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Feb. 15, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:38
Another Horrific Shooting | Ep. 476
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Another tragic, heartbreaking shooting, this time in Parkland, Florida.
17 students and teachers dead after a mass shooting that just is heartbreaking and horrific in every way.
We'll discuss it.
We'll break it all down.
We'll bring you all the information.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So there's a lot to get to with regard to this particular shooting, another mass shooting.
It's another month, another mass shooting.
And this has driven a lot of folks in the media to do what they always do after a mass shooting, which is call for gun control and then suggest that anyone who disagrees with their prescriptions to solve problems like this must not.
I'll talk about that.
the people who died, which is one of the things I hate most about American politics.
A tragedy occurs, an act of evil happens, and people who disagree with the political prescription that is offered by most activist side are then deemed to be uncaring or people who are unfeeling.
It's something really despicable.
I'll talk about that.
We'll talk about what exactly happened in Parkland, who did, who failed, who failed, Who succeeded?
Some of the stories of heroism.
We'll talk about the response.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so.
You know, last night, in the aftermath of this horrific shooting, my—I was in a pretty terrible mood, as I think most people were who saw the information.
It was heartbreaking and upsetting and deeply disturbing, obviously, whenever you see a situation where somebody walks into a school and just starts gunning down students and teachers.
And last night, my daughter was really misbehaving.
She's 4 years old, and she's at the stage where she says no to everything.
Like, everything is a challenge.
I have to threaten to take away her blankies unless she gets in bed and stops jumping on the bed so she doesn't crack her head.
I mean, that's basically my life at night.
And this morning, she woke up, and I went in her room, and she stood up on her bed, and she said, And I just thought to myself, it's just a horrifying reality that there are a lot of parents who are waking up this morning whose kids are not going to be saying that to them.
And it's just, if you're not heartbroken after seeing what just happened in Florida, then you're not a human being.
And the idea that is put forth by both sides politically, depending on the tragedy itself, In a terrorist attack, it's people on the right who say people on the left don't care enough.
When there's a mass shooting, people on the left say people on the right don't care enough.
It's not about the level of caring.
Everybody cares.
Everybody is just weeping with the families today, as well they should.
That does not mean that every policy prescription is equally valid, equally good, or equally valuable.
And one of the things that is so disturbing and upsetting about how we jump to conclusions is that as soon as there's a mass shooting, we don't even wait for the facts to come out.
Everybody leaps to their respective side.
So in order to deal with the problem, you first have to determine what exactly was the problem.
What exactly went wrong?
What exactly happened here that we can solve?
That's not what we do.
On Twitter, particularly, where everybody is looking for an instant reaction, folks on the right, whenever there's a mass shooting, say, let's wait for all the facts.
And folks on the left, when there's a mass shooting, says, you don't need any more facts.
There have been lots of mass shootings.
The United States has more mass shootings over the past 20 years than most of the industrialized world combined.
That means it's time for a massive bout of gun control.
And I understand the tendency.
I do.
I mean, I think that the tendency to say, we need to do something, something has to stop here, is strong.
But that doesn't mean that any particular piece of legislation that's put on the table is going to be equally valid or that it's going to be equally effective at doing this.
So during the ramp up, usually what it turns into is folks on the left scream gun control, folks on the right say, let's wait for all the facts.
And then folks on the left say, all you want to do is thoughts and prayers.
You don't want to do anything.
You're deliberately trying to obfuscate.
You're deliberately trying to block progress here.
That's not what this is about.
The question is—there are two questions.
One is the question of sympathy, and one is the question of what we do next.
And the first question should not even be on the table.
Everyone cares about what happened in Parkland yesterday.
You know, the president was getting ripped up and down this morning.
He did a statement, about a six-minute statement, from the White House talking about what happened in Parkland, Florida.
And here's what he had to say.
My fellow Americans, today I speak to a nation In grief.
Yesterday, a school filled with innocent children and caring teachers became the scene of terrible violence, hatred, and evil.
Around 2.30 yesterday afternoon, police responded to reports of gunfire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
A great and safe community.
There, a shooter, who is now in custody, opened fire on defenseless students and teachers.
He murdered 17 people and badly wounded at least 14 others.
Our entire nation, with one heavy heart, is praying for the victims And their families.
So naturally, folks on the left immediately suggested that because Trump said that we're praying for the victims, this means we don't want to do anything.
It means that we don't care, as opposed to when President Obama would speak after a shooting, when he would fulminate against Congress and suggest that we need some sort of vast gun confiscation, or if not a vast gun confiscation, some sort of gun control that probably would have done little to stop the shooting.
So let's move beyond the implication that folks we disagree with are obviously uncaring, unfeeling, crude, barbarous people who don't care when small children and high schoolers are cut short in the prime of their lives before they even had a chance to have a full life by evil, sick human beings.
Let's put that aside, because if we can't put aside the implication that folks we disagree with are evil and nasty, then we can't have a political discussion.
If you really think If you're on the left today, and you really think that folks on the right don't care about what happened in Parkland, and that what you're dealing with is an ultimately evil group of people who do not care at all when innocents get shot, then maybe it's time for you to arm up yourself and go fight those people, because only monsters would not care what happened in Parkland, Florida, yesterday.
So, what exactly did happen in Parkland, Florida, where here was a school shooting eyewitness talking about the harrowing events?
Well, it was a second fire alarm that went off today, around like 2.22, and we were like suspicious because We already had a fire alarm, Joe, going off, so we weren't sure if this was a real fire, Joe, or not.
And apparently, I guess, the shooter pulled the alarm so you could have kids going out on the hallway to shoot.
And I was on the top floor, and then right behind, right below me, on the first floor, I heard shooting, and I saw two guys running.
I went to make a right, and I just ran.
And I had my book bag on my back, just in case I got shot from the back.
