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Feb. 27, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:19
The Parkland Story Gets Even Worse | Ep. 484
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Were the police told to stand down?
Did the police tell emergency responders to stand down?
And we're going to take a look at the government's record on mental health, because all of this is relevant to the big gun control debate.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So first off, I just want to thank all the folks who showed up last night at University of Minnesota.
We had a packed house.
About 500 people showed up to pack a pretty crowded room.
There were 100 police officers who showed up for about maybe 40 protesters at most.
The protesters were not violent.
Nothing really happened.
But they had a full squat gear, people racking their M4s.
So this is how insane it's become on America's college campuses when that sort of stuff is necessary.
I'll have a few more notes on that a little bit later and a lot of news to get to here today, including some more information updates on what happened in Parkland.
That story just gets worse and worse.
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Okay, so time for some updates on what has happened in Parkland.
So every day, there's more information now coming out on what the sheriff's office in Broward County did and did not do in the lead-up to, during the attack, and in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting attack at the school shooting.
And it is really astonishing.
The more information that comes out, the worse this gets.
According to the Miami Herald today, The shooter threatened classmates, posted photos of himself holding guns, made violent statements online, and was repeatedly described to authorities as a potential school shooter.
His troubling behavior gave law enforcement plenty of opportunities to investigate and arrest him, according to the Miami Herald, and even take away his guns long before he shot up Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland last week, according to interviews with former South Florida prosecutors and legal experts.
Sheriff Scott Israel had claimed that there is no way under law for him to actually confiscate the weapons of the shooter or to arrest the shooter.
That is not true.
According to Miami-Dade Prosecutor Marshall Dorey Lewis says, quote, The idea that they were aware of it and could do nothing is absurd.
We can't let this happen again.
So not only did the FBI refuse to act on two strong tips, one of which involved the shooter posting on the internet that he planned to become a professional school shooter, which is illegal.
That's a terrorist threat.
The Palm Beach Sheriff's Office was told that the shooter had put a gun to others' heads in the past.
The Florida Department of Children and Families ruled him stable despite clear evidence of self-harm, and at the school where the shooter killed 17 people, they knew he was cutting himself, threatening students, and taking pictures with guns, and that he may have ingested gasoline in an attempt to commit suicide.
And nothing was done about any of these things.
They did have the legal authority to go in and arrest him.
They had the legal authority to ensure that he did not have weapons.
They did not do any of those things.
They dropped the ball.
They really blew it.
There are some rumors out there, and we'll see if they're substantiated.
Sarah Rumph over at Red State has a long piece about it.
It is obvious that the sheriffs of Broward County have been attempting to minimize the number of arrests that take place on campus.
The reports that the student, that the shooter, was expelled from the school are not true.
He was actually allowed to remain in the school.
And there are a lot of questions being asked today about whether the determination to end the so-called school-to-prison pipeline allowed the police to let this guy off the hook.
That basically, they didn't want to be part of that school-to-prison pipeline, so instead they let an incipient school shooter Run around on the loose with guns, which would just be devastating.
We'll see if there's more information that comes up.
about that.
Even if a case couldn't have been made, the arrest should have happened.
The teen might have been placed squarely on the radar of police analysts, and then any time anything else came up, there'd be more action taken by the police.
Another prosecutor named Priovlis, according to Miami Herald, says at the very least, the most capable intelligence detectives should have been monitoring him.
The sheriff has said that the BSO's handling of tips is under internal investigation.
He says, I don't know that the signs were missed.
He said, this isn't science fiction.
We're not allowed to arrest on what a person thinks about on pre-crimes.
But this wasn't a matter of pre-crimes.
There are reports of this shooter threatening other students.
That is cyber-stalking under the law in the state of Florida.
There's pictures of this student online brandishing guns and talking about being a school shooter.
These are crimes in the state of Florida.
And there have been other people who have been arrested for similar stuff.
Miami-Dade schools policed on Friday arrested Crop High senior Sean Mesa for posting photos of himself with guns on social media.
Improper display of a firearm is a misdemeanor in Florida.
That's not the only case that is like that.
There's another arrest that was made in 2016 of somebody who was involved in very similar behavior.
There is a Miami-Dade Police Homeland Security Bureau arrest of a guy named Enrique Dominguez, who is posting apparently disturbing images of himself dressed like the Joker with combat-style knives.
And his co-workers report he pledged allegiance to Allah, showed them ISIS execution videos, and vowed to dress like the Joker before gunning down co-workers.
They went and arrested him.
Why couldn't that have applied here?
The answer is it could have applied here, but something happened at the sheriff's office and they didn't do their job.
And now we're finding out that the sheriff's office itself may have told police officers to stand down.
So Laura Ingram reported on her show.
Yesterday, the deputies were told to stand outside and wait because they didn't have body cameras on.
So because there were no body cameras on the detectives, or on the sheriff's deputies, and because they didn't want to go in without those body cameras so that they could defend themselves against possible lawsuit, maybe?
Whatever the case was, according to Ingram, her sources in the department say these deputies were told to stand around outside while kids were getting shot inside.
Our sources near the Broward County Sheriff's Department are telling us that the deputies who arrived at the scene of the shooting were told not to enter the school unless their body cameras were turned on.
And then we found out that the deputies did not have body cameras.
