RUSH: Last week, the First Amendment was under assault. This week, the Second Amendment is under assault. The media templates have been set in stone. They started last night, yesterday afternoon even, in regards to this massacre at Virginia Tech, before anything was known, before any of the facts were known. It was one of the reasons I didn’t talk much about this yesterday, because it was all breaking at the time, and had I echoed what I was seeing in the Drive-By Media yesterday, I would have been wrong in part. So as I mentioned yesterday I was sitting around and just waiting to gather all the information here. It has been utterly predictable and it has been utterly fascinating at the same time, to watch the Drive-By Media coverage of this massacre. Some people are calling it a ‘tragedy.’ I’m even having a problem with calling it a tragedy. A tragedy is a tornado or a hurricane running you down. This is an act of pure evil. This is an act of pure evil on the part of one person that has nothing to do with ‘American society.’ It has nothing to do with anybody else who was not involved, and yet the media template is etched in stone here. We have found out that the killer had chains and a lock to keep his victims from escaping.
He had two pistols, one of which he bought back in March or April. He had a vest filled with ammunition, and somehow some kind of gun control law was going to stop him from killing these people. That, frankly, is absurd, and I urge all of you to resist the groupthink that has been part of this. I don’t care what network you watch, that has been the template: the Second Amendment and gun control, here. ‘We need more gun control. If we would have had gun control, why, this wouldn’t have happened! Virginia is the headquarters of the NRA.’ This is going to bring this all back. The bottom line here is that every event — regardless how bad, how large, or how small — is covered through the politics prism now. Everything is being looked at here through the prism of politics rather than looking at this for what it is. The shooter bought his first gun, a 9mm handgun, on March 13th, and his second weapon, a .22 caliber handgun within the last week. This is according to ABC News and their source here is law enforcement officials. None of this argues at all for the concept that gun control would have prevented any of this.
This was not a spur of the moment crime. It was not something done in a flash instant. There was preparation here. This guy was going to get a gun. He was able to buy it, but he was going to get a gun regardless. He had it in his mind to do this. So last week the First Amendment’s under attack; this week is now the Second Amendment, and it is terrible how an event like this can be so contorted to meet a political end. But that is the primary reason for all of the coverage: to meet a political end. There are several news templates in newsrooms. The Duke lacrosse case is a representative of a great template. The Imus situation is another template, and so is this. They’ve just released some details of the note that the gunman left behind, and in the note — isn’t this classic? — he rails against ‘rich kids and the debauchery of American society.’ Now, who cares what this guy thinks other than a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists who might want to examine this for the textbooks? This is the kind of thing that does not happen in this country every day. This is extraordinary, which is why the reaction that we’re all having to it is as it is.
This doesn’t happen every day in this country. This is not what America is. This event does not provide a microcosm of the evils and horrors of American society. So you have this kid that went nuts here for whatever reason, in a suicide note, railing against ‘rich kids and the debauchery of society,’ and wait ’til the Drive-Bys pick up on that and start extrapolating that into the other templates that exist in their newsrooms as to what’s wrong with American society. I don’t know what his grievance was against ‘rich kids.’ I have no clue and we won’t know until the details of this note are spelled out. The Drive-Bys are all talking about the ‘healing’ that we all must go through now, and that this is a tragedy. As I say, you can say it’s a tragedy, and I may be splitting hairs here, but, as I say, a tragedy is when a tornado runs through town and flattens a building and 30 people die. This is pure evil on parade, or insanity. It’s self-contained within the mind and the body of the shooter. It was a sick, evil act, very much like that of a suicide bomber. It was an evil, driven nut who had a couple of guns, and we have to face that head on and deal with that, not hide under our covers in fear and blame and guilt and start asking, ‘What’s wrong with America?’
