this country the way he thinks of it (or thought of it) when he wrote the note before he came. He didn’t leave, by the way. I keep reminding you of this. The country is so rotten, but he did not leave. He chose to stay here for whatever reasons. So he had chains. He had a lock to keep his victims from escaping. He had two pistols — one bought in March, one in April — and a vest filled with ammo. Somehow some kind of gun control law was going to stop him? He’s got this note out there saying that American ‘rich kids’ bummed him out. He rails against ‘rich kids’ and the ‘debauchery’ of the American culture. Anyway, just be vigilant on this, because it’s going to intensify. This is the kind of story where the Drive-Bys can’t contain themselves, while everybody else was out there just trying to understand this and feel in ways they can’t even define, they feel so bad. The Drive-Bys are excited. They have an opportunity here to advance their political agenda. That’s what they’re all revved up about.
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RUSH: Let’s go Cleveland. Jack, you’re on the Rush Limbaugh program. It’s nice to have you with us, sir.
CALLER: Thank you. You know, we as Americans really need to start forming a more perfect union — and in that regard, I think, is that we gotta help our brothers and sisters. You mentioned through a common faith. I believe that’s the case. And in this situation, this is one thing, but this shows how soft we can be. You know, you — when you address the president and go with him in his war that’s going on, you know, we still have Al-Qaeda, and they’re still somewhere, and we better know our neighbors. We better call our congressmen. We better try to get better security for us so we could have —
RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute —
CALLER: — domestic tranquility.
RUSH: Hold it. What do you mean we’ve become soft?
CALLER: What’s the — what’s the — what’s the number one movie right now? Disturbia. Look how much money people threw at that stupid movie. If they took the same amount of money and did efforts to help other people like you do with leukemia and — and that, you know, people need to start, you know, giving a hand to other people, and if people have issues or if you know somebody, if somebody knew that young man who was — evidently had mental issues, if somebody knew him and just let him go, they’re just as many to blame. You have to help other people. If you get too rich and too wealthy and too arrogant, you’re not going to help the poor. The poor need to be helped. Everybody needs a good chance here in America.
RUSH: Wait a minute.
CALLER: That’s maybe why he came here.
RUSH: Wait a minute. We don’t know that the guy was poor in the sense that we define poverty.
CALLER: No, but he was mentally ill.
RUSH: Well, yeah, we do know that. We also know that he was in a creative writing class and that the professor was really disturbed by some of the things that this guy was writing, and they did send him to the counselor here, but there’s no report beyond that. We don’t know what action was taken, if any. But we do know that there were some people at the university apparently who were troubled by some of the disturbing things that he had written.
CALLER: Well, what happens when our security gets breached because of Al-Qaeda here again? What happens then? What are we going to do, go, oh, you know, we should step up this?
RUSH: Hold it. What I don’t understand — what is this psychobabble we gotta help each other business have to do with Al-Qaeda breaking security?
CALLER: Well, look at this. You’ve got a university where kids go to school that, you know, they want to have a right to go to school. I want to be able to go on the local bus line and be able to go to my job, okay? So I want to feel safe. There’s not enough money being spent here in — in the — in our own —
RUSH: Ah, come on, come on —
CALLER: No, there’s not. I can give you a case in point, my own city.
RUSH: There is more money being spent here on everything than ever before. Now, I understand some people are upset today. If I wanted to be cynical, I could say what in the world are you feeling unsafe for? The Democrats are telling us they’re even going to take away the words war on terror. No, the only thing you ought to be afraid of is Bush, because if Bush hadn’t done all this stuff in Iraq, why, nobody, no Islamofascists would be attacking — I heard the Democrats say this. Well, I’ll talk this up to the fact that you’re beside yourself here. I’m still not clear what he means by soft targets, or we’ve become soft. I thought I knew where he was going but then he didn’t get there, so I’m not sure exactly what he means. Jack, thanks for the call.
RUSH: Mark in Centerville, Virginia. It’s nice to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Nice to be here, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I think you touched the nerve here when you said about the God issue and my point is the desensitization of human value in our society, whether it’s abortion, euthanasia. What I really think is an issue is video violence, video gaming. I will guarantee you, I’ll bet my last dollar in my pocket, that this shooter will be found to have been a compulsive video gamer, and when people are living that kind of lifestyle — and college students do this a lot.
RUSH: Look.
CALLER: Yeah?
RUSH: (sigh) Let’s say you’re right.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that. We can find all kinds of societal problems and ills, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you would look at as a bad influence — video games as you mentioned — it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers.