So they did not enter the building or engage the shooter.
So curiously, police also lost radio communications during the Parkland shooting.
I mean, this is a massive botch.
They didn't even have body cameras, but they suddenly obeyed the rule that they weren't allowed to go into dangerous areas with body cameras.
Something is really fishy here.
There was an EMT who was on national TV last night, an emergency medical respondent, who was saying that the police were barring them from getting in.
They said they could have saved some more lives if they'd been allowed to get in there right away, but they weren't allowed to get in there.
The police were stopping them from going in.
Three high-ranking Florida officials are expressing their frustration because they say EMS was delayed getting inside Stillman Douglas High School on the day of the shooting in the critical moments when victims lay inside in need of immediate care.
One source tells Fox News some EMS teams requested to go inside but were denied by the commanding agency, the Broward County Sheriff's Office.
That source alleges scanner recordings will reveal that.
Okay, this is amazing stuff.
This is amazing stuff.
And people are talking about the NRA and law-abiding gun owners as the problem.
We also now have a response from the Broward deputy, Scott Peterson, who's been ripped up and down by the sheriff.
And there's something fishy about the sheriff ripping this deputy up and down and suggesting that he was a coward.
There's something very fishy about a sheriff Who does not defend his cops and who throws his cops under the bus.
Now, it may be very well that this deputy chickened out.
That's quite possible, but that's not what he's saying.
According to his lawyer, quote, allegations that Mr. Peterson was a coward and that his performance under the circumstances failed to meet the standards of police officers are patently untrue.
Let there be no mistake.
Mr. Peterson wishes he could have prevented the untimely passing of the 17 victims on that day.
His heart goes out to the family of the victims in their time of need.
However, the allegations that Mr. Peterson...
Why don't we have the video?
Why don't we know what happened?
They have video of what happened there.
They have cameras on the premises.
officers are patently untrue.
Mr. Peterson is confident that his actions on that day were appropriate under the circumstances and that the video together with the eyewitness testimony of those on the scene will exonerate him of any subpar performance.
So this is another one of the questions.
Why don't we have the video?
Why don't we know what happened?
They have video of what happened there.
They have cameras on the premises.
This particular deputy was awarded the school deputy of the year in 2014.
Apparently, according to the Miami Herald, he was in another building dealing with a student issue and the shot sounded.
He was armed with his sidearm.
He ran to the west side of building 12 and set up in a defensive position, then did nothing for four minutes until the gunfire stopped, according to the sheriff.
But according to this deputy, he says that he heard the gunshots but believed the gunshots were originating from outside the building on the school campus.
And he said BSO trains its officers that in the event of outdoor gunfire, one is to seek cover and assess the situation in order to communicate what one observes with other law enforcement.
So maybe a mistake was just made as opposed to cowardice, or it's possible that there was something else going on because we still have not fully rebutted that CNN report that says it was not one deputy on premises, but four deputies on premises who are outside doing nothing.
And if Ingram's report is correct, if Laura's report is correct, then that means that there were four people outside who were told not to go in because their body cameras weren't on them, which is just insane.
Now, meanwhile, the sheriff, Scott Israel, is doing his best to avoid all culpability.
Again, according to Laura Ingram, Just a few hours ago, The Ingram Angle received copies of internal emails from a source close to the Broward Sheriff's Office, which has since been confirmed by a second source, that email urges all staff members to vigorously support Sheriff Israel.
So in other words, he's too busy defending his own ass to actually take responsibility for what went on in his department.
There's no question this guy's a political actor through and through.
Israel actually got into hot water back in December.
Why?
Because there were a bunch of Broward County Sheriff's cars and he put a wrap on the cars with his face on it for political purposes.
They were jokingly called Israelmobiles by members of the department.
And we obviously know the sheriff loves grandstanding.
We know he loves his camera time.
He's never run from a camera at any point.
And he apparently, and he knows full well what happened here.
We're just not getting all the information.
Now, there will be a full investigation that takes place.
I'm sure that we will find out what happened here.
I have very little doubt that it's going to cast even more aspersions toward his behavior in this whole thing.
It's truly disastrous and truly frightening.
And again, The bottom line is this.
If you expect me to give up my weapon when the authorities won't even do their job, you must be out of your mind.
If you think that I'm going to give up my method for defending myself because the authorities want me to, and then they won't even defend my kids if my kids are going to a school that they are assigned, try again.
Not going to happen.
We know who blew it here.
It wasn't the NRA that blew it here.
It was the FBI.
It was the local law enforcement.
The reason this matters is because we keep hearing about how we need more laws on the books.
Well, more laws on the books aren't going to do anything if we're not enforcing the laws that are already on the books.
More laws aren't going to change anything if we're not actually changing things.
Which we're not, of course.
So, that means that more of these school shootings are likely to happen.
And the grandstanding doesn't help either.
Which brings us to the grandstanding itself.
So, there's been a ton of focus on a specific subset, I should say, of kids who were at the Parkland School, at Marjory Stoneman High School, when this happened.
And it's a very specific subset.
And you know all their names, right?
You know Cameron Kasky, you've seen him on TV.
And you know Emma Gonzales, you've seen her on TV as well.
And she has now over a million Twitter followers after having basically zero Twitter followers a week ago because the media have really been pushing her out there.