It would go through my book bag and my books.
I ran to where there were students and teachers, And we went to Westfleet and then from there I knew it was a real shooting because I saw three helicopters and that's when everyone was just all meant for themselves and I jumped the fence and I just ran.
So the shooter, whose name—you know, I'm starting to believe—I've always been conflicted about this.
There are a lot of folks who say you should not mention the identity of the shooter, you shouldn't mention the name of the shooter, and I'm starting to believe that's right, because the glorification of these shooters is obviously driving other people to worship them.
Since Columbine, a huge percentage of school shooters have worshipped at the altar the folks who were responsible for Columbine, the monsters responsible For Columbine.
So, I'm going to avoid mentioning the name of the shooter today.
I'm going to talk about what we need to know about him, but I'm not going to mention his name, because I don't think that giving him credibility or giving him fame is a worthwhile thing, because these crimes do tend to create copycats.
But here is Matthew Walker.
Matthew Walker was a student at the school, and he was discussing with the media what he saw and also what he knew about the shooter.
Honestly, a lot of people were saying that it was going to be him and stuff like that.
A lot of kids do jokes around like that, saying that he's the one that screwed up the school, but it turns out, you know, everyone predicted it.
That's crazy.
Wow, he must have come on the campus then, right?
Yeah, he was on the third floor.
He knows the school layout.
He knows where everyone would be at as of right now.
He's been in some fire drills.
He's prepared for this stuff.
OK, and this shooter, there are always, always, in this case, many, many red flags about this shooter.
His Instagram was filled with pictures of him holding up guns.
You can see this picture of his Instagram, flaunting his weapons.
He was on law enforcement's radar, as well.
The New York Post has a long story about it.
The suspected gunman is a troubled former student obsessed with firearms who was once identified as a potential threat to his fellow classmates, according to a report.
One teen said, I stayed cleared of him most of the time.
He's been a troubled kid.
He's always had a certain amount of issues going on.
He shot guns because he felt it gave him, I guess, an exhilarating feeling.
He showed me his guns personally through his phone.
This particular shooter had even joked about taking out his schoolmates on several occasions.
The teen says he played around with the joke multiple times.
You know, he knows the layout of the school.
He can actually go ahead.
He can pinpoint where all the students would be.
He's been through the drills multiple times.
He'd been banned from carrying a backpack on the campus of this high school due to his alleged issues, according to the Miami Herald.
A math teacher said, we were told last year he wasn't allowed on campus with a backpack on him.
It's Jim Gard, a math teacher who taught this shooter last year.
He said there were problems with him last year threatening students.
I guess he was asked to leave campus, according to the teacher.
School officials had sent out an email warning teachers about the shooter and the alleged threats that he was making against other students this year.
The Broward County school superintendent said this didn't happen.
He said, we received no warnings.
I don't really believe that.
Apparently, the FBI received warnings as well.
And I will give you more details on that in just one second.
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So, according to the Broward County Schools District Superintendent, Robert Wonsey, he said potentially there could have been signs out there, but we didn't have any warning or phone calls or threats that were made.
But his classmates, the shooter's classmates, say he was a well-known threat at the school.
A lot of people were saying that it was going to be him.
One of the students said everything he posts is about weapons.
It's sick.
And they are looking at some of the motives behind all of this, but apparently he was a loner.
He was—law enforcement says he was a member of J-ROTC, Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps.
He was apparently in an alternative school, in an alternate school, and people didn't want to be anywhere near him.
He was reportedly wearing a gas mask and carrying smoke grenades during the alleged massacre.
It's not clear where he got the smoke grenades.
He apparently—he used an AR-15-223.
which is a most commonly owned semi-automatic rifle in the United States.
That was legally garnered.
He had it legally, apparently.
He bought it legally.
The smoke grenades, no one knows where those came from or whether he got those legally at all.
We also know that the FBI was apparently warned last September about this guy.
So there was a YouTube user who used his real name.
This guy used his real name, and he wrote in response to a video by a vlogger that he was going to be a, quote, professional school shooter.
And that vlogger warned the FBI.
On Thursday, BuzzFeed reported the FBI had been warned about someone of the same name in late September 2017.
BuzzFeed spoke with the YouTube vlogger Ben Benite, 36, who said he noticed an alarming response to one of his videos posted and immediately contacted the FBI.
Agents with the Bureau's Mississippi field office got back to him immediately, Benite said, and conducted an in-person interview the following day on September 25th, according to BuzzFeed.
They came to my office the next morning.
They asked if I knew anything about the person.
I didn't, said the vlogger.
They took a copy of the screenshot, and that was the last I heard from them.
So you can actually see the screenshot in which the shooter says, I'm going to be a professional school shooter and uses his actual name.
It is not an alias.
It is it is not a it is not a pseudonym.
But I told BuzzFeed that around 430 on Wednesday, 30 minutes after they took the shooter into custody, Special Agent Ryan Furr of the Miami FBI field office contacted him about the shooter.
He said, quote, I think we spoke with you in the past about a complaint you made about someone making a comment on your YouTube channel.
I just wanted to follow up with you on that and ask you a question with something that's come up, if you wouldn't mind giving me a ring.
So the agents visited him in person for a second time on Wednesday.
They asked me if I knew who he was.
I didn't.
I don't.
Then they left.
I guess it's vlogger, not vlogger, sorry.
In any case, The FBI refused to acknowledge that they made this call or that this guy was on their list.
According to former classmate Joshua Charo, 16, he said, All he would talk about is guns and knives and hunting.
I can't say I was shocked.
From past experiences, he seemed like the kind of kid who would do something like this.
He used to tell me he would shoot rats with his BB gun, and he wanted this kind of gun, and how he always liked to shoot for practice.