It’s just like after 9/11 — and I’ve got a media sound bite here, people saying, ‘Ohhhhh, it feels just like after 9/11! Whoa, it’s horrible out there,’ and what happened after 9/11? The state department convened a little seminar on ‘Why do they hate us?’ Now with this guy’s note in which he rails against ‘rich kids and the debauchery of our society,’ the question is going to become, ‘What’s wrong with America?’ not, ‘What was wrong with this guy?’ This guy is going to end up, before it’s all said and done in certain places in the Drive-By Media, having — if not a legitimate and understandable grievance — a grievance at the way America is — and guess who runs America right now? George W. Bush! ‘This guy had a grievance. It was understandable. There is so much partisanship. There’s so much angst. There’s so much hate! There’s so much anger, racism, bigotry, homophobia!’ All of this stuff is going to be thrown into the mix now, because the purpose of this he was not as far as the media is concerned — and it makes me sick. There are genuine families grieving here over an event, and the last thing they’re doing is looking at this politically.
But that’s the total focus of the Drive-By Media, and as more information comes out they’ll be able to fold it in and make it match whatever templates exist. It seems to me that, as a society, we have embraced the emotion-numbing, denying, guilt-ridden, morally neutral therapist babble. So this guy is going to end up being judged in a morally neutral way. ‘Why did he do what he did? Do he have reasons that we can understand and are explainable — not to excuse what he did, of course,’ they’ll say, and then they’ll use the: ‘Are there more such people like this guy, waiting out there to explode and go nuts because of rich white kids on campus and the debauchery of American society?’ I’ll tell you, you’ll be doing the wrong thing out there, folks, if you start hiding in fear that the Drive-Bys are so intent in piling on you. This is a self-contained incident. These things have happened before. The biggest I think crime spree on a college campus was, what, in 1966 somewhere in Texas. But this is an odd week. This is the week of Waco. The Oklahoma City bombing happened during this week. That was 4/19 of ’95. Waco was 4/19 of ’93. Columbine was 4/20 ’99 — and of course yesterday’s incident, on the 16th of April.
There’s something about this week. Starting last night, even before we knew much of anything, the Drive-Bys were casting blame on guns and worse — and, of course, the people in charge of Virginia Tech! Everybody who wasn’t there was an expert! Everybody who wasn’t there would have made all of the correct decisions under pressure in life-and-death decisions better than anybody actually on the campus. So now, ‘We gotta get rid of the president of the university. We gotta get rid of the police chief. We gotta get rid of all these people that botched this.’ There was no way to stop this! There was no way — well, I take that back. There might have been a way to stop it if this school hadn’t been a gun-free zone and some of the students had been allowed to have a gun, somebody might have had a way of responding to this guy a little sooner than anybody was able to. It’s a perfect illusion for what happens when you’ve got gun control: the bad guys end up with the guns and everybody else is unarmed and is in the line of fire. But this is also a great illusion of how the Drive-Bys work. They’ve driven into town.
There’s so many people in there that they’re clogging the cell phone circuits, and parents have been unable to get through to talk to their kids to find out what’s going on because the Drive-Bys have taken over the town, and they’ve driven in there, and they’ve flown in there. It’s the same thing they did at Duke. They charge in there, start blasting us with their damn words, their political prism, how America’s rotten. ‘This sucks. This is horrible.’ I’m telling you, you’d be better off if you turned off the television for the next couple days. I’m talking about your own mental attitude. This is not the fault of Virginia Tech or the president there, or local law enforcement that some nut came into their ZIP code to act this way. Everybody there is as much the victims of the shooter as the students who were shot. It is a devastating thing and within its own boundaries and context, it’s bad enough, with the grief of so many families who have no understanding of this. They can’t possible understand why this happened. What in the world would possibly explain it? People who suffer heartbreak do not do this routinely. People who have their thesis papers or their final exams rejected do not go on shooting sprees on a regular basis. It has happened, but it’s not quintessentially American. This does not happen every day, does not happen every week, does not happen every month, does not happen every year. It is rare, and it is extraordinary precisely because it is so rare.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, I know this goes against the grain of all discussion today, but sometimes, you know what? You just can’t prevent things like this, and that’s why we’re stunned and upset when things like this happen because it is extraordinary. Now everybody’s out there talking about gun control. Exactly what kind of gun control are they talking about now, as they attempt to politicize this — and when I say ‘they’ today I’m talking about the media. I’m talking about the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party. Jim Moran, congressman from Virginia, is blaming this on George W. Bush, and there will be a lot of others that will join that chorus as the afternoon proceeds and the days proceed. At the time last night when they’re calling for all this… Here, play audio sound bite number one. This is PMSNBC last night, and this is before we even knew half the details. This is MSNBC promoting something coming up.
