Two mass shootings rock the nation, the media and Democrats blame Trump, and our social fabric continues to disintegrate.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
What an absolutely horrifying morning to be talking about news and politics.
Obviously, this weekend was just devastating for the country for a variety of reasons.
Two mass shootings taking place, one in El Paso, Texas, the other in Dayton, Ohio.
As it turns out, there was also a mass shooting in Chicago.
We will get to all of those.
We should take these one at a time because they obviously have different motivations.
They obviously have different backgrounds.
There's been a lot of attempts to conflate all of these types of shootings under one broad rubric.
That is not going to suffice.
We have to get very specific about what exactly caused each of these shootings, who is to blame, what we do about it, and all of the rest.
So we begin today with the shooting that everybody is obviously talking about the most, and that is the shooting that happened in El Paso over the weekend.
According to NBC News, a gunman opened fire Saturday in a Walmart and around a nearby shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, leaving 20 people dead and 26 injured, law enforcement officials said.
In delivering an updated number of deceased, Governor Greg Abbott called it one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas.
He said 20 innocent people from El Paso have lost their lives.
It's an unbelievable number and it's just absolutely horrifying.
One of the big problems with the country right now is that when something truly terrible happens to the country, If you go on social media, if you talk with people around the country, not in person, but you just do it via social media or on the internet, very often the first thing that happens is everybody doubting everybody else's motives.
We need to start from the premise that when Americans die, an act of evil, that we're all on the same page.
Because we are.
We're all on the same page.
This is an act of absolute monstrous evil, and as it turns out, very specific type of evil, white supremacist evil.
And let me tell you, the white supremacists who are on the move right now, these absolute loser, evil pieces of human debris who are active on 4chan and 8chan, the people who are coordinating to create the impetus for attacks like this to murder innocent people.
This is a cancer.
It needs to be wiped out.
And I've been seeing a lot of people who are on the left doing this routine, where when people on the right say this sort of stuff, they, well, where were you?
I was here the whole time, guys.
I was here the whole time.
Many of us were.
Back in 2015, I was calling the Charleston shooter a white supremacist terrorist.
There are those of us who are fighting white supremacists and the adjacent alt-right for years on end.
For years on end.
And the attempt to play politics with this, to pretend that people aren't sincere in their opposition to white supremacy because they disagree with you about policy, is disgusting.
Because the fact is, white supremacists are evil.
I know it personally.
I've been fighting them personally for years.
I've expended hundreds of thousands of my own dollars on security because of the attacks that I have leveled against white supremacists.
Three months ago, the FBI arrested a white supremacist for attempting to kill my family and me.
So I'm fully aware of the white supremacist and how evil they are.
I've been writing about it for years on end.
Some of us have been part of this fight for quite a while.
And we should all be part of this fight.
Obviously, white supremacy is not only evil, it's anti-American, it's disgusting, it's a cancer that must be rooted out.
And again, this is not something that I am new to saying.
This is something that many of us on the right have been saying for quite a while, and for the media to pretend that's not the truth, as we'll see, is just a lie, and a vicious lie, and a politically driven vicious lie.
We're all on the same page.
A few things can be true at once.
One, We all mourn when something like what happened in El Paso happens.
Two, every person of decent heart thinks that white supremacy is a grave evil that must be fought and facedown and destroyed and eradicated.
We're all on the same page about that.
And three, just because we disagree about politics does not mean that one and two are invalid.
And finally, four, if you suggest that three is not true, that our disagreements about policy, are reflective, not of different ideas about the best possible solutions, but they're reflective of sympathies for evil, then you are part of the problem.
You're part of the problem in the country.
We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
But first, let's talk about stamps for just one moment.
I know it's really grave day, but let's talk about stamps.
The fact is that when you go to the post office very often, you end up spending too much time.
There are lines, you have to park in front of the post office and get a ticket, like I did last time I was at the post office.
Well, when I'm too busy to go to the post office, I go to stamps.com because stamps.com is fast and easy.
They bring all the amazing services of the U.S.
Postal Service directly to your computer.
Whether you're a small office sending invoices, an online seller shipping out products, even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
Simply use your computer to print official U.S.
postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
Once your mail is ready, Just hand it to your mail carrier or drop it in a mailbox.
It is indeed that simple.
