RUSH: It’s Open Line Friday. Whatever you want to talk about, even if it doesn’t make any sense, is perfectly fine. Here’s Jeff in Minnesota. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Dittos to you, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I will adhere to caller responsibility No. 1. I am a local city council member, and we were running into some space issues at our city hall. So what we ended up doing is we ended up making satellite offices in each of our schools with an armed policeman that uses that space during the school day.
RUSH: Wait, wait, hold on. Wait a minute. I’m not understanding something. You have “space issues” at city hall, and you’re a council member.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: So you’re setting up satellite places in schools where people can go and watch the proceedings?
CALLER: No. To take care of our space issue, we assigned policemen in each of our schools in the form of a satellite office. So essentially we put an armed policeman in every one of our schools for the school year.
RUSH: Okay. But it has nothing to do with city council proceedings?
CALLER: No, sir. No.
RUSH: I don’t know what —
CALLER: No, I just happen to be a city council member.
RUSH: I don’t… What’s the space problem? Why…? If you have a space problem, why does somebody with guns alleviate space problem? I’m not putting two and two together here.
CALLER: The police department was part of our city hall, and we’re running out of space. So to make free —
RUSH: Oh! Okay. So you’re relocating police officers’ official office space over to schools!
CALLER: Correct, sir.
RUSH: Okay. Okay. I’m sorry I’m so thickheaded, but I finally figured it out.
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: So the point is you’ve got armed police in the schools now who are —
CALLER: That is correct.
RUSH: — actually on duty and, as such, in their offices, which are at the schools?
CALLER: That is correct.
RUSH: Okay. So how many people have been killed?
CALLER: Zero.
RUSH: Really? Zero.
CALLER: It works. We’ve had great success with it.
RUSH: Now, are these —
CALLER: One side note —
RUSH: Are the officers that are in these satellite offices in the schools, they are side-armed? Their weapons are visible?
CALLER: That is correct.
RUSH: Not concealed. And they’re in uniform, so they’re not plainclothes. So they’re plainly visible and it’s obvious that they’re police officers armed? Everybody in the school where those cops are can tell that about them?
CALLER: That is correct. They’re parked out in front in the parking lot.
RUSH: How’d you get this done without a bunch of people raising holy hell about it?
CALLER: It was kind of a win-win situation. As you may be well aware, this is more a common-sense issue. It works.
RUSH: Well, you know, the president talked about that today in relationship to this entire subject of keeping children in schools safe. He said, “It’s nothing more than a common-sense issue,” and you know what? What you’re describing as common sense makes sense to me. Here’s the amazing thing. This, I think, is a useful way in illustrating what I’m claiming to be a loss of sense, rising stupidity.
Common sense isn’t common anymore. Just like a common morality seems to have evaporated, so does the notion of common sense, and it’s been replaced by whatever people’s political preferences are political agenda happen to be. That, I think, is what really befuddles so many people. Common sense is just refuted. It’s unaccepted. In fact, it’s oftentimes said to be another problem.
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RUSH: You know our last caller, Tom from Minnesota, I misunderstood what he was saying. I got confused. He said, “We work at the town council. We had a space problem. So we put cops in satellite offices.” I thought, “What do cops and the town council have…?” That’s what he was not talking about. He was on the town council, therefore he has credibility for what he’s gonna say next. They had a space problem in the police department, and so they set up satellite offices in schools for the police officers where there was no room at the main station.
Now, stop and think of that as an idea. Instead of teachers and security people with concealed carry — which, look, I see the problem with that. There’s no perfect solution here. But I’ll tell you, we know enough now to know that all this rage and anger at the NRA is totally worthless. It’s misdirected. It is a waste of time. The NRA has no culpability in what happened at that high school. It’s stupid and a waste of time to get mad at them! Stupid and a waste of time to get mad at Trump. So when that happens, you can readily identify a political agenda in action and not a serious discussion of solutions.
Imagine establishing a tiny police office in every school. Just like you’ve got the school nurse, you have the school doctor, you have the school STD director, you’ve got the school police. Except that they are actual police from the community, but their desks are in the school and not at the police department. How many of you, where you live…? You know, you go to the mall, and there’s a little kiosk where it’s a satellite police department? This may be actually something to build on. You talk about uniformed police readily identifiable.