PMSNBC ANNOUNCER (whispering): Tonight: (dramatic music) the deadliest shooting rampage in US history. Should today’s massacre at Virginia Tech prompt a call for tighter gun control? (gunshots) Scarborough Country. MSNBC tonight at nine!
RUSH: I’m not targeting Joe Scarborough. They have producers there, and they do things like this. But this is exploitation. I know it’s done for ratings, and I understand that, too. But I’m talking about the political prism that you find in Drive-By newsrooms and how the templates in there govern everything they do. Rather than the facts of each case, rather than the facts of each event, templates guide them. John Leo has written a brilliant piece today in the New York Sun which we’ll also get to as the program unfolds. These were not ‘assault weapons.’ These were not ‘military-style weapons’ as the left likes to call other weapons. These were two pistols. Now, the liberals tell us to rely on law enforcement, do they not? They love law enforcement. Law enforcement is never wrong. ‘Law enforcement’ are great sources for them. Now all of a sudden they’re attacking law enforcement! All right, well, if law enforcement can’t be counted on, then what about defending ourselves? If we gotta fire the police chief and we gotta fire the cops, and we gotta get rid of the university president and they have gun control laws on campus (it’s a gun-free zone in the campus), why in the world…? If we’re going to get rid of law enforcement, who the hell is going to protect us if we can’t protect ourselves?
No, no! They tell us we can’t do that, either, because guns — even in the hands of trained, law-abiding people — that’s bad. That’s recipe for disaster waiting to happen. How come it doesn’t happen? This was not a standard, trained law-abiding citizen here obviously by definition. So what we have here, what I want you to be on the lookout for is throughout the afternoon and night and into the days ahead, what we’re going to get is an agenda being pushed, and that agenda will be pushed whether in the middle of a war or in the middle of a terrible, terrible personal tragedy that most of us can never imagine, like this. You get an agenda with the Imus situation. You had a political agenda with the Duke lacrosse situation. No time for reflection! No time for actually thinking through the possible consequences of their agenda because — and that’s why I call them the Drive-By Media. They drive in, take over, load the community up with a bunch of fear, panic and paranoia, and move on to the next story whenever the template exists, whenever it fits, and continue pushing an agenda: blindly pushing an agenda without concern for the consequences of what it is they do. In fact, I’ve thought that by the end of my program yesterday, I would have a decent number of facts that had been learned. When was the first shooting yesterday? It was before ten o’clock, right?
Seven a.m. was the first shooting, and I was stunned, frankly, that it took so long to get basic facts about what happened. Whose job is that? Reporters, I thought. If they weren’t out pushing their own agendas — what do you have here? You have a shooter, unidentified, killing people on campus — the number, the death toll keeps rising — and I guarantee you that the focal point was, ‘Why’d the guy do it? Who is he? Is there some legitimate grievance he’s got that we can understand? Is there some sympathetic reason,’ and gun control, and that has to be one of the reasons why it took so long to put together the simple facts of what had happened here. Because, folks, I’m going to tell you: getting facts is no longer the job of the Drive-By Media. In fact, sometimes facts will get in the way of the agenda, and that’s why facts are not pursued. Facts are not their job. Advancing the liberal agenda is their job, and because they were advancing that agenda all day and all night is one reason why we were getting so few facts. They’ve already got the story written even before they have the information. I had people walk in this morning, ‘This is disgusting, the exploitation of this massacre by the media and other liberals to promote gun control.’