And of course, David Hogg, who's been on every TV show that he can possibly find.
Now, they have every right to speak as much as they want, and we have every right to criticize them as much as we want, because this is still the United States of America, and just because you went through something tough does not mean that you are an expert on what happened or why it happened.
It just means that you're an expert on suffering, as I've said here on the show a bunch of times.
But nonetheless, we are being treated to the awkward spectacle of these kids being trotted out there by a compliant media that actually, as Charlie Cook over at National Review says, are laundering their views through the moral bank accounts of these students.
All the people in the media wish they could call for a ban for guns every day on the air.
They can't.
So instead, they bring on these kids to do it for them.
That's the whole goal of having these kids as guests.
And the kids are saying things that are just insipid.
David Hogg, particularly, is a very bad spokesman for his point of view.
Just because he's a good-looking kid who can complete a sentence doesn't mean anything he says makes any sense.
And again, this is not a rip on him as a victim, this is a rip on him as a political commentator.
You either say things that are intelligent, or you don't.
And your experiences have nothing to do with it.
This is a form of identity politics.
In the same way that the left will maintain that your opinion should be gauged not based on the actual content or value of your opinion, but based on the color of your skin, your ethnicity, your religion, your background.
Instead of doing it on that basis, they're saying that we should now judge the decency of your viewpoint or the genius of your viewpoint based solely on whether you went through a terrible experience at a school shooting.
So here is David Hogg suggesting once again for the umpteenth time that politicians don't care about kids' lives.
He cares deeply about kids' lives, David Hogg.
He cares so deeply that he's called for a boycott of Amazon.
He's called for a boycott of the state of Florida because there's nothing like harming those family business owners down in Miami Beach.
You have to make sure that those new immigrants can't sell their tacos during spring break.
We've got to make sure that doesn't happen.
So, he wants people to boycott Florida until the gun laws in Florida change.
He has spoken at a rally in New Jersey.
He is pushing for a boycott against FedEx.
He says he's not going to go back to school until he gets what he wants.
Well, tough.
I mean, then don't go back to school.
That's not true anyway.
He will be back at school.
In any case, he was doing this routine again yesterday.
Politicians don't care about kids' lives.
This is the worst form of demagoguery, and here he is saying it.
These politicians don't care about these children's lives.
Notice how the only action being taken, for example, with Rick Scott, is after he is running for Senate to try to take Bill Nelson's seat.
That's what's going on here.
People need to acknowledge that.
And, like with Marco Rubio, for example, the man must be a professional dancer, just like other politicians, because he's great at sidestepping questions.
At the CNN town hall, he turned a one- He didn't obstruct at all.
He said he would continue to take money from the NRA because he's a proponent of Second Amendment rights.
and repeating his false message that he's going to continue to accept money from the NRA, just making sure that people don't understand that and they're distracted by him trying to turn it into a long answer so he can get reelected.
And it's disgusting.
He didn't obstruct at all.
He said he would continue to take money from the NRA because he's a proponent of Second Amendment rights.
I mean, Senator Rubio was perfectly honest on that special about whether he would take money from the NRA.
Again, when David Hogg says all of these very, very silly things, when he suggests that it's about the governor, Rick Scott, or it's about the senator, Marco Rubio, Bill Nelson has nothing to do with it, right?
Bill Nelson has all the right views, so that's totally fine.
This is the same guy, David Hogg, who went on TV and defended Scott Israel, the actual sheriff of Broward County, right?
The guy who's botched everything.
The entire first part of the show is about all of the botchery by the sheriff's office, and yet somehow Rick Scott is responsible for the deputy not doing his job, but the sheriff's office is not responsible for the deputy doing his job.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Okay, so David Hogg goes out there and he says this sort of nonsense.
And then, of course, he's feeded by the media for it.
So Jimmy Fallon does the same thing.
Here's Jimmy Fallon praising the Parkland students and suggesting that they are all heroes and he is going to march with them.
So it's not enough, by the way, that we have one pope of politics in Jimmy Kimmel on late night.
Now we have to have two popes of politics on late night.
Jimmy Fallon joins Jimmy Kimmel in this effort Stephen Colbert, of course, has been the Pope of Politics before, so we actually have the Holy Roman Empire, and the kingship is passed around, the emperorship is passed around between various parties depending on how the ratings are.
Fallon wants to get in the game because he's been ripped as too anodyne, as too lackluster, as not political enough by a lot of the left-wing commentators, and therefore he wants to get in the game.
So here is Jimmy Fallon doing his best Jimmy Kimmel impression.
He needs to grow a little bit of stubble and cry if he really wants to do this right.
I think what the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are doing is unbelievable.
They're speaking out with more guts, passion, conviction, and common sense than most adults.
They're high school students.
It's beyond impressive.
That strength that they have, it's inspiring.
They are angry, and they're doing something about it and creating change.
This is a real revolution.
And they have organized a peaceful march on Saturday, March 24th in Washington D.C.
to demand action to prevent gun violence.
I just want to say I stand behind you guys and I will be marching alongside you with my wife and two children in D.C.
to show our support.
Wow, how nice.
I mean, all the late night hosts immediately coming out and signaling, virtue signaling, that everything that these kids have to say is wonderful.
The bravery, the decency.