CALLER: You’re absolutely right, but the classic forms of brainwashing are involved with compulsive video gaming: sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, and then, as I say, if you’re shooting people eight hours a day in a cyber-environment, then it just lowers the resistance to honoring human life.
RUSH: Well, look, there’s no question that some people probably are affected by that. In this case, let’s not jump the gun on this guy and make him a video gamer. We’ll find out soon enough everything we want to know about this guy, and I guarantee you that much of what we find out will be America’s fault. Just be patient. This stuff will all come out. I want to ask you people a question. I want you to be honest. You don’t have to tell anybody else what you think. You don’t. You can answer this privately. I’m going to ask you a question. You do not have to tell anybody what you answered. When you first heard the news yesterday, and the death toll kept rising and it finally got up to the 30, 32 number, the 33, how many of you were not really all that profoundly affected by it? The reason I ask the question is, how many of you have become desensitized? The previous caller used the word. There is so much violence on television and in the movies, the video games, I guess, you want to throw those in, violence in newscasts, and we hear about 35 people dead in Iraq every day.
Some people just after awhile, you don’t have an emotional reservoir left. Your emotion is all spent. You can only care about 35 people shot so much because, here we had 30, 33 people killed, 30 injured in one incident, but the number of deaths on the highways — which, granted, are not murder, but there’s a pretty big murder rate in the country, various cities around the country. I just wonder how many people, when this first happened, were desensitized. It didn’t affect them the way it would have if it — and I have no answer for this, I’m just asking the question because… The reason I asked this is because this is so extraordinary. I would be surprised if a whole lot of people said that it didn’t affect them. But within our generations, our two generations, the last 50 years, there have been a substantial number of these things. Not every day, not every year, not every month, of course. They do happen, but they are not symptomatic of something wrong in the country. Now, I remember when I was hosting my television show, this would be the early nineties, and there was the first incident I can remember of a seven-year-old killing a four-year-old.
Bob Greene, who worked for a Chicago newspaper wrote a piece to him about how it just seemed to him America was losing its soul — and concurrent with that was: Are we not teaching God enough? Are we getting rid of public displays of religion and the public references to God too much that we are causing people to not recognize there are things larger than ourselves in life? And you could ask the same question about this. Are we losing our soul here? I would disagree with it in this instance, although it is troubling, but these incidents are not common. They are extraordinary, and if they were happening frequently, then we would say, ‘Okay, something is definitely wrong,’ but the one thing that I find here in talking to people is that the last option people want to choose is, ‘This guy was a nut. He had mental issues. He was insane, and he engaged in a random act of violence.’ That’s just too simple. It’s just too simple. No, no, no! It’s gotta be more to it. It’s got to be video games. It’s gotta be gun control! It’s gotta be all these other things. Everybody wants to try to look at this — not everybody, especially the media, though, they want to look at this — through whatever political prism that they see life through, rather than seeing it for what it is.
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RUSH: I know it’s natural that everybody wants to throw their theories into this, and perhaps come up with perhaps a unique explanation or to understand, and I think it’s natural, because people have a tough time accepting a relatively simple explanation for something of this scale. But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns? If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it’s the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this. You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act. But if you want to start blaming the video games, this guy was this or that, weeeeell, then you’ve gotta maybe talk about banning them because that’s the same tack that’s taken with guns. You got one guy who used a gun that’s it. You’re falling prey to the same way the Drive-Bys propagandize, and that’s, ‘Well, we need gun control! We gotta get guns out of the hands of people.’
By the same token we’ve got liberal college professors all over the country, and they inculcate kids with what’s wrong with this country but they still don’t all run around on mass shooting sprees. So while there may be individual explanations for what it was that got into this guy’s head — and you can’t leave the girlfriend theory out of this, that he was rejected and felt out of sorts over that. Even in that sense, people suffer heartbreak all the time, and the vast majority of them don’t run around and start shooting at people who break their hearts. So you gotta be real careful here not to paint with broad brushes on these things. You gotta be very careful not to plug this into your own individual political prism, because then you become no different than what the Drive-Bys are doing. If you just wait, eventually we’ll find out more than we want to know about this guy, and you’re going to have to listen to what’s reported about this guy with keen ears, and you’re going to have to read with sharp eyes out there, because the Drive-Bys are going to report about this guy in ways that will advance their political agenda because that’s what this story is to them. This is Faith in Lake City, Florida. Glad you called, and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I was listening to your show and had Fox on with the sound off, and saw a little thing across the bottom that said that he was on medication for depression — and immediately my mind flashed back to the 1990’s school shootings and how many of those kids were either on medication or going off medication, and I’m not saying that the medication maybe caused it, but, you know, there’s something innate in all of us hopefully that keeps us, even if we’re angry or whatever, from going through to that next step, and this medication sometimes messes with brain chemistry, and that could have been — and I don’t know — something that set him over the edge.