Apparently, he escaped the school by hiding among the other students evacuating the area, but then he was arrested in a nearby neighborhood at around 4 p.m., So, obviously, shocking stuff.
So, here's the question now.
So, the question is, what do we do?
The question is, what do we do?
There are some stories of heroism that I'm going to talk to you about in a few minutes, but what do we do about situations like this?
So the Republicans do what the Republicans typically do, right?
They say, we need to wait to find out exactly what's happening here.
So Marco Rubio says, listen, the senator from Florida, it's his home state.
He said, we don't know how this happened yet.
In order for us to fight what exactly happened, we have to know what exactly happened and how exactly it happened.
Here's Rubio saying this.
He just got shellacked on media over this.
It's not, only because people don't know how this happened.
I mean, who this person is, what motivated them, how did they get a hold of the weapon that they used for this attack?
I think it's important to know all of that before you jump to conclusions that there's some law that we could have passed that could have prevented it.
And there may be, but shouldn't we at least know the facts?
I think that you can always have that debate, but if you're going to have the debate about this particular incident, you should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim could have prevented it.
I've seen a lot of that on television, and maybe there is a law that could have prevented this instance.
But we don't know that, and neither do they.
That's exactly right.
But people are saying, how dare he say this?
How dare he?
Listen, Glenn Kessler fact-checked this statement by Rubio.
Rubio made a similar statement last year, saying all the gun laws that have been proposed wouldn't have stopped a lot of these school shootings.
And Glenn Kessler, who has no right winger over at The Washington Post, concluded that this was true.
Because of course it's true, right?
The fact is that in this particular case, if somebody—here's the deal.
In a country with 300 million weapons, and there are 300 million guns in the United States, if you are determined to go and hit a soft target with no security present, You're going to find a way to do it.
You are.
It is not hard to illegally obtain a gun in the United States.
Forget about the rules.
It is not hard to illegally obtain a gun in the United States.
It is not hard to make illegal modifications to a legally obtained weapon.
It is not difficult to carry out a terror attack.
And this was essentially a terror attack.
There is no reason that you can't do that.
Which brings us to question number two.
There are two questions.
One, what can we do to minimize the chances that this happens?
And number two, how do we maximize the chances that the response time is the shortest so that we can kill somebody like this before they're able to do any more damage?
So the answer to question number one, there are some things that we can probably do.
Jim Garrity over at National Review has suggested, for example, that we really crack down in more harsh fashion on straw purchasers.
Straw purchasers are people who buy a gun and then transfer it illegally to somebody.
So, I buy a gun legally, and then there's somebody I know who can't get a gun, and so I transfer that gun legally to that person.
That makes me a straw buyer.
That's illegal.
In the last 10 years or something, only 44 people have been prosecuted in serious fashion as straw purchasers, despite the fact that there are thousands of these people who are out there.
That obviously needs to stop.
Would that have stopped this school shooting?
No, because this guy had no criminal record.
There was no record of him having been institutionalized, I believe, for any significant period of time that would have barred him from owning a weapon.
And that means that it's very difficult to see how he wouldn't have been able to get the weapon.
The only way he would have been able to be barred from having the weapon is if the FBI did their damn job.
If the FBI actually investigated, found this guy, warned local law enforcement.
Now, apparently, this shooter was also on the radar for local law enforcement.
Apparently, his mom had called up—his mom, I think, recently passed away.
Apparently, his mom had called up the police, and they'd had, like, sit-down sessions with this kid.
So there were a lot of red flags.
Everybody was warning about him, and nobody was able to do anything.
So maybe one of the things that we should do, as a preventative measure, is make it easier to involuntarily commit somebody like this, who sounds like he's a sociopath.
And maybe we should make it less difficult for family to say, listen, we can't control somebody like this.
This person is dangerous.
Right now, the law in most states across the United States is that we will only put you on a 48-hour hold, a 48-hour psychiatric hold, if you are a danger to yourself or others.
And then if you can show that you're not a danger to yourself or others, we release you again.
Well, that's probably not enough.
An involuntary commitment in the United States is incredibly difficult.
Very, very tough.
Maybe that needs to change, because how many of these school shooters have been people who should have been in psychiatric care?
It sounds like this guy was crazy.
It sounds like Jared Lee Loeffner in Arizona was crazy.
It sounds like James Alsa—what was his name?
I can't remember his name.
The evil guy who shot up a theater in Aurora, Colorado.
That guy was crazy, obviously.
Adam Lanza.
The shooter in Sandy Hook was a crazy person.
All of these people should have been forcibly incarcerated for psychiatric care.
They were not.
There's something wrong with that system.
I mean, we have to have heavy screening.
We don't want innocent people being forcibly institutionalized.
We do want to make sure that if you have a real mental illness and you're a threat to others, that you're not out on the streets able to walk into a school and start shooting it up.
So that's something that you could, there are a couple things you can do right off the bat to stop this.
Background checks, would that have stopped this case?
No, because again, there was nothing for them to check.
He had no criminal record.
The only way that you could presumably stop somebody like him from buying that weapon is to ban the weapon outright, ban the sale of the weapon outright.
So that's what the left is starting to propose now, is let's ban the sale of the weapon outright.
That probably would not have stopped this particular case, because again, if you are determined, there are too many guns in the United States to prevent the illegal sale of a gun to somebody who wants one.
And unless you're willing to undergo a full-scale gun confiscation, in which you're talking about hundreds of millions of weapons across the United States, which would not go down without significant violence, particularly in gun-heavy areas, then you're not talking in the real world.
You're just not speaking about things that are happening in the real world.
In Australia, the gun violence rate has gone down at a lower rate than the United States, despite the gun confiscation.
The gun confiscation only took one-third of the guns.
That was the gun buyback program in Australia.
It's illegal for people to own guns.
Two-thirds of the people who own them still own them.