Okay, they're not going to talk to some of the other students.
They're not going to talk to some of the people who I've recommended that they talk to on the show.
They're not going to talk to Kyle Cashew, who still is unverified on Twitter, by the way.
Thank you for following him.
He's one of the students there who disagrees.
With some of these other students.
But he, of course, is not appearing every single day.
You don't know his name because he's not on CNN or MSNBC every single day.
Still, as I say, unverified on Twitter.
No shock there.
But again, this is what the entire Hollywood infrastructure is going to do.
The Oscars will be about that on Sunday night.
You watch.
They were going to do Me Too, but now this obviously allows them to virtue signal on another topic.
Now, never mind that half the people in the audience have done movies in which guns are glorified as the way of stopping violence.
Never mind that all those people are millionaires who are protected by armed security outside.
You watch, on Sunday during the Oscars, the entire thing will be about how we need to get rid of guns in our society, and then presumably all of our action movies can be Bruce Lee-style karate fights.
That's basically what all of these things will turn into.
So there's a problem with the suggestion that the children shall eat us and that the kids shall eat us.
It's a different problem even than the identity politics question of does victimhood confer expertise?
And that is a lot of kids are not I mean, I'm not saying these kids who are speaking on TV aren't bright.
You know, for their age, I'm sure they're very bright.
I'm talking about, are these kids, are kids in general capable of the kind of decision making that adults are capable of?
And the answer, as a general rule, is no, which is why, of course, we have legal restrictions on kids buying cigarettes and kids buying alcohol and kids buying guns and all the rest of this sort of thing.
There's a reason that 16 year olds don't vote.
Now, there are a lot of people who have gotten on my case for saying this because I was writing syndicated columns at 17.
Well, that's fine.
You know, I was taking flack at 17, too.
And there were people saying I was too young to write columns then.
And some of the stuff I wrote, I think, was dumb.
You know, like, if I look back at the stuff that I wrote when I was 17, I think a lot of it's good.
I think some of it's not so good.
And I hope that I've matured over a period of time.
People generally do.
But that's sort of the point.
When you grant this pure virtue to children to be our political leaders, it doesn't end well.
So I'm going to show you some video of it not ending well.
So over in Bakersfield yesterday, there was a student protest over guns.
Now, why there should be a student protest over guns in Bakersfield, in the state with the most gun restrictions in America, right?
California, where I live, has incredible gun restrictions.
There was a protest over in Bakersfield.
And the kids, of course, used this as an excuse to leave school and basically run roughshod through the community.
Let's face it, most of the kids who are getting involved in this cause are not doing so because they want the extra credit in class or because they deeply care about the issue or know anything about the issue.
They're doing it because it's fun.
Just like most protesters do things because they are fun.
Okay, so here is some video of the kids and notice how the adults essentially let them have their way because after all, kids are our moral leaders now.
This is clip 16.
Hundreds of students took to the streets to protest gun violence.
These students from Stagg High School were told by officers to disperse the streets.
The Stockton School District says what started out as a peaceful protest on campus turned rowdy as about 100 of 300 students jumped the fence of the school.
Some were seen throwing rocks at cars, including police cars.
I'm really upset that I'm on my way to school.
Like, I go to Delta College, so I'm on my way to school and I can't even get in my car now.
I'm about to cry.
Okay, yeah, those are the kids who ought to lead us.
Those are the kids who ought to lead us.
Now, not every kid is these kids, obviously, but to suggest that children are the wisest among us, yeah, no, they're not.
Okay, I have two kids.
I remember being as young as these kids.
When you're 14, 15 years old, you don't have a lot of, there's not a lot going on upstairs that prevents you from doing stupid things.
This is in Stockton, not Bakersfield, obviously, but when you grant absolute moral immunity to kids because they are young, You end up with worse kids.
One of the worst things that you can do as a parent is suggest to your children that they have the absolute moral immunity to do whatever they want.
Parenting is about teaching and cultivating children.
It is not about granting children leadership positions and suggesting that in the absence of knowledge they ought to lead us because after all they're so innocent and the innocent children among us shall lead.
I think that's just absolutely silly.
Now, These kids and their impact, they wouldn't be making this sort of, they wouldn't be as big a phenomenon as they've become, except that the media have obviously magnified their influence to tremendous, tremendous effect.
And the media are even worse at this stuff than a lot of the child advocates are.
They're members of the media who legitimately know nothing about what they're talking about.
So, we're going to show you some members of the media saying things about guns that are utterly asinine.
And then they're supposed to, we're supposed to believe they're experts?
We're supposed to believe that these people know what they're talking about?
I mean, really, really astonishing.
So here's Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC making one of the worst arguments in history for why we ought to ban rifles.
An AR-15 style rifle, well that's a semi-automatic weapon, meaning it fires one round when the trigger is pulled, then automatically reloads the chamber, making it ready to fire again.
Handguns can also be semi-automatic, but some, like revolvers, they're not.
Meaning it can take a lot longer to fire multiple rounds.
Another big difference, the speed of bullets.
The AR-15 can fire bullets between 2,800 and 3,000 feet per second.
and 3,000 feet per second.
A 9-millimeter handgun between 700 and 1,100 feet per second. - So I'm really enjoying the media doing this routine about the speed of bullets as though that is the only thing that matters in terms of the amount of damage The caliber of the bullet matters also, right?