With Stamps.com, you get five cents off every first-class stamp, up to 40% off priority mail.
Not to mention, it's a fraction of the cost of those expensive postage meters.
Stamps.com, it's a no-brainer.
It saves you time, it saves you money.
It's no wonder over 700,000 small businesses already use Stamps.com.
Right now, my listeners get a special offer.
It includes a four-week trial, plus free postage, plus digital scale, no long-term commitment.
Go check them out right now.
Stamps.com.
Click on that microphone at the top of the homepage.
Type in Shapiro.
That's Stamps.com.
Enter Shapiro.
Okay, so to get back to this white supremacist terror attack that happened, and again, this is not the first.
This happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh just a few weeks ago.
That was the white supremacist terror attack.
There was the white supremacist terror attack in Christchurch.
There's the white supremacist, there've been white supremacist terror attacks Of recent vintage going back to 2015 during the Charleston massacre inside a church.
But obviously white supremacy has a long history in the United States going all the way back to before the Civil War and the ownership of black folks.
And what we saw yesterday from white supremacists, or on Saturday, was obviously a grave act of white supremacist evil.
Law enforcement sources said that police identified the suspect.
Now, we on this show and on my website, Daily Wire, we refuse to identify suspects by name because we don't want to glorify them.
We don't want to glorify what they do because studies tend to show that there's a clustering effect that happens when you pay a lot of attention to the specific person and make them prominent and make them famous.
It's one of the things that they want.
So we don't mention their names here on the show.
Multiple senior law enforcement officials believe that this shooter posted a screed online just prior to the attack.
They say investigators are examining a posting they suspect is from him, and then they eventually, basically, confirmed it.
Okay, so this person released a manifesto.
Now, I'm not going to read this person's manifesto for the same reason that I'm not going to mention his name.
Because I don't believe, just as with the Christchurch manifesto, that we should be reposting these manifestos and giving them airplay.
I will, however, point out a couple of things about the manifesto specifically because they're going to come up in what we discuss.
As this guy's motives because as we will see the media were firmly fixed on putting this one on President Trump on suggesting that the shooting was directly the fault of President Trump and his rhetoric and his unwillingness to separate off supposed unwillingness to separate off from white supremacists.
And all of the rest.
The Walmart shooter manifesto suggested a couple of things.
One, this person suggested they support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto.
That means that the Christchurch manifesto has now been directly linked to three separate attacks.
There's this one, as well as the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, as well as the Christchurch shooting, obviously.
And this is an agglomeration of white supremacist memes about an invasion of our country.
This is some of the language that people are picking up on, is that this attacker, this evil piece of debris, who should be executed at the first available opportunity.
He suggests that this is a response to a quote-unquote Hispanic invasion of Texas, as we'll see.
This is then used by the media to suggest that anybody who is opposed to illegal immigration is in league with white supremacy, which is just disgusting and a lie.
The person goes on to talk about how if America allows increasing Hispanic population, then America will become a one-party state, the Democratic Party.
And this, of course, is used as an excuse to suggest that all Republicans agree with white supremacists about immigration, which, of course, is, again, a lie.
And then this shooter goes on to discuss how there are many Republicans who are pro-corporation, meaning pro-immigration, but those aren't the real defenders of America.
This person says immigration can only be detrimental to the future of America.
And then this person goes on to talk about the environment.
Now, that part is being ignored by the media, obviously, because environmentalism tends to be an affect of the left, whereas immigration restrictionism tends to be a right-wing thing these days.
The shooter suggests our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country.
This is creating a massive burden for future generations.
Person quotes the Lorax.
And then finally, this person suggests at the very end, in what is inconvenience to the narrative that President Trump is the cause of all of this, the person suggests at the very end that this has nothing to do with President Trump.
Says that his ideology has not changed for several years.
Says my opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president.
I put this here because some people will blame the president or certain presidential candidates for the attack.
This is not the case.
I know that the media will probably call me a white supremacist anyway and blame Trump's rhetoric.
The media is infamous for fake news.
So that is what we know about this particular shooter at this time.
As soon as the shooting happened, basically within 12 hours, there's another shooting.
And this one happened in Ohio.
The shooting in Ohio happened outside a bar in Dayton.
And a gunman wearing body armor opened fire at this Ohio bar, killing nine people.