We are told that the liberals are the most compassionate and the most tolerant and understanding. They have the biggest hearts. You couldn’t tell it by this! The emotional, the personal element of this tragedy is not that interesting, no, no, no. ‘There’s gun control out there! We can finally get rid of NRA, and get rid of Wayne LaPierre! We can finally get rid of NRA headquarters. We can finally get gun control,’ and they can’t even tell you why they support it. It’s just their agenda. It’s just something that they have been longing for, for years, decades, and this has fallen into their laps! I’m sorry if you think this is callous, but I’m telling you what I think based on what I have watched about this, and the agenda and the political prism through which this is being seen and reported is far more interesting to them, far more important to them than the personal characteristics of this tragedy. Let’s go to this morning on MSNBC, David Gregory talking to Howard Fineman, who, during the Edwards press conference, looked first at the political results, the political impact of that. Gregory said, ‘The politics of this, the issue of gun control undoubtedly comes up. The availability of concealed weapons, licenses, permits in Virginia.’
FINEMAN: Every time something like this happens people predict a big change in terms of the politics of gun control. This may be different, in part because it’s in Virginia. This happened in the home of the right to bear arms.
GREGORY: Right.
FINEMAN: Literally. We’re talking about the headquarters of the NRA in northern Virginia.
RUSH: See? See?
FINEMAN: There’s going to be a huge debate here because of handguns. If you look at the press around the world, then —
RUSH: Wait, stop the tape a minute. Who’s going to start the debate, Howard? What do you mean, ‘There’s going to be a huge debate’? You guys are supposed to sit by, watch what happens and tell people who aren’t there what happened. You guys are going to start the debate. You guys are going to make it look like the American people are having a debate. Can anybody remember for me the 2004 presidential debates, and how about the 2000 presidential debates? In both cases (Algore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004) made it abundantly clear they were not part of the liberal gun-control movement. We had John Kerry out there, ‘Can I get me a huntin’ license here?’ and Gore stunned everybody in the debate with Bush, talking about how they’re not interested in taking guns away from private citizens who obey the law and so forth and so on. Remember how stunned everybody was? My point in bringing this up is, there’s not this national, mad dash for gun control on the part of the American people. There’s no big debate about this to grab guns out of people’s hands, but the Drive-Bys are going to make that debate. They’re going to make it look like you are having it and everybody else is having it when in fact it’s just them pushing an agenda, driven by one of their many templates. But the deeper point to me here is, as with FEMA during Katrina, the liberals are out there blaming the institutions of America for their tragedies — and then they insist the institutions are the only thing that can prevent them. The institutions are the only thing that can stop them. Government institutions somehow fell apart here, the school institutions, and yet it never occurs to them to think individuals can deal with these problems themselves.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So, they found a note from the shooter in which he rails against ‘rich kids’ and ‘the debauchery of the United States.’ Well, I have a simple question and retort. He was here for 14 years. If he thought this country was so bad, why the hell didn’t he pack up and go home, then? The question ought to be — and I’m just warning you people, because what’s going to happen here is that once the Drive-Bys get hold of the full contents of that note that he left it’s going to fit right into the template: ‘America is to blame. We’re too rich.’ It’ll even be folded into global warming. ‘Rich kids? We’re destroying the planet! We’re living in excess of our responsibilities,’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of this stuff, and it will be used in part to not justify — and I want to make this clear. They won’t justify, but it will explain his temporary insanity. ‘A lot of Europeans are angry at us for the same things, are they not? Islamofascists say the same thing. We have too many rich people and our culture is debauched, and now this guy is saying it.’ Believe me, it’s all going to fit into the template. If this guy thought the country was so bad, he can take his little ass back home. He stayed here for 14 years! So I reject the whole context, the whole thrust of the contents of his note.
Here we’ve got a piece of slime, a piece of human debris bent on killing as many people as he can. Now, unless law enforcement’s tipped off to this in advance, it’s difficult to see how he can be stopped from doing at least some of these killings. It is this guy who is personally responsible for this. Now, maybe things could have been done to lessen the chances of the tragedy, I don’t know, maybe reduce its severity, but the bottom line is this guy did it — and that will be rejected by the left and the Drive-By Media because they are looking to advance an agenda. As always with the left, personal responsibility is secondary. Most people are not capable of personal responsibility when liberals look at them. They look at them with contempt and arrogant condescension. So the whole concept of personal responsibility is throw it out the window. It’s secondary because the big thing here is now to find scapegoats and to make broader arguments. The British press, some UK newspaper, is blaming Charlton Heston who is sitting in his home with Alzheimer’s disease. You’ve got Democrats blaming George W. Bush today.