The size of the actual bullet matters.
Beyond that, if we're going to talk about guns that are used in the killings of human beings, there's no question that rifles are the vast minority of guns that are used in the killing of other human beings in the United States.
Like, 13% of all murders involving guns involve rifles.
60% involve handguns.
And then the rest involve weapons that have not really been specified.
The notion, again, that we're going to measure the velocity of the bullets, and that therefore we ought to ban rifles but not ban handguns, It's just silly.
And again, if you're going to make the argument that Lawrence O'Donnell made the other night, that a person with a handgun can't stop somebody with an AR-15, that's, again, ridiculous, considering that in the congressional baseball shooting, the guy apparently had an AR-15, and it was a person with a handgun who took him down.
This happens fairly regularly.
But it's not just Stephanie Ruhle making a fool of herself.
This one was making the rounds yesterday.
Local NBC trying to show you what the firing of an AR looks like and how much damage it can do.
Take a look at this video used to shoot a watermelon using an AR-15.
Yeah, there's only one problem with that particular video.
That is definitely not an AR-15 right there.
That is a shotgun.
That is a pump-action shotgun.
It's not even a semi-automatic shotgun.
It's a pump-action shotgun, meaning that you have to manually chamber the round.
So, well done, media.
Yes, I'm definitely going to trust you on what types of guns ought to be banned when you literally cannot tell the difference between a semi-automatic, an automatic, and a manual revolver, for example, when you can't explain to me why it is that velocity of a handgun matters as opposed to velocity of a rifle.
All of this is just ridiculous.
And then, of course, you have the people grandstanding off the back of this who, again, know nothing about guns.
Whoopi Goldberg, yesterday on The View, suggesting that the GOP is silent about guns because the GOP is corrupt.
But does Whoopi Goldberg know the first thing about guns or how any of these gun laws would affect anybody?
Does she know how many AR-15s are in circulation?
The answer is at least 8 million in the United States.
Does she know how many rifles are in circulation in the United States?
Tens of millions.
Does she know the answer to how many guns are in circulation in the United States?
Or where the crime rates are highest?
Or which states have the highest rates of gun violence?
Or how many of the killings with guns are actually suicides?
The answer is two-thirds.
Right?
Does Whoopi Goldberg know any of that?
No.
She just knows that guns are bad, and so she's gonna rip on the GOP for being silent about guns.
She makes, I think, the dumbest point of the day yesterday on The View, the repository of many dumb points.
Here she is.
You know, when the athletes were kneeling, every Republican sort of had something to say.
And it's not a criticism.
It's just, I'm just wondering, and many have been wondering, where they've been, where they stand on this particular issue.
Okay, and the answer is that all of the Republicans sounded off on players kneeling because they thought players kneeling was wrong.
They haven't sounded off about law-abiding citizens owning guns because they don't think law-abiding citizens owning guns is wrong or bad.
This is not difficult.
There's an actual political reason, an actual values reason, why so many conservatives are not speaking up about why guns should be confiscated because we don't think guns should be confiscated or the sale of them should be banned.
And again, it's amazing to me.
I've proposed on this program at least three different measures that we could all take as a society in order to push forward against the scourge of mass shootings.
And none of these have been seriously discussed by the media.
They would prefer to just shout, guns, guns, guns, ban, ban, ban, confiscate, confiscate, confiscate.
But none of them actually want to talk about serious, hard proposals.
The Democrats, apparently, have now made a move in the House.
They've introduced a piece of legislation to ban all semi-automatic rifles.
Of course, this is going nowhere, and they know it.
The reason they're proposing it is because they want kudos from a bunch of the people in the media.
They want to campaign on it.
As I've said before, the Democrats had control of Congress.
They had full control of the Senate, meaning 60 votes in the Senate.
They had control of the House.
They had control of the presidency from 2009 to 2011.
Did they pass one single gun regulation?
The answer, of course, Is no.
They waited until Republicans took office, and now they get to grandstand.
They get to stand there and claim that it's Republicans who are standing between Americans and safety.
If those dastardly Republicans would just get out of the way, then we'd be able to pass some really good regulations.
They have no intention of pushing anything remotely resembling a good regulation.
They just want a posture about all of this.
And fortunately, they have the media to do it for them.
They have the media to stand there and do it for them.
Now, there are some folks who are actually mentioning some solutions.
You know, those folks actually include the presidents of the United States.
So the president of the United States has actually put forward a couple of different proposals.
I think some of those proposals are smart.
I think some of those proposals are not so smart.
One of the proposals that he put out yesterday was actually, you know, in our good Trump, bad Trump matrix, this goes in good Trump, Trump talked about mental institutions and the reality that we need to make it more difficult for people who are a danger to themselves and others, not only to get guns, but also we need to make it easier for them to get treatment.
Here's Trump talking about the history of mental institutions in the country.
He got a lot of flack for this yesterday, but he's absolutely correct.
This is clip number five.
You know, in the old days, we had mental institutions, and a lot of them.
And you could nab somebody like this, because, you know, they did.
They knew he was—something was off.
You had to know that.
People were calling all over the place.
You can't arrest him, I guess, because he hasn't done anything, but you know he's like a boiler ready to explode, right?