So the idea that people are just going to turn over their weapons is insane.
It's not going to happen.
So then it becomes a question of what can we do practically, and a lot of the measures that the left talks about wouldn't do anything practically when they say ban assault weapons.
OK, so what do you mean by assault weapon?
You mean the grip?
You mean the way that the stock attaches?
What are you talking about assault weapon?
You're going to ban all rifles?
Because again, you're going to need a mass confiscation if you actually want that to work.
So this is where the rubber hits the road.
There are a lot of polls that suggest that Americans want more gun control.
These polls are pretty much meaningless.
They're about as meaningless as the polls that say that Americans want spending cuts.
We want spending cuts until you tell us what it is that you want to cut.
Americans want gun control until you tell us what it is that you want to control.
If you're telling us that you want background checks, we're pretty much all for that.
They exist.
If you buy from a federally licensed firearms dealer, as happened in this case, and you fail the background check, you can't buy that gun.
That exists.
People on the left like to talk about the gun show loophole, the idea of hand-to-hand transfers.
There's not a ton of evidence that that is connected to crime, hand-to-hand transfers, that I legally sell my gun to Mathis, for example.
There's not a lot of evidence that that has any impact on crime.
But that's not stopping the left from making hay while the sun shines politically.
And that's where I really object.
Again, going back to the original point, people on the left continue to insist over and over and over again that if I want to look specifically at what measures they're pushing, Then this means that I'm doing something wrong.
Instead, I should just give them a blank check because something terrible and evil just happened.
Okay, in just a second, I'm going to show you the Democratic response to this and where I think it is morally deficient.
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OK, so the Democrats in the media respond to this shooting with their usual excitement and alacrity.
They are not excited, obviously, that people got shot, but excited that now they get to push this issue into the forefront once again.
So Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she comes out and she says, it's not too soon to talk about this.
Now, what the left never says is what this is.
They say it's never too soon to talk about gun control.
OK, what do you mean by gun control?
And what does that mean?
What specific proposal are you putting on the table?
And if you don't have one, then what exactly are we talking about here?
I hate vague terminology.
I think that it's useless in politics and it's counterproductive in politics.
And, in fact, all it is for the left is a buzzword.
When the Democrats controlled Congress, when they had 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House and the presidency, they didn't pass one piece of solid gun control legislation.
They could have.
They didn't.
They knew it was unpopular.
They knew the American people wouldn't like it.
They knew that, in many cases, it probably would have been unconstitutional.
But here is Debbie Wasserman Schultz again saying it's not too soon to talk about gun control.
Listen, I am happy to talk about gun control.
But you need to show me what is the specific piece of legislation we are discussing, what is your specific proposal, and then we can talk about it.
Otherwise, you just saying, I don't like guns, is as useless as you saying, I don't like nuclear weapons.
I'm not a huge fan of nuclear weapons either.
They do a lot of damage.
But we have to talk, in serious policy terms, about the costs and benefits of the United States having nuclear weapons.
And the same thing is true with regard to private ownership of guns.
Here's Debbie Wasserman Schultz doing the routine.
It's absolutely not too soon to yet again say that something has to be done about access to guns in this country.
But just as important, something has to be done about making sure that people who have mental health challenges get the help that they need.
Okay, so if we all agree with that, on the mental health challenges, that people who have mental health problems ought to get the help that they need, then we need to strengthen the system.
I think we all agree on that.
And there are ways that we can strengthen the enforcement of preventing mentally ill people from getting guns.
In the state of California, a couple of years ago, there were 30,000 people in the state of California who were on the rolls as people who should not be able to own guns that we knew owned guns.
And we had a 20-person team trying to track them down and take away their guns.
Okay, that ain't going to cut it.
So stronger enforcement would be useful here.
And here, there should be some points of agreement.
Will there be?
Unclear.
One of the reasons that it may not be is because when it comes down to actual boiling down of this stuff to legislation, things become a lot more complicated.
So, for example, there are a bunch of people online who have now been claiming that Donald Trump rolled back an Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership, that they struck down an Obama-era regulation blocking gun sales to the mentally ill.
This is the line.
CNN ran it.
The Hill ran it.
NPR ran it.
The idea being that Republicans made it easier for mentally ill people to get guns.
That is not what the House Republicans were doing.
That is not what it was.
Charlie Cook writes about this over at National Review.
He says, So here is what exactly happened here.
Okay, there was a rule.
That Obama-era rule was not that gun buyers must obtain background checks or that the mentally ill are barred from buying guns.
And it wasn't an NRA initiative.
It was an ACLU initiative.
The NRA and the ACLU both supported what the House did.
Why?
Because here's what it was about.
The rule would require the Social Security Administration to forward the names of all Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income recipients who use a representative payee to help manage their benefits due to a mental impairment to the national instant criminal background check system.
So bureaucrats within one federal agency would be able to say that old people who are no longer able to take care of their finances should have their guns removed from them and this should be used as a definition of mental defective.
There are a bunch of problems with this.
So as Charlie says, on separation of power grounds, the prospect of the Social Security Administration playing judge, jury and executioner is flatly intolerable.
On due process grounds, there was nothing to recommend the measure.
On statutory grounds, it seems clear the SSA was acting ultra viris, I mean, out of their authority.
And as a political matter, the vacillation of the Obama administration, which insisted simultaneously that incidents of violence continue to highlight a crisis in America's mental health system and that it was not attempting to imply a connection between mental illness and a propensity for violence, was downright embarrassing.
Again, the link also between financial acumen being able to take care of your finances and being able to own a gun, that link is really weak.
I know a lot of people who are not capable of handling their finances.
And most of those people are still able to handle a gun.
It doesn't matter.
The left trotted out this nonsense anyway all day yesterday, and you're still seeing it today.