RUSH: What school shooting in 1990 are you talking?
CALLER: In the nineties.
RUSH: You talking about Columbine?
CALLER: Columbine, and then the high school shootings that preceded that. The one in Kentucky.
RUSH: Oh, Arkansas, Kentucky —
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: All those kids were on some sort of —
CALLER: Well, several of them were.
RUSH: Do you remember what the drug was —
CALLER: No, I don’t.
RUSH: Were they on Ritalin for ADD?
CALLER: I think it was depression or psychotropic. But, you know, and a lot of those now have warnings on them that say, you know, could cause —
RUSH: Have you looked at the warning on a pamphlet that comes with any drug? Any drug you take can cause a thousand things to go wrong.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: Diarrhea, headache, vomiting, nausea, temporary insanity! If people actually read these little pamphlets that came with every drug, nobody’d take one.
CALLER: I agree with that, but if he’s already that far gone on medicine for depression, it could be the trigger. I don’t know, but…
RUSH: Well, it will all come out in the wash at some point.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Virtually everything we learned about the guy, at some point will fit somebody’s political or social agenda. As I say, the easiest explanation — a temporarily insane guy, nut case, wacko, maybe sick and evil — ah, that’s too simple! It has to be something more complicated that led to this, because people can’t comprehend doing this themselves — and if you’re not insane, you can’t comprehend that, either. If you’re not evil, it’s hard to comprehend it. Everybody bases things on their own personal reference points. Kathleen in Defiance, Ohio, you’re next on the EIB Network. Nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you. Thank you. Longtime listener.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: I am a nurse in the mental health field. I work at the psychiatric unit. I have worked outpatient and inpatient. You cannot force someone to take medication unless you can court order it. For right now, we don’t know if this guy has done anything more than go to his family doctor and say, ‘I’m depressed. Give me an anti-depressant.’ We don’t know which one it is. If it’s the wrong medication —
RUSH: We don’t even know that. We don’t even know that he was on anything, do we?
CALLER: No, we don’t. We’re speculating.
RUSH: Well, wait a minute. Did they run a crawl that he was taking something? Okay, I’m sorry. Faith just said that Fox ran a crawl he was on something, but it wasn’t identified.
CALLER: We’re speculating right now what he’s been taking, what his medical history is.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Until you have become a risk to yourself or someone else — as in major intentions known, or acted on them — you know, they can take you to my ER and try to get you up on my unit and we can’t take you. We can’t get you in because if you don’t want to go, you won’t go.
RUSH: So it’s the same old story. You call the cops and say somebody I know is going to break into my house at eight tomorrow morning, and they can’t do anything until the house is broken into?
CALLER: Right. Right. It’s that way in mental health, too.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: Darn. I wish we could read people’s minds. I wish we knew exactly what medication to give them. But we don’t. Life is uncertain.
RUSH: So you say you’re a psych nurse?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Okay, so how about the explanation this is a random act by a sick person that had evil intent?
CALLER: Yeah, sounds like what I’ve taken care of before.
RUSH: All right, now, I know the psychiatry industry would love to dig into these people to try to find out, just because it’s the nature of their work, ‘Okay, why was he evil? Why was this kid sick? What was it that would force somebody to go off the rails like this when most people stay within the guardrails of society.’
CALLER: Unusually the biggest common denominator is early childhood abuse or trauma, and this can even be something that is not intentional. So, gosh, we’re going to follow you around —
RUSH: Well, in the case that happens —
CALLER: — from the time you’re born?
RUSH: — to everybody, too.
CALLER: Yes! Yes!
RUSH: That happens to everybody, and that can’t be the explanation totally.
CALLER: Well, that’s one of the predisposing factors — and then, there’s your life, and we could nitpick it to pieces.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: But it turns out a lot to be your choice.
RUSH: A-ha! I knew if I waited and employed the patience of the host that I am so well known for, we’d get to your choice. Obviously he chose to do it, but people are going to, ‘No, he didn’t choose to do it. He was driven to do it by America’s unfairness and debauchery,’ or what have you. You just wait, folks.