So, personal responsibility? ‘Nah, that’s secondary. We gotta find some scapegoats! We gotta make broader arguments. We gotta advance our political agenda,’ but, interesting, is it? Liberals and the media don’t always take this approach, do they? When it comes to George Bush, why, he is personally responsible for whatever tragedy occurs in our country, or in Iraq. George Bush is personally responsible for poverty, personally responsible for gasoline prices. Personally! Bush is personally responsible for everything, but real criminals, real perps, terrorists, on down to this guy? ‘No, no, no, no, no! We can’t rush to judgment on this, Mr. Limbaugh. No, no, no, no. We must understand and define the underlying socioeconomic reasons for this,’ and I’m going to tell you something: this is very destructive to our society. It’s very destructive to the victims of the Drive-By Media who are you. You are the average news consumers. You tune into this and you get barraged with politics and guilt, and you’re told you’re responsible because you’re Americans, and you haven’t done enough to get guns out of the hands of people, and so forth and so on, but the bottom line is that we all know that individuals are responsible for what they do or don’t do.
Let me give you an illustration of just how ridiculous the media are here. Why talk about gun control? Why talk about that? You could just as illogically blame the massacre on, say, the student visa process. This guy was a legal alien in the country on a student visa. You could blame immigration. You could blame any number of things. You could blame the student visa process, and you could further say — if I want to draw an analogy — they’re trying to say we’ve gotta get rid of all guns? Let’s keep all foreign students out of the country. How would you react to that? You have one guy from South Korea over here for 14 years. He goes nuts for whatever reason and kills 32 people at V Tech, and now we’ve gotta get rid of every gun in America. We’ve gotta get rid of every gun owned by law-abiding citizens. Why don’t they look at it, ‘Hey, maybe let’s stop all foreign students from coming into the country? They obviously don’t assimilate. They don’t understand the society. They end up getting angry and enraged, and they start killing people.’ It would be the same argument.
If I were to sit here and say ban every foreign student and get ’em out of the country, it would be no different than what the Drive-Bys are saying about trying to get rid of every gun. We could go into the lax immigration laws. We could say, ‘You know, we gotta close the borders! We can’t let anybody who’s not an American into this country. Look what those people do,’ we could say. If we wanted to echo the Drive-Bys but take it a different direction, we could say, ‘This is it. Legal immigration, illegal immigration, it’s over because the people coming into this country they get drunk and drive around and kill people or they get guns and they go to college campuses and kill people!’ The Drive-Bys are doing the same thing, only they are targeting guns for only one reason. They have a political agenda to take away your gun. It is part of liberalism. All of these examples I have cited would be just as absurd in this case as the gun control argument is, because this guy was a nut, pure and simple, 100% nut — and look how much of this story they got wrong. It’d be nice to be able to mourn the students and the professors and families without being fed all this garbage. You know, just as the Democrats in Congress are thinking politics when it comes to equipping our troops in the war, the Drive-Bys are thinking ‘ratings’ and not news reporting in the middle of a slaughter.
Can’t we mourn the students and the professors and families without being fed this garbage? Can’t we get some facts from so-called reporters whose job it is to get facts, before they start advancing a predictable agenda? That’s what reporting has become today, and this story is a classic illustration. Endless propaganda is what reporting is today. Endless liberal propaganda, from the war to talk radio to this mass murder, it is always the same. It is liberal propaganda driven by an agenda — and they got this story wrong for hours. They said he was ‘Asian of Chinese background.’ They also said he ‘wasn’t a student.’ Well, it turns out he was a student, and he was Korean. Gun control liberals. They also support activist judges and the ACLU. They oppose building more prisons. They oppose stringent sentencing guidelines for violent criminals, but in this case, none of this matters! This guy was hell-bent on slaughtering unarmed students and professors who he knew would be unarmed and unable to defend themselves, and that is key. He knew he would own the possession of the only gun on campus before law enforcement got there, and he blew himself away before they showed up.