Blumenthal—Senator Blumenthal from New Jersey—from Connecticut, rather, Richard Blumenthal, he was doing the same routine as Debbie Wasserman Schultz, however, and blaming Congress for not doing enough, even though he can make no specific proposal that would have stopped what happened yesterday.
This one is the 18th school shooting just this year, but also the day-by-day deaths that are preventable, and we have an obligation to prevent.
Congress has been complicit.
Congress bears responsibility.
So when they say Congress has been complicit, then you hear the MSNBC host go, hmm, yes, yes.
It just shows you how stupid this whole conversation is.
Explain how they've been complicit.
Explain the law that they should have passed that they didn't pass.
Explain what they did wrong.
Don't just say Congress has been complicit on a broad level and something bad happens.
Congress isn't God.
There are certain things that should have been done here.
It sounds like the FBI blew it.
And our great, hallowed FBI.
But the idea that Congress is responsible for this without mentioning what proposal Congress voted down is beyond insipid.
Also, the left keeps implying, for example, there are a bunch of pieces of misinformation going around today.
Another piece of misinformation going around.
The NRA is paying off politicians to be pro-gun.
That is not the case.
There was a rumor going around on the left.
It's a Stephanie Rule, I believe, on MSNBC.
was suggesting that it's just terrible that there was one senator who received $3 million over the last 10 years from the NRA.
That senator spent $30 million on his last senatorial race alone.
If you think that he moved from anti-gun to pro-gun because the NRA paid him off, you're an idiot.
Another piece of bad information that you're seeing parroted by the media.
There's a group called Everytown.
Everytown is a gun control group.
And Everytown said that there were 18 school shootings in the month of January.
Now, you may be wondering, why didn't I hear about those school shootings every single day?
The answer is because there were not 18 school shootings in the month of January.
There were more like three.
Even one is terrible.
But there were no mass school shootings, and the ones that exist are bad enough without you having to blow it up to 18.
We can go through them.
ABC News said there were 18 school shootings in the first 45 days of 2018, according to Everytown.
And New York Daily News said the same thing.
But that's not true.
Okay, twice.
So they counted these as gun incidents on campus.
Twice, someone shot themselves on a school ground.
One incident on January 3rd featured a man shooting himself in a former school's parking lot.
On January 10th, a teen killed himself in an Arizona elementary school bathroom.
Okay, that is not a school shooting.
That is a school suicide.
Hey, four times a bullet was fired through a school or dorm's window.
A gunshot on January 4th was fired at a high school in Seattle through an office window.
No one was hurt.
On January 10th, a shot was fired shattering a California University classroom window.
No injuries reported.
The same day in Texas, a bullet was accidentally fired through a classroom wall at the Grayson College Criminal Justice Center.
No one injured.
On January 15th, a bullet traveled through a residential hall's dorm room.
No injuries reported.
On January 25th, a Mobile, Alabama high school student fired a gun on campus.
No injuries.
On January 26th, shots were fired from a car in a parking lot.
No injuries.
On February 5th, a third grader pulled the trigger on a cop's gun.
No one was injured.
On February 8th, a shot was fired inside Metropolitan High School.
No one was injured.
Okay, there have only been a few cases in which someone was injured other than the shooter.
January 22nd in Texas, a teenage girl was wounded by shots from a semi-automatic handgun.
That same day, a 14-year-old boy was injured in a shooting in Gentilly, Louisiana.
February 1st, five children were injured in an accidental shooting, so that's not even a purposeful shooting, it's accidental.
And finally, on February 5th, a teenager was shot and injured outside a high school.
There were only three deadly shootings, apparently, in the last 45 days.
So that is still awful.
Every one of these is awful.
Every one of these is tragic and terrible and an act of evil.
That does not mean that 18 happened.
So I think that it's just important to get the statistic correct.
You wonder why people don't trust the media?
It's because the media don't bother to do any of this.
They just give you the bottom line, 18 school shootings.
And then, the minute you dig into it, you realize there were not 18 school shootings, there were three.
A football player was shot and killed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
In Benton, Kentucky, two people were killed, another 15 shot at Marshall County High School.
January 31st, there was a fight that broke out at a Pennsylvania high school and a 32-year-old man was shot and later died.
So that is not the same as what the media have been telling you.
The media's malfeasance here has been really quite awful.
And we're going to talk about the media malfeasance here in just a second.
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So as I said, the media response to the shooting has been filled with lies and untruths and half-truths.
And what it really is about is folks in the media demonstrating how much they care.
This has become the game.
And it's not a game in the sense—none of this is really a game.
But this has become what the media do.
What the media do in the aftermath of a shooting is they demonstrate How deeply they care.
All the late night hosts go out there and talk about gun control, even though a simple note of sympathy would suffice.
They decide that they become experts on gun control.
Members of the media go out there and talk about how much they care, because in American society, for some odd reason, we have decided that we can judge whether you are making a quality proposal by the level of how much you care.
This is stupid politics.
The level of how much you care has nothing to do with the decency, strength, or truth of a proposal that you are making.
Nonetheless, these emotional pleas continue from the media.
There's a commentator named Kavanaugh on NBC saying that the argument against gun control is legitimately over.
There is no more argument against gun control because of the shooting.
The argument that gun safety laws don't work has, I mean, it's jumped shark week.
It's gone.
Look at these mass killings.
That argument is gone.
We need to have reasonable laws, not taking away anybody's rights.
Everybody's got to work together.
Are we making the Second Amendment a suicide pact for all of us, our children, the mall, the school, the college?
This is crazy.
And we can do better.
Okay, that is ATF Special Agent Jim Kavanaugh, law enforcement analyst.
Solid law enforcement analysis there.
Reasonable gun laws that don't violate anyone's rights.
Why, that sounds just magical.
Now, what the hell are you talking about?
Like, really, make a proposal.