The Ohio shooter was formally named.
Some of the victims include his 22-year-old sister.
Six of the nine victims were black.
Police have said they don't think it was targeted discrimination because of the short timeline of the massacre.
This shooter was killed by police in approximately 30 seconds after he opened fire with a .223 caliber rifle on innocent revelers enjoying a Saturday night out at 1 a.m.
according to The Sun.
The shooter's high school principal told the Dayton Daily News that the Ohio shooter was suspended from school for writing a hit list on a bathroom wall, sparking a lockdown.
So there have been some serious red flags about this, again, evil piece of debris, this evil piece of debris.
Politics were very different from the first Evil Piece of Debris's politics.
Heavy.com uncovered a bunch of information about this person.
That information includes the fact that he said he would happily vote for Elizabeth Warren, praise Satan, said he was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, retweeted a bunch of folks who are sort of political pundits and video cutters on the left.
He tweeted, I want socialism.
I'll not wait for idiots to finally come round to understanding So this person is obviously of the left.
Tweeted out things like vote blue for God's sake.
Tweeted out videos from prominent people on the left.
Now, as I have said, this has been my position on every one of these shootings going all the way back to a Bernie Sanders-backing Democrat who decided to shoot up congressional members at a congressional baseball game, or all the way back to a quasi-member of Black Lives Matter shooting up Dallas police officers back in 2015.
I've said for a long time, politicians and political pundits are not responsible for violence unless they actively call for violence.
Incitement.
One of the things we're seeing in the country right now is an attempt to paint speech you don't like as incitement.
Hey, folks on the left did not incite this person to violence.
And President Trump did not incite this shooter to do what he did in El Paso.
We have to have very strict standards intellectually for what counts as incitement.
Now, that is a different question from the appropriateness of language and from whether language is inflammatory.
I agree that language can be inflammatory and wrong, but that does not mean that it incites violence.
And failing to recognize the distinction between inflammatory and wrong and incites violence allows us to curb free speech.
It allows us to crack down on speech that we don't like.
It allows us to blame our political opponents, whether you're on the right or the left.
You can blame Elizabeth Warren for what happened in Ohio, but that would not be correct.
You can blame President Trump for what happened in El Paso.
That would similarly not be correct.
We cannot adjudicate whether language is inciting By the effect that it has on folks with what we would call in tort law, eggshell skulls.
We cannot judge whether a reasonable person would be incited by a piece of language based on what an unreasonable outlier does that is violent or evil.
Now again, that doesn't make the language right.
It doesn't make the language good.
Bernie Sanders' language wasn't right or good when he talked about how Republicans wanted to kill grandma.
Barack Obama's language was not right or good when he talked about how American police are endemically racist.
Donald Trump's language was not right or good when he talked about the alt-right or when he talked about Charlottesville.
That language was not right or good.
That is not the same thing as inciting violence.
And if we fail to make that distinction, we're going to end up in a really dark place in which we are calling on government to shut down free speech, in which we suggest that our political opponents are actually engaged in violence, when in actuality they're engaged in language that makes the country worse and is bad, no question, but that does not actually incite violence.
We'll get to more of this in a second, because it turns out that there were some more shootings over the weekend as well.
And we'll get to that in just one second.
First, there's one app that's going to keep you safe and secure while you are away.
ExpressVPN.
So whenever I travel, I'm worried about people who are stealing my data.
In fact, I'm pretty worried about people stealing my data on a regular basis, no matter what, because there are lots of people after it.
There are hackers after it.
There are folks who are in big tech who are after it.
There are members of government who are after it, especially if you happen to be abroad.
This is why you should be using a VPN.
The best VPN that I know is ExpressVPN.
It runs in the background of your computer or phone, and then you use the internet just the way you normally would.
You download the app, you click to connect, and voila!
You're protected.
I won't go online while traveling without ExpressVPN.
You should not either.
ExpressVPN.
It's the fastest VPN I've tried.
It costs less than $7 per month.
...and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
ExpressVPN uses new cutting-edge technology called Trusted Server to make sure there are no logs of what you do online.
So no matter what you're trying to browse online, ExpressVPN gives you instant access all over the world.
Don't travel anywhere this summer without downloading ExpressVPN.
Protect your online activity today.