There is no gun control law that could have stopped him, and anybody with an IQ of a pencil eraser or higher understands this. As I watched some of this last night, I felt a bubbling, effervescent resentment here at the constant insertion of this liberal political agenda into these tragedies, and to practically every other story that they cover. No time for the families to mourn, no time for the nation to mourn. We’ve already got stories from the Drive-Bys about how great Bill Clinton was at being mourner-in-chief, citing his brilliant speech after the Oklahoma City bombing, and implying that when Bush goes down there today, he’s just not going to pull it off as well as Clinton. Now, what the hell is that about, if not pushing a political agenda and propaganda? Two audio sound bites here, and this is to remind you of a point I made before the half hour break, and that is all this talk of the Drive-Bys are all for gun control, and Howard Fineman out there saying, ‘It’s going to ignite a massive debate.’ It’s Democrats who have to run as opposed to gun control in order to win elections these days. Gore tried it in 2000. Kerry tried it in 2004. Last night, CNBC on Larry Kudlow’s show, he was talking with Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy from New York, and he said to her, ‘Ms. McCarthy, you’re an advocate of gun control. Do you see that as an issue in this shoot-out?’
MCCARTHY: He got an awful lot of rounds off, so I’m curious to know what kind of gun he used. I know it was a 9mm, but I’m wondering if it had been changed at all, and I’m also wondering if there were large-capacity clips being used. We had tried to ban the large-capacity clips, and that’s any amount over ten bullets in a clip. We find that, you know, our police officers, our military, they should have the large-capacity clips, but there’s no reason except, you know, if you’re — you know, for sportsmen, and it certainly was an exception for that. But there’s no reason for the average citizen to have large-capacity clips.
RUSH: See that? See that? They gotta make an exception for the sportsmen. They know where they stand on all this but the point is, ‘Okay, it was 9mm. Okay, you limit the size of the clip. The guy just takes in more clips!’ Who are these people? How ignorant do they have to be? This guy was hell-bent on doing this — and it was not spur of the moment. He planned it. He went in with all kinds of ammo. He had two guns. What is this about…? I’m not a gun expert, but what is this, converting a 9mm clip? They just can’t wait to use the word ‘semiautomatic.’ I think this was a Glock, wasn’t it? One of them was a Glock. Okay, if it was a Glock then where is the Glock made? Austria? If we’re going to blame Charlton Heston and Bush, let’s blame everybody in Austria because they allow Glock to exist, to manufacture the weapon. Now, here’s the next one. Kudlow said, ‘Well, has that federal assault ban expired and there’s been no renewal? Why hasn’t that gotten through both houses?’
MCCARTHY: Well, as you know, this is a — a pro-NRA House and Senate, so it’s been very difficult. I go up on the House floor every single week and talk about the gun violence that’s going on across the country. Our gangs are getting more sophisticated guns. They’re outgunning our police officers, again. What people have to understand is that it’s costing — it’s also a health care crisis.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, let’s bring that into it now!
MCCARTHY: It’s costing this country over a hundred billion dollars a year —
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, bring it in.
MCCARTHY: — on those victims that do survive —
RUSH: Yeeeeeah!
MCCARTHY: — and not even counting the 30,000 —
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
MCCARTHY: — people that are killed each year, from gun violence —
RUSH: Oh, yeah!
MCCARTHY: — whether it’s suicide —
RUSH: Yeah!
MCCARTHY: — whether it’s accidental, or there is homocide. [sic]
RUSH: Yeah, it’s gun control leads to increased health care costs. Can anybody say ‘buzzword’? Can anybody pick another item from the liberal agenda that they’re trying to ram down everybody’s throats? So she says that Congress is very pro-NRA, and that’s the dirty little secret of how the Democrats got the majority. They had a lot of pro-gun moderates out there, candidates, pro-gun people running as moderates. It’s a pro-gun Congress, she’s out there saying. Anyway, gangs are getting more sophisticated guns, outgunning the police. (Laughing.) Does anybody think that the Crips and the Bloods or any other gang out there is not going to have guns if there’s gun control? If we abandon the Second Amendment, if we just wrote it out of the Constitution, does anybody think that gangs like this are not going to end up with guns? Oh, they think they’re obeying the law. Go to Washington, DC. Wasn’t there a recent DC court of appeals decision saying the whole local gun control law there was unconstitutional because it violated the federal Second Amendment? Yeah, now they’re asking for the whole court to rehear this, I think. (It’s called en banc.)