So he's—he just—you have to do something.
But you can't put him in jail, I guess, because he hasn't done anything.
But in the old days, you'd put them into a mental institution.
Okay, this is 100% true.
It sounds harsh, what Trump is saying.
What he is saying here is 100% true.
E. Fuller Torrey is a famous psychologist.
I've recommended his books on the program before.
He's founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center and his latest book is American Psychosis.
The federal government destroyed the mental illness treatment system.
Well, back in 2013, he talked about what it was that the government had done to destroy the mental health facilities in the country.
He talked about how in 1963, John F. Kennedy advised, addressed Congress on mental illness and mental retardation.
That was the name of the speech and proposed a new program under which the federal government would fund community mental health centers or CMHCs to take the place of state mental hospitals.
The reason was because he had a younger sister who had a mental disability and should be put in a state mental hospital and it freaked him out.
And so he said the federal government should take over and instead they should fund community mental health centers.
Well, over the next 17 years, the Feds funded nearly 800 of these, with a total of what would be about $20 billion in today's dollars.
And during those same years, the number of patients in state mental hospitals dropped from 500,000 people to 132,000 people, and the beds were closed down.
to 132,000 people and the beds were closed down.
Well, it turns out the community mental health centers, these local centers funded by the feds, were not interested actually in taking care of patients who were being discharged from the state hospitals, meaning the people who were the most unsafe Instead, they're focusing on people with less severe problems, people who were then termed the worried well.
So, you know, the normal person who's taking an antidepressant now.
This is what these centers focused on.
So, state mental institutions, which were very bad places, were replaced by something even worse, which was nothing.
And so a lot of these people ended up on the streets.
There was no way to forcibly, involuntarily commit somebody.
It became very difficult to actually get somebody who was dangerous to themselves into a treatment facility.
Right now, you have to provide serious evidence that somebody is a threat to themselves or others, which means an actual suicide attempt.
It means an actual suicide attempt in most states.
You just acting like this shooter acted may not be enough in some of these states.
So as E. Fuller-Tory writes, he says, Meantime, during the years the CMHCs were funded, Medicaid and Medicare were created, modifications were made to the Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance programs.
None of these programs was originally intended to become a major federal support for the mentally ill, but all now fill that role.
The federal takeover of the mental illness treatment system was complete.
And he concludes, approximately half of the mentally ill individuals discharged from state mental hospitals, many of whom had family support, sought outpatient treatment and have done well.
The other half, many of whom lack family support and suffer from the most severe illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have done poorly.
According to multiple studies, Untreated mentally ill are responsible for 10% of all homicides and a higher percentage of mass killings, constitute 20% of jail and prison inmates, and are at least 30% of the homeless.
Severely mentally ill individuals now inundate hospital emergency rooms.
They've colonized libraries, parks, train stations, and other public spaces.
This is not their fault.
Okay, and we've spent a ton of money on it.
The total cost on mental illness through all these supplemental programs is $46 billion.
The total cost for mentally ill individuals through Medicaid and Medicare is $60 billion.
That $46 billion is just SSI or SSDI.
It's a huge increase in what we are spending and we are not getting what we paid for.
And part of that is because of the social liberals who decided that it was important to release people onto the streets as an element of freedom.
They all read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and decided that the entire institutional system was Nurse Ratched.
That wasn't true.
It was never true.
Okay, so in a second, I'm going to show you some stuff that Trump said that was not as great.
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Okay, now with all of that said, with regard to what President Trump had to say that was good, President Trump also had some stuff to say that was not good.
And this is where, you know, President Trump is an unguided missile.
President Trump says a lot of stuff.
What he actually implements very rarely ends up being some of the weird ideas that he puts out there.
Yeah, I've learned over the past year that you ought to pay less attention to what he says he's going to do on policy and more attention to what he actually does on policy.
But some of the stuff that he said yesterday about guns was less than edifying.
So yesterday he was talking about the deputy who apparently was armed outside and did not run into harm's way to try to save the students.
He said that he himself, Trump said he himself, would have confronted the shooter.
You know, I really believe, you don't know until you test it, but I think, I really believe I'd run in there even if I didn't have a weapon, and I think most of the people in this room would have done that too, because I know most of you.
Um, um, no.
I'm just gonna put that out there, no.
No, I don't think most people would run into the line of fire unarmed of a guy who had a rifle.
I think that is really, really unlikely.
I think the likelihood that President Trump, who does not, shall we say, have a stellar record on military matters personally, He, you know, obviously his bone spurs prevented him from serving in the Vietnam War, and then he suggested that his personal Vietnam War was avoiding STDs during the 1970s.
I'm gonna go no on that.
We can all call on this law enforcement officer to have done his job, but I think that it's a bit of an exaggeration to suggest that you personally are gonna go in there and save the children by running in there without a gun.
That's the whole point.
You do need a gun in order to stop a bad guy with a gun, as a general rule.
And then Trump followed that up by saying that he's willing to buck the NRA and consider some possibilities.
Now, is this smart politics?
It probably is.
It's smart of him.
He knows that the NRA folks are going to back him no matter what.
The NRA has become extraordinarily pro-Trump in a way that I think is actually not advantageous to them politically.
I think the NRA ought to remain a bipartisan coalition of gun owners.