They’re carrying their sidearms. Nothing concealed. By definition, they are trained and ready, except this guy in the sheriff’s department that was outside the school and didn’t go in. But right there you’ve got a deterrent. (interruption) What? The guy didn’t go in. You know that he thinks he did a good job? His name is Peterson, right? Scot. Scot Peterson. “Deputy Who Didn’t Stop Florida Shooting Thinks He ‘Did a Good Job.'” He “‘believed he did a good job’ because he called in the location of the massacre and gave a description of the shooter.”
This is his union rep speaking. “School resource officer Scot Peterson, who resigned in disgrace from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, was ‘distraught’ about the shooting … but believed he did his duty, according to the president of the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association. ‘He believed he did a good job calling in the location, setting up the perimeter and calling in the description (of Cruz),’ said the union official, Jim Bell.” Well, we played the sound bite where the sheriff, Scott Israel, just destroyed the guy.
You know, and some sniveling little media member asked, “What should he have done, Sheriff? What should he…?” He should have “gone in,” he should have “engaged the killer and killed the killer.” Exactly right. Go in, you get in, get it, and get out. The guy didn’t go in! The union rep says he did a good job. He did his job. He called in the disturbance, gave him exact location, set up the perimeter. So what, the shooter couldn’t escape? But look, back to the point. So here you have armed police that are on duty doing their normal daily job.
They just do it from a desk or an office in the school, rather than from the police department, and the shifts rotate so you have a different crew. It could be sheriff’s deputies. I don’t know. Police, sheriff deputies, whichever would have jurisdiction here. Now, that sounds like a very common sense proposal. At bare minimum, it is a common sense proposal. I dare say “solution” because I would get pushback and arguments. But in terms of proposing things, that’s something that’s common sense.
You have no concealed carry. You have no deceit. You don’t have to worry about whether the concealed carry people know what they’re doing, whether been properly trained, whether following up on the training, being recertified and all that. Because we already know that with uniformed police and sheriffs’ deputies. Plus everybody would know they are there, and there is the deterrent factor right there. Everybody would know where they are. Now, at a big school like this one… This school as big as mine.
The student body, I think, was 3,200 where I went to school, but it was just… There were two schools for one town. This was 3,000 students, roughly. That’s a large school. So if you have a static location for the police, then people gonna know where they are and –thinking ahead — if you’re a perp, you could probably plan a shooting as far away from where the uniformed police are as possible. But still, the knowledge that they’re there…
The knowledge that somebody who is legally trained, legally empowered to shoot back at you… Because right now these perps, as wacko and disturbed as they might be, they know full well that they’re gonna be the only ones with a gun because they know full well the American left has turned schools into gun-free zones. For the first two to five minutes, they have no opposition. They have no obstacles. So that’s something to think about. I didn’t understand what the caller was getting at at first. I thought he was talking about shortage of space at town hall, which is where city councils meet.
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RUSH: This is Randy in Atascadero, California. Hi. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. Good to be with you. Yeah. I’m a trauma surgeon. I’ve been a trauma surgeon for 40 years, seen a lot of trauma, particularly gunshot wounds. When I was hearing them talk the other day about having guns at the schools, you know, my initial reaction is, you know, negative towards that. Just because of what I do and what I see. But as I’ve gone through my career, I’ve come to realize that, you know, there’s idealism, which would mean, you know, that guns won’t be shooting anybody.
But the realism is is that they do. As long as they’re there and they exist, the genie’s out of the bottle, and so you have to protect yourself. And I think the idea of having someone at a school who is very well trained in handling guns and knowing how to deal with those situations I think is absolutely necessary. The only one thing I get a little worried about is when I hear them keep talking about the teachers. It is not that the teachers can’t do that, but if they keep talking about teachers, you know, teachers are kind of becoming sitting ducks. If you’re a gunman you’re gonna go in there and first one you’re gonna do shoot is gonna be the teacher. (chuckles) So I — I, you know, I like them —
RUSH: I can see that. We’ve come up with an alternative idea today. We had a caller from Minnesota, who’s a member of the town council. He didn’t identify the city, but he’s a member of the town council. He said they had in their police department a space problem. They didn’t have room for all the officers for desk duty, just to hang around. I mean, they’re not always out in the patrol car. Officers hanging around, they didn’t have enough space, so what they did was open satellite police stations, one or two cops in a room at neighborhood schools.