You have some of the most stringent gun control laws in both New York and Washington. Murder rates there are very, very high. But look at what we’re doing here. See, I’m even falling prey to it. We have a once-every-30-years tragedy. We have families beside themselves who will never understand this, I don’t care what they’re told. We’ve got 32 kids and professors who are dead, and all they did was show up. We have a genuine human debacle. It’s impossible to relate to this to try to understand this, and yet the gun control argument, here it is! It’s come up. That’s the point of this whole story to these people, and I even found myself being sucked into it here just mere moments ago, as though gun control would have prevented this! See, the trick here is that they are supposed to be able to convince you that if we just had gun control laws, why, this guy couldn’t have gotten a gun. That’s what’s just insane. So you see how easy it is to get sucked into something about which this story is not at all. This is not a gun control story. This is a pure, unadulterated (sigh). This is human misery on the scope that most of us will never be able to relate to or understand, and these families won’t either, and it’s a disgrace and it’s disrespectful to them to take advantage of this and take it off into the world of liberal propaganda, templates and agenda-driven items such as gun control.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to October 3rd of last year, 2006. There was a press conference for Amish schoolgirls who were murdered. Remember that circumstance? The governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, conducted a press conference, and an unidentified reporter said, ‘Governor Rendell, do you see any need for any changes in state public schools in terms of security?’
RENDELL: You can make all the changes you want, but you can never stop a random act of violence by a person who is intent on killing themselves. It’s the same thing as protecting the president of the United States. You can have 50 secret service agents there, but if someone is willing to swap their life for the president’s, they’re going to get a point blank shot at the president.
RUSH: Wow! Governor Rendell was saying exactly what I’m saying to you today. Interestingly that he’s a liberal Democrat and this Amish massacre happened in his state, and so everybody said, ‘Well, what are we going to do? We gotta make all schools safer! Oh, my God, gun control!’ He says there’s only so much you can do. You can make all the changes in the world you want but you can’t stop a random act of violence. I wonder if the Drive-Bys will talk to him — and they love Eddie Rendell. Chris Matthews loves Fast Eddie. Fineman? I wonder if they’ll go talk to him about this. I wonder if you will hear what Governor Rendell said, if you’ll be reminded of what he said last October in the Drive-By Media. I’m telling you, folks, no gun control law would have stopped this shooter. Everybody with an IQ of 12 knows it. I cannot express with the passion I’d like because it would require profanity, the human aspects of this. The grieving the loss, the questions, the just total bewilderment, lack of understanding, the nonsensicalness of this is being totally overlooked in the effort by the people covering this event to advance their own political agenda: the propaganda of gun control.
Jim Moran was on some radio station this morning, and he’s blaming the GOP, blaming the Republicans and blaming George W. Bush for this — and so what you have here is a contemptible political demagogue with a history of this kind of inane comment. Of course nobody is going to talk about Jim Moran. Like I said yesterday, on floor of Congress, a member of Congress can go anywhere and say anything, and nobody is going to say a word. Television can do hit pieces. Newspapers can do hit pieces. But somehow if you say something on radio, critical of somebody, well, the ‘watchdogs’ are going to come after you, and why is this? Because radio is dominated by conservatives. So here you have a genuine lunatic trying to blame this on George W. Bush! I imagine Pelosi or somebody is going to call up and say, ‘Wait a minute, Jim. Shhh! Shh! We got a good thing going here. You’re going to blow this. Nobody is going to buy that Bush is responsible for this.’ By the way, the two biggest acts of terrorism in this country occurred with box cutters, pocketknives, gasoline, and fertilizer — 9/11 and Oklahoma City — not guns.