Find out how you can get three months for free at expressvpn.com slash ben.
That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash ben for three months free.
With that one year package, visit expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more.
So again, I want to give you all the facts of the shootings themselves, and then we'll get into the reaction, which has been terrible pretty much across the board.
So the final shootings that happen were, of course, the shootings that happen nearly every weekend in the city of Chicago that we are supposed to ignore and which the media certainly will ignore.
So you have 20 dead in El Paso, and that, of course, deserves as much media attention And then we have nine dead in Dayton, Ohio, and that, of course, deserves as much media attention as it's getting.
And then we have seven killed and 46 wounded in weekend shootings in Chicago.
And this happens nearly every weekend in Chicago.
And this, of course, will get no attention.
According to CBS, dozens of people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, including two mass shootings in less than three hours on Sunday.
In all, seven people were killed, 46 others were wounded in shootings since Friday evening, more than a dozen people were wounded, one of them fatally, in a pair of mass shootings in the Lawndale neighborhood early on Sunday.
Apparently these were just dispute-related, possibly gang-related.
It is unclear exactly what the cause of it was.
So because the media tend to look into causes in order to generate narratives, They're going to cover the Chicago shootings, not at all.
They will cover the Ohio shootings a little bit more, but not much more, because the Ohio shootings, again, were perpetrated by somebody who was on the political left and probably suffered from some sort of mental illness.
And then there's the white supremacist shooting in El Paso, Texas, and that's going to drive nearly all the media coverage this week, which does show the disparity in how seriously the media actually take gun violence in the country.
And the fact is that what happens in Chicago is much more typical of gun violence in the United States.
That is much more typical than what happened in Dayton, Ohio or what happened in El Paso.
But the media are going to focus in on what happened in El Paso because the fact is that that backs a particular narrative.
That narrative is that America is filled with white supremacists and that President Trump has forwarded all of that.
And so you're going to see a vast disparity between the amount of coverage on the Ohio shooter And his politics?
And the amount of coverage on Texas?
And you're gonna see virtually no coverage of what happens in Chicago nearly every weekend.
So for folks who say they take gun violence seriously, the answer is, if you're only taking what happened in El Paso seriously, but you're ignoring Ohio, and more than that, you're ignoring Chicago, you're not taking gun violence seriously.
It's possible you're taking white supremacy seriously, and that, of course, deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms.
But let's be honest about what exactly it is that we are taking seriously, and what is the narrative that is being performed.
Now, we should take all of these things seriously.
All of them.
Again, white supremacy should be taken as seriously.
It is a form of terrorism.
White supremacist terrorism is terrorism.
It should be treated as terrorism.
Now there are certain differences from, for example, ISIS.
I see people saying that white supremacism should be treated the same as ISIS.
ISIS is a group.
White supremacism is an ideology.
So it's not state-sponsored, for example, white supremacism.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be opening the floodgates on the sort of resources that we use on terrorism to be used against white supremacism.
We should.
Those boards, the 8chan boards, the 4chan boards, I've been saying for years at this point that I hope the feds are monitoring those places.
I hope the feds are on top of it.
They should be monitoring those places.
This is where the incipient violence is happening.
We, of course, should be unleashing all of the resources available to us on a law enforcement basis to fight this, and on a cultural basis.
We should be calling out white supremacism wherever we see it.
We should be shouting from the rooftops about how evil this stuff is.
Some of us have been doing this.
At the cost, as I say, of hundreds of thousands of dollars in our own security.
Some of us have been doing this.
So that is backdrop.
President Trump reacts to all this, and then we're going to see where the media, where people decided to go for all this.
Because it seems to me that everything that I've said so far on the show should be basically inarguable.
We should all agree with all of this.
White supremacism, evil.
Mass shootings need to be stopped.
We can disagree about the ways to stop mass shootings, but we should discuss the various ways to solve mass shootings.
We're not going to discuss any of them.
Instead, there will be political pandering galore and blame cast in all of the wrong places for political reasons.
The media have an interest, unfortunately, in putting certain types of narratives at the expense of other types of narratives.
We're going to see a vast disparity in the amount of coverage now that it's obvious what happened in Ohio.
We're going to see a vast disparity between the coverage of Ohio and what happened in El Paso, Texas.