And they actually were uniformed, and they were carrying their weapons, which were side arms, so it was obvious they were weaponized and that they were police. But they were there as police officers in a segregated part of the school that was thought of as the police station. They were not doing concealed carry. They were not teachers. And I thought, you know, that kind of makes sense to me. How many times you go to the mall and you see a miniature kiosk with police officers in there, any number of places where this happens.
And you would therefore have a known deterrent in the school. You would have trained police officers who are fully equipped and trained to deal with firearms and situations like happened in the school. You wouldn’t be putting the onus on teachers who would have to be trained for it. It’s an idea, at least, and it may be worth trying. It’s gonna be automatically rejected by people who want to keep blaming guns.
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: It appealed to me much more than having teachers be the people carrying the burden of this.
CALLER: I agree with you. I think that you really do need to have professionals because they’re trained in it, and when it really comes to an emergent situation, they’re the ones that at least have had experience with that.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: I think that’s a really good idea, or retired police officers. And also, you know, I keep it’s just key to reduce the access points to these schools —
RUSH: Well, I tell you, on the teacher business, you know, I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am for personnel in schools that are carrying guns, concealed carry, whatever. I have never been a loud voice for those people being teachers. I think some could be if they could pass tests and so forth, but the idea that teachers should carry the burden, I’m not crazy, unless you give them some additional pay. But there’s no reason you can’t have professionally trained armed security in there that don’t look like security. They’re plainclothes, and they’re just suits. They’re walking around, nobody knows who they really are, pass them off as members of the administrative staff or what have you, but they’re there.
And perps would know they’re there, wouldn’t know who they are, wouldn’t know where they are, but would know they’re there. There’s some deterrence in that. Look, before you go, I have to run something by you I saw. You know, I read a lot of tech blogs. And the tech blogs all hate the NRA. I mean, they’re just perfect leftists.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: And one of them went out and found a trauma surgeon who said the reason we’ve got to stop the AR-15 is a pistol fired through a liver or kidney, we can save the organ, but an AR-15 obliterates the organ and the person has no chance. And it was all a way to create additional thinking that we need to ban the, quote, unquote, AR-15 which is the devil of the moment. They went out and got a trauma surgeon to describe what happens to an internal organ with an AR-15 round as opposed to a pistol bullet. Of course that’s gonna be the case. One’s a rifle and one’s a pistol.
CALLER: Right. I mean, it has to do with velocity, as you probably know.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And the fact is, is that that’s true about the rifles but, you know, it’s also true about a magnum. You know, you have a .44 magnum pistol and it will do the same thing. I have dealt with those and they make a hole bigger than your fist in the liver.
RUSH: A tumble and the exit hole is bigger than the entry. Yeah, I know. None of it’s pretty.
CALLER: It’s not just the rifles. I mean, I personally have to say that I think there has to be strict limitations on these automatic rifles. But I do think that you’re not living in this world if you think that getting rid of all guns or getting rid of guns for the general public is gonna get rid of the problem, because —
RUSH: Precisely.
CALLER: It’s so true, you know, the criminals are gonna be the main ones with the guns —
RUSH: By definition, it’s criminal. When you start regulating the law-abiding, what are you accomplishing? Except denying them liberties, freedom, whatever. Regulating the law-abiding is absurd here! It’s common sense. But it doesn’t present that way to people who have been radicalized on this. Look, I appreciate the call, Randy. I gotta go. I’m way out of time here.
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RUSH: Looky here, folks. Houston Chronicle. Headline: “North Texas School is Getting a Police Station Because ‘Horrific Things Can Happen Anywhere.'” They’re calling it a police substation.
“A North Texas public charter school is getting a police substation on campus, not because of any specific school shooting incident, but because ‘horrific things can happen anywhere.’ The school board of Westlake Academy worked with the city council of Keller, which is north of Fort Worth, to get the plan for a Keller Police substation on the school’s campus.”
The story was uncovered by CBS DFW, Dallas-Fort Worth, the CBS Dallas-Fort Worth bureau. So it’s already happening out there. Minnesota, and now in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This idea may pick up steam to the chagrin of the Democrats and the anti-gun. They’re gonna hate this. Law enforcement, the charges, “You know what Black Lives Matter say. It’s gonna target black Americans.” You wait ’til the left gets hold of this idea. And they’re gonna overshoot and it’s gonna backfire on ’em, just like they have on taxes.