Put it on the table.
Let's discuss it.
But don't give me the reasonable gun laws, and then don't actually propose a gun law.
You can't do that.
That's not fair, it's not right, and it's not true.
It's just foolishness.
And more than anything else, it's designed to put people who are in favor of gun rights on the defensive.
Oh, you're unreasonable.
See, if you disagree with Jim Cavanaugh that there is a case against gun control, then that means that you're unreasonable.
It means that you don't care.
It means that you're a bad person.
This is what I said to Piers Morgan years ago after the Sandy Hook shooting, that he's standing on the graves of the kids at Sandy Hook in order to promote his political agenda.
Unfortunately, members of the media still play this game.
If you cannot assume good intentions on the part of your political opponent, you're never going to be able to make a deal.
You're certainly not going to be able to come to any sort of conclusion.
It wasn't just Kavanaugh.
Don Lemon on CNN made an emotional plea for gun control after the school shooting.
So just forget politics here.
This is about lives, the lives of all Americans.
We need to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.
Everyone agrees with that.
People who oppose gun control will say today is not the day to talk about it.
And you know what?
They are absolutely right.
Because the day to talk about it was weeks, months, years, or decades ago.
And yes, of course, we also need to make mental health a priority in this country.
But guess what?
We can do both.
We can do both of those things at the same time.
If we don't, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
This is America, people.
Don't forget that.
OK, yeah, I got this is America.
I mean, I like Don, but I mean, come on, come on.
Yes, this is America.
Guess what's in our Constitution?
A Second Amendment.
That's part of America.
This idea that we're all sitting around wailing and gnashing our teeth over meaningless slogans.
This stuff should have been done years ago.
Make your case.
Make your proposal.
I don't understand.
Do you have a secret proposal?
Is it like Trump's foreign policy on ISIS that he wasn't going to reveal during the campaign?
Or Dick Nixon's proposal on how to end the Vietnam War in five minutes?
Like, what's your proposal?
We've been around.
I'm waiting.
Put it on the table.
Let's talk about it.
But we're not getting any of that.
Instead, we get the, we cannot accept this.
Right?
America's better than this.
Whenever people say things like, America's better than this, it's so irritating, because the suggestion is, if I disagree with your general proposition on policy, then that means I don't think America's better than this.
I think America's worse than this.
I think people deserve to be shot.
He wasn't even the worst person on CNN last night.
That was Philip Mudd.
Philip Mudd is the national security analyst, counterterrorism analyst over at CNN.
He teared up, and then he started talking about, we cannot accept this.
I have 10 nieces and nephews.
We're talking about bump stocks.
We're talking about legislation.
A child of God is dead.
Cannot we acknowledge in this country that we can't, we cannot accept this.
I can't do a wolf.
I'm sorry.
We can't do it.
Okay.
Do you think we all don't feel like that?
You think we all don't feel like that?
We cannot accept this is such an obnoxious statement.
Of course we can't accept this.
Who are you implying can't accept this?
Are you implying that a bunch of us who own guns accept this?
We're the ones who want to stand out there and shoot this bastard before he enters the school.
Are you suggesting that those of us who think the best solution to this would be armed security are accepting this?
On the contrary.
I went to a Jewish day school here in Los Angeles for high school.
It's a high school called Yeshiva University of Los Angeles or Yeshiva of Los Angeles.
It changes name a couple of times.
It's right next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Every month, probably once a month, we had to evacuate the school because of a bomb threat.
Because it's a Jewish school and that means there are anti-semitic bomb threats on a pretty regular basis.
While I was there, there was a guy named Buford Furrow.
Buford Furrow was an actual white supremacist terrorist.
He graduated from ULA in 2000.
He, in 1999, shot up a Jewish community center in the West Valley here in Los Angeles.
And before he did that, he drove past our high school.
He drove to the high school.
He stopped at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He thought about going in, and he saw security guards.
He wrongly assumed they were armed.
They were not armed.
But he wrongly assumed that they were armed security guards.
And he thought to himself, OK, I can either walk in here and get my ass shot, or I can go to a place where there will be no security, like the JCC, and then I can shoot up as many people as I want.
He ended up killing several people.
And the point of the story is that security at schools matters.
For the left, which has constantly suggested that government stimulus would be had by creation of government jobs, how about this?
How about the government, local government, state government, how about they pay for security at their schools?
How about we make sure that there are armed guards, several armed guards, on every school campus?
This is not too much to ask.
We have armed security guards at malls, for goodness sake.
Why shouldn't we have them at schools where we have a bunch of sitting duck students, the most valuable commodity our society has, kids, and they're utterly unprotected.
And you stick a gun-free sticker up there and you think that's going to somehow dissuade people from walking on campus with a gun?
I don't understand why this is even mildly unreasonable.
How is it unreasonable to suggest that maybe we ought to have armed people who are qualified with a gun standing there to make sure that other armed people can't walk in the school?
This guy walked in there with a full-on rifle.
He wasn't concealing it.
He was banned from campus.
And when people say, well, you can't do identity checks at the door in school, why the hell not?
Why can't you do identity checks in school?
We had one in my high school.
This idea that, oh, you're militarizing the school.
You know what?
The security at my daughter's preschool is really good.
Militarizing schools.
You know what militarizes a school?
Somebody walking in with a gun and murdering students.
That militarizes the school.
You know what doesn't militarize a school?
Having a security guard that everybody knows their name and they're friends with, who knows how to use a gun and is capable of doing that in case a bad person walks on campus with a gun.
This notion that you're going to protect students by doing none of that.
They're fragile psyches.
Let me tell you something.
What's more fragile than a student's psyche?
Their body.
This idea that students are so fragile psychically that if they see a man with a gun in a uniform, or if they see cops on campus, or if they see a security guard on campus with a gun, not a security monitor with a stupid radio, an actual gun, if they see that person, this is going to disturb them.