I think the fact that they've gone so hard pro-Trump is a mistake.
It alienates a lot of people.
But Trump is saying something smart politically, but probably dumb in terms of policy, saying that he's going to buck the NRA and consider some measures that they may not want him to consider.
What about the NRA?
They're on our side.
You guys, half of you are so afraid of the NRA.
There's nothing to be afraid of.
And you know what?
If they're not with you, we have to fight them every once in a while.
That's okay.
They're doing what they think is right.
I will tell you, they are doing what they think is right.
But sometimes we're going to have to be very tough and we're going to have to fight them.
But we need strong background checks.
For a long period of time, people resisted that.
But now people, I think, are really into it.
And John Cornyn, great guy, Senator, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy, hopefully, are going to work on some legislation.
I hope you guys, they started already.
In fact, John has legislation in.
We're going to strengthen it.
We're going to make it more pertinent to what we're discussing.
But he's already started the process.
We've already started.
So we'll find out what comes out here.
But Trump obviously wants to make some inroads by pushing the NRA a little bit off to the side.
Do I think that that's wise?
Politically, it probably is wise.
In terms of policy, we'll have to see what actually comes out.
Now, in terms of people who are hypocrites, this is just breaking news from the Huffington Post.
This is an amazing thing.
On the morning after the October 1st mass shooting in Las Vegas, A member of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's press staff warned House candidates and their staffs not to politicize the shooting that day.
Politicization, according to the DCCC official, included talking about gun violence prevention policy.
He says you and your candidate will be understandably outraged and upset, as will your community.
However, do not politicize it today.
There will be a time for politics and policy discussion, but any message today should be on offering thoughts and prayers for victims and their families, and thanking first responders who saved lives.
So this, of course, would be wise politics, but the Democrats have run screaming from this.
The guy who wrote it was Evan Lukasky.
Lukasky is one of the—he's the DCC regional press secretary, I guess.
And people are very angry at him and the Democratic Party for having said this.
But look, even a bunch of people who are gun control advocates are now saying there's not a whole hell of a lot that we can do in order to stop these mass shootings and we're not going to call for actual bans on semi-automatic weapons.
Again, showing the hypocrisy of all the folks on the left who are virtue signaling.
Speaking of the virtue signaling, there's now been a call to boycott FedEx.
There's been a call to boycott Amazon because you can buy NRA products on Amazon.
That boycott has been called for, I believe, Thursday.
So, that would be a good time to buy from Amazon, folks.
If you want to go and buy something, now's the time to buy it on Amazon.
Demonstrate that you stand with companies that are not going to close off alternative political viewpoints out of political convenience and expediency.
So, check that out.
Buy something from Amazon on Amazon Prime on Thursday.
I love Amazon.
I'd be very upset with them were they to try and disassociate politically from Second Amendment advocates just because the media would like them to.
Okay.
Time for a couple of things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, first a couple of things that I like.
I've been writing this book on philosophy.
It is not the easiest book to write because a lot of deep thinking.
And that means that I have to listen to deep music while I do this.
That's how pretentious I am.
I'm so pretentious that when somebody tweeted out today, what album has the three best songs in a row on it?
I tweeted out three separate numbers from Bizet's Carmen.
Yeah, that's how much of a douche I am.
In any case, what I recommend today is Brahms' String Quintet No.
1, which is just a lovely piece of music.
I've gotten very into listening to Brahms while I work.
Just wonderful stuff.
Here's Brahms string quintet number one.
I don't want to do the rest of the show now.
I just want to listen to this.
Brahms is fantastic.
A couple of other favorites that I've been listening to recently.
Brahms' Piano Quartet No.
1 is fantastic.
His piano trios are all terrific and really, really romantic and melodic.
So check those out.
They're really a blast to listen to, and they're very relaxing as well.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
So I wanted to play this yesterday, and I did not have a chance.
It is the best piece of audio ever.
So, Michael Wolff.
The author of Fire and Fury, a charlatan, a con man, a guy who went into the White House and basically just wrote down all of Steve Bannon's pathetic musings and then turned it into a book about how everybody in the Trump White House was incompetent and stupid and all the rest of this.
So Michael Wolff was on Australian Today Show and he was asked some pretty specific questions about You Say.
Was it the BBC?
I'm trying to remember where this was.
In any case, He was asked specifically—it was London's Today Show, rather—he was asked specifically about whether he had any evidence to the effect that Donald Trump was having an affair, which he had implied.
He had suggested that Nikki Haley was having an affair with Trump, which of course is absolute bunk.
There is no evidence to support it whatsoever, and Wolf has been implying it anyway.
Well, Wolf is asked specific questions.
Watch as he pretends he can't hear the audio, but notice something weird about this.
OK, he only says that he can't hear the audio every time the person asks him if he can hear the audio.
So pretty astonishing stuff.
Here it is.
Michael Wolff doing his dishonest routine.
You said during a TV interview just last month that you are absolutely sure that Donald Trump is currently having an affair while president behind the back of the first lady.
And I repeat, you said you were absolutely sure.
Yeah, I can't.
Last week, however, you backflipped and said, I quote, I do not know if the president is having an affair.
Do you owe the President and the First Lady an apology, Mr. Wolf?
I can't hear you.