It's going to make them unable to function in a normal society.
What kind of stupid crap is this?
What absolute utter nonsense?
Even when I went to middle school, there were security guards with guns.
In Israel, every school has a security guard with a gun, or multiple.
Are the kids from Israel somehow really screwed up because they saw a gun?
Only people who are idiots think that the mere sight of a gun traumatizes a child so much that they'll never recover.
You know what traumatizes a child?
Being shot.
You know what traumatizes a child?
Seeing their classmates shot.
You know what traumatizes a child?
Hiding in a closet, texting their parents that they might be about to die because there was no one on campus with a gun to stop a bad man who walks onto campus with a gun.
So listen, I'm happy to look at gun control proposals if they are actually specific so we can determine what is true and what is not.
What I am not willing to do is entertain the idea that if you just say gun control, I'm supposed to bow to whatever you fill in that blank check with.
And meanwhile, I'm supposed to pretend that it's not idiocy not to have armed security guards on campus.
Just stupidity.
Now, I thought there was something else interesting that was tweeted out yesterday.
Michael Ian Black, who's a comedian, he tweeted something out about how there is something deeper than the gun problem happening in the United States.
I think he's half right and half wrong.
Here's what he tweeted, quote, Deeper even than the gun problem is this.
Boys are broken.
Until we fix men, we need to fix the gun problem.
The last 50 years redefined womanhood.
Women were taught they can be anything.
No commensurate movement for men who are still generally locked into the same rigid, outdated model of masculinity, and it's killing us.
If you want to hurt a man, the first thing you do is attack his masculinity.
Men don't have the language to understand masculinity as anything other than some version of a caveman because no language exists.
The language of masculinity is hopelessly entwined with sexuality, and the language of sexuality is hopelessly entwined with power, agency, and self-worth.
So men, and boys before that, don't have language for modes of expression that don't readily conform to traditional standards.
To step outside those norms is to take a risk most of us are afraid to take.
As a result, a lot of guys spend their lives terrified.
We're terrified as being viewed as something other than men.
We know ourselves to be men, but we don't know how to be our whole selves.
A lot of us, me included, either shut off or experience deep shame or rage, or all three.
Again, men are terrified.
Even talking about this topic invites ridicule because it's so scary for most men and women.
Men are adrift, and nobody is talking about it, and nobody is doing anything about it, and it's killing us.
I think that he has a point that boys are broken.
I think that's true.
But his suggestion that what is happening here is basically that men have been told that they ought to act like men, that this has corrupted manhood, is nonsense.
If there was a collapse in manhood over the last 50 years, you have to ask what changed.
What changed in the model of manhood was the definition of manhood.
Manhood used to be about being a protector.
I don't have to redo the sheepdog speech here from American Sniper, but that's what being a man was about.
That being a man, I will say the main message.
The main message, if you haven't seen American Sniper, a very famous speech by one of the characters, the main message is that men can either be wolves or sheep or sheepdogs.
They can either be victimizers, or they can be the victimized, or they can be the sheepdogs who ensure that the wolves are kept at bay.
The job of men was to protect innocence.
That was the number one job of men.
Not job number two, not job number ten.
Getting laid was not high on the list.
Playing video games was not high on the list.
Protecting women and children was number one on the list.
It's why when the Titanic went down, the idea was women and children first.
That was a good thing.
Men are supposed to protect.
That is a man's job.
And I'm not talking about shortcomings in some of the men at the school, because that was not happening, okay?
There were real men at the school.
The real one was a football coach who was murdered yesterday.
Coach Aaron Feist was initially said to be dead.
Then he was thought to be alive.
He passed away this morning.
Apparently, he jumped in front of the bullets in order to stop students from being shot.
It's really, really sad.
He worked as a security guard at the school for at least eight years.
And apparently, when the shooting broke out, he jumped in front of the students and was murdered.
There are men who are willing to be protectors.
But the question is not about those men.
The question is about people who become shooters.
Boys, particularly, they either create or they destroy.
This is true from the time they're children.
They're either building blocks or they're knocking the blocks down.
This is what boys do.
That means that boys have to be trained from a very young age to build and not to destroy.
They have to be told not only not to destroy, but that it is their job to build.
And the way that you build a society, the way you build a community, the way that you build a safe world is with men who protect human beings from other bad human beings.
Make men into heroes.
Don't make them into feminized versions of what you wish men were.
You can't get rid of manhood.
You can't get rid of masculinity.
Nor would you want to.
A society without masculinity is a society that's bound to the eventual degradation of civilization.
What you actually want here is a manhood.
A proud manhood that stands up for women and children.
That turns men into heroes.
That makes men aspire to be heroes.
It doesn't abandon boys and tell them they're wrong for feeling that aggressive impulse.
Men are aggressive.
It's what they do.
Channel that aggression towards something good, and you get great civilizations.
Channel that aggression towards something evil, you get evil civilizations.
But it must be channeled.
It's something we ought to keep in mind as we move forward in these discussions, that something is happening on a societal level that is really negative and really nasty, and it goes deeper than the kind of weapons that are available on the market.
Okay, so there's a lot going on on immigration.
But we're going to save that for tomorrow, because there have been a couple of immigration plans proposed.
The White House is in favor of one, not in favor of the other.
The one that seems to be moving fastest through the Senate, to make a long story short, is a proposal that essentially allows illegal immigrants up till now to stay in the country illegally and to bring in some family members, and even allows a four-month grace period for people who are entering the country now illegally to get in and never be deported.
The White House has already said they won't sign that bill, but that seems to be the one that's moving through the Senate.
We'll have some more updates on it tomorrow.
OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
So, Steven Pinker has a brand new book called Enlightenment Now.
So, I haven't actually read the book yet.