Just last month, you said you were absolutely sure that the President was having an affair.
I'm not getting anything.
You're not hearing me, Mr. Wolf?
I'm not getting anything.
We were hearing each other well just before.
You're not hearing me, Mr. Wolf?
Do you hear?
I'm not...
I'm not hearing anything.
The dwarf was hearing me before, but he's not hearing me.
I'm not hearing anything.
No, it looks like.
And then he just gets up and leaves the interview.
He doesn't even wait to see if the audio is going to come back in because it didn't go out in the first place.
So, Michael Wolff, remember, this was the person that the media were fawning over.
This was the great genius who had uncovered the truth behind the facade of the Trump administration.
Oh my goodness, what utter stupidity.
Just grand watching Michael Wolff implode like that.
So, well done, Michael Wolff.
And we've got to do something about this spate of earpieces that don't work.
Apparently, whether it's Trump with Jake Tapper or whether it is Michael Wolff, when you hear a question you don't like, suddenly the earpiece just bugs out.
Very weird, very weird stuff.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so thing number one that I hate, the NCAA has been under severe attack because the NCAA does have a couple of stupid rules.
Some of these stupid rules include that if you are in college and playing for a college basketball team on scholarship, so let's say that you're getting a scholarship that's worth 45 grand a year, that this somehow compensates you for the use of your name.
And the NCAA can use your name on its jerseys, they can sell those jerseys, they can make millions of dollars off of you, and you have been fairly compensated with your 45 grand.
This is absolutely asinine.
I've always thought the NCAA policy here was gross.
The same thing is true of one-and-done.
I think the one-and-done rule in college is ridiculous.
I think you should be allowed to go directly to the NBA if you want to go to the NBA.
Kobe Bryant did it.
LeBron James could do it.
There have been a bunch of people who tried it and failed.
That's okay.
That's your prerogative.
There is no one-and-done rule in baseball, by the way.
You can go directly from high school to the minor leagues with no stop in between.
The one-and-done rule is particularly stupid because all of these kids who are going to college for a year are not suddenly deciding to stick around and pursue their business economics degree.
They're not sticking around because they really want to go into—all these kids who are going to play at Kentucky on scholarship, they're not actually going there because they are deeply invested in getting their neuroscience degree.
They're going there because they know they have to play there for a year before they can be drafted by the NBA, which is why John Calipari has been making a pretty solid living for years and years and years by simply recruiting four or five guys who will be there for a year, renting them for a year, and then sending them on to the NBA.
Well, that policy is really stupid.
What that policy is not is racist.
What that policy is, it's a way for the NBA to prevent a glut of younger players who don't know what they're doing, and it's a way for the NCAA to make a lot of money.
This is greed, not racism.
It's not the same thing.
Stan Van Gundy, though, says that one and done is racist.
Again, I don't think it's racist.
I've said before that it is weird to me.
That somehow baseball has never made this rule, but the NBA has.
Again, I don't think that has to do with race so much as it has to do with the minor leagues.
There is a minor league that exists in baseball that does not exist in basketball, right?
There's a D-League, but that's a new creation, essentially.
The minor leagues are a job, and people will work in the minor leagues for 10 years.
Nobody's in the D-League for 10 years.
In any case, here is Stan Van Gundy suggesting that one and done itself is a racist policy.
The people that were against them coming out made a lot of excuses, but I think a lot of it was racist, quite honestly.
And the reason I'm going to say that is nobody, I've never heard anybody like go up in arms about, oh my god, they're letting these kids come out and go play minor league baseball, or they're letting these kids come out and go play minor league hockey.
They're not making big money.
And they're white kids, primarily, and nobody has a problem.
But all of a sudden now, you've got a black kid that wants to come out of high school and make millions.
That's a bad decision?
But bypassing college to go play for $800 a month in minor league baseball, that's a fine decision?
What the hell is going on?
The NCAA is one of the worst organizations, maybe the worst organization, So I agree with his critique on the NCAA.
I don't agree with his critique with regard to the race issue.
Again, using race as a proxy for bad decision making I think is kind of stupid.
And I totally agree with his entire critique of the NCAA.
I think the NCAA is ridiculous.
I think that you have to When you see people selling shoes for a little bit of extra money, and suddenly this is some sort of terrible thing, it's just stupid all the way through.
That is something I would like to see, and I'd like to see the NCAA change its policy pretty radically.
Eric Dickerson said the same thing.
He said, this is slavery.
It's not slavery.
It's not remotely resembling slavery.
Slavery is when people are owned and their labor is owned.
It is not when you voluntarily give up your labor in order so that you can get a college scholarship and then have a shot at the NBA.
So let's not go overboard here.
Okay, so tomorrow we will be broadcasting from Nebraska, where we will be preparing to speak at Creighton.
I'm really looking forward to it, and I'm going to do that speech.
I think I've decided I'm going to do a full-on policy speech about guns.
I'm going to explain what gun rights are, where they come from, What gun policies work, what gun policies do not.
We'll take it on from a statistical level, a moral level, a constitutional level.
So that will be a full-on examination of the issue.
I'm looking forward to giving a Creighton tomorrow night.
If you're going to that, I look forward to seeing you there.
If not, you should be able to watch it online.
We will be back here tomorrow with more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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