I'm looking forward to reading it.
I ordered it yesterday.
He is a psychologist who's come under heavy scrutiny from the left, not because he's a right-winger.
Steven Pinker is not a right-winger.
Like Sam Harris, he's on the political left.
But Steven Pinker is willing to discuss the reality that there is such a thing as objective truth, that some cultures are better than other cultures, that reason makes a difference, and that the Enlightenment was something that was good.
Now, where I think that, I'll read the book and then I'll give a fuller critique of it, but my initial response and my initial prediction about the book is that Pinker, in taking a somewhat anti-religious view, because Pinker is an atheist from what I understand, that in taking a somewhat anti-religious view, he's ignoring the root fundamentals of the Enlightenment.
I'm a pro-Enlightenment guy too, but I also acknowledge where the Enlightenment came from.
It didn't just spring out of the minds of man unprompted.
There was a whole set of developments that occurred before that, And then we've ripped away a lot of the developments undergirding the Enlightenment, and then we want to keep the actual cherry on top.
Well, you can't get rid of the Sunday and keep the cherry on top.
That's not how this works.
You can't keep the roof of the building by destroying its foundations.
But I'll have to read the book to see if that's what Pinker actually does.
But this book is doing really well.
I'm really glad to see it.
His book, Pinker's book, Jordan Peterson's book.
There are a lot of people who are in the sciences, people who are now rising up to defend civilization against the postmodernist cult that has torn down science, torn down reason, torn down Humanism, not just secular humanism, but religious humanism.
And I think that it's important to fight back against that.
You know, I provide very often on this show a vision of a humanity that is in some ways degraded, in some ways degrading, meaning that it is degrading over time.
But the reality is that, as I've said before, this is the best time in human history to live.
Now the question is, what can we make ourselves to make ourselves the best selves to take advantage of that and continue that progress forward rather than moving backward?
Okay, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
Thing that I hate, number one.
So, one of the things that is super irritating whenever we get into a gun discussion is how little people on the left know about guns while they're talking about them.
So, we heard the usual schtick about how this weapon, if you held down the trigger, that it was going to fire a continuous stream of bullets.
That's not true.
It's a semi-automatic.
That means every time you pull the trigger, there's one shot that is fired.
Stephen King made an ass of himself on Twitter.
Here he is tweeting out, against Rick Wilson.
So Rick Wilson says you're a hell of a lot more likely to be killed in Florida by an opioid overdose than MS-13, but my bae.
So that was Rick Wilson ripping on President Trump, actually, because that's what Rick Wilson does a lot.
He's ripping on Trump for talking about MS-13 and the dangers of illegal immigration.
Stephen King, however, is an ignorant moron.
So Stephen King tweets out—he's a good writer.
I mean, I like some of his books, at least until the end.
Every one of his books starts with an interesting premise and finishes with the entire world burning down.
So you can basically skip the first 700 pages of his novels, figure there's some creepy stuff, and then just watch.
Whatever contained small world he's built burned to the ground while a couple of children walk away.
That's always the ending of every single one of his books.
In any case, Stephen King tweeted out, don't tell that to the parents of the kids who got shot in Broward County today, sport.
So Rick Wilson tweeted out, you're a hell of a lot more likely to be killed by an opioid overdose than MS-13.
And Stephen King said, don't tell that to the parents of the kids who got shot in Broward County.
So apparently he thinks MS-13 is a gun.
Okay, MS-13 is a gang.
It is not a gun.
You have to be an idiot to think this.
Didn't stop Stephen King, though.
So, Stephen King tweeting out, obviously, that somebody's gonna walk into your school with an MS-13 or something.
Well done, Stephen King.
Just don't talk...
Honestly, don't talk about things you don't know anything about.
Elizabeth Warren, also yesterday, she made a fool of herself.
She spoke to this Native American group, we discussed it at length yesterday.
Here's what it sounded like when this very, very Native American woman, who is whiter than I am by a score, by a huge margin, wearing her traditional Native American garb, here's what she said about her Native American background.
It has been an honor to work with, to learn from, and to represent the tribes of my home state of Massachusetts, the Aquinnah and the Mashpee Wampanoag.
So it's a great delight to be here.
Thank you.
President Trump likes to talk about Pocahontas.
Yep.
So I figured, let's talk about Pocahontas.
Our country's disrespect of Native people didn't start with President Trump.
It started long before President Washington took office.
Okay, stop this.
Stop this nonsense.
You want to talk about disrespect to Native American people?
How about pretending to be one?
How about spending your career pretending that you have Native American ancestry so you can get a job at Harvard?
That seems a lot more disrespectful to Native American heritage than somebody mocking you for doing that.
I will continue to call Elizabeth Warren foca-hontas.
It's not Pocahontas, President Trump.
It's foca-hontas.
I'll continue to call her foca-hontas because she's not Native American.
And hijacking somebody else's culture for specific use in an affirmative action program seems pretty wild to me.
And yet there she was talking about how she's going to stand up and defend Native American people.
Just ridiculous.
The fact that the left goes along with this demonstrates that even identity politics has to take a backseat to leftism when the rubber meets the road.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow.
We'll talk about the immigration plan that's moving forward and all of the fallout from yesterday's horrific, heartbreaking shootings.
Obviously, not only do our thoughts and prayers go out to the people who were affected by the shooting, But I would love to see some of the proposals that I made on the program today.
Yes, with regard to straw purchasers.
Yes, with regard to mental health checks.
I would like to see some of those proposals advanced.
So lest anyone say that we're not about moving forward politically.
We should be moving forward politically, but on a basis of specific proposals, not on the basis of gun control, and therefore you don't care about what happened.
Everyone cares about what happened.
We all stand together on this.
And if you don't believe that, then I think that you're doing something that's relatively un-American.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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