So President Trump reacts this morning to what happened in El Paso.
And here is what the president had to say.
The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate.
In one voice, our nation must condemn racism.
Bigotry and white supremacy.
These sinister ideologies must be defeated.
Hate has no place in America.
Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.
Now, as we will see, folks in the media, they don't care what President Trump actually said this morning.
They're going to go with the narrative that President Trump is responsible for what happened in El Paso.
Now, again, they don't hold to the same logic.
They don't.
I think that President Trump's language on the alt-right in 2015 and 2016 was bad.
I think it was egregious, in fact.
Okay, but they do not hold to the same standard with regard to President Trump that they do with regard to other politicians.
So Bernie Sanders is not responsible for the congressional baseball shooting.
Elizabeth Warren is not responsible for what happened in Ohio.
Barack Obama is not responsible for what happened in Dallas.
But President Trump is responsible for what happened in El Paso, according to the esteemed members of our media.
And it doesn't matter that even at Charlottesville, where Trump came under heavy criticism from people like me for not being sufficient in his condemnation of all of the people who are marching in that tiki torch ceremony on Friday night, on that Friday night.
Where President Trump said there are good people on both sides, and he did not mean of the Confederate flag debate.
Go back and look at the transcripts.
I know there's this revisionist history going around.
That is not what he said.
He said there were good people on both sides of those marches.
He made up in his own head a group of people marching with the white supremacists.
But he also, we must note, he did say at the time that he did not mean the white supremacists.
He did not mean the neo-Nazis.
He did condemn them at the time.
The folks in the media are suggesting that Trump is responsible for every act of shooting, every shooting that happens.
He's responsible for it.
And as we'll see, members of the media are now claiming that anybody who supports him is responsible for what happened at the Tree of Life Synagogue or what happened in El Paso, Texas.
And that is disgusting, it's egregious, it's cynical, and it's obvious.
We all know what you're doing.
And we'll see, this has become the media nerve.
So Trump came out this morning and made a strong statement against white supremacism.
Is that going to help him?
Of course it won't.
Not with the people who are trying to pin this on President Trump, of course.
President Trump went on and he suggested that this is not a gun problem, this is a mental illness and hate problem.
Which, again, I think is obviously true, considering there are something like 300, 400 million guns in the United States, and these shootings are carried out by lone individuals, not by vast waves of individuals across the country.
We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but when necessary, involuntary confinement.
Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.
This, of course, is true.
We'll get to more of what President Trump had to say in just one second.
First, let's talk about the blinds that are in your home.
Good blinds are to a home what a good tie is to a suit.
It really does bring it all together.
If you walk in your house and you look around, you're like, God, this place kind of looks dingy.
That may be because of the window coverings that you are using.
But shopping for blinds is not actually something that I am great at.
Blinds.com makes it really fast and really easy, however, which is why I love them.
With 15 million windows covered, over 30,000 five-star customer reviews, Blinds.com is America's number one online retailer for affordable, quality custom window coverings.
Every order gets free samples, free shipping, a free online design consultation.
You just send them pictures of your house.
Then they will send back custom recommendations from a professional for what will work with your color scheme, furniture, and specific rooms.
They will even send you free samples to make sure that everything looks as good in person as it does online.
They've made it really easy for you, so there's no excuse to leave up the mangled blinds, or worse, have no blinds at all, because, well, you know, that's gonna be inappropriate for those who are outside.
For a limited time, my listeners get 20 bucks off at blinds.com when you use promo code Ben.
That is blinds.com, promo code Ben, for 20 bucks off for wood blinds, cellular shades, roller shades, and more.
Blinds.com, promo code Ben.
Rules and restrictions do apply.
Again, that's blinds.com, promo code Ben.
Okay, so President Trump continues along these lines.
He says that our nation is overcome with shock, horror, and sorrow, which obviously is true.
Fellow Americans, this morning, our nation is overcome with shock, horror, and sorrow.
This weekend, more than 80 people were killed or wounded in two evil attacks.
Okay, and then the president went on to talk about what he wanted to do about it.
He directed the DOJ to propose legislation putting the death penalty on white supremacists who commit terror attacks.
Today, I'm also directing the Department of Justice to propose legislation ensuring that those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty and that this capital punishment be delivered quickly, decisively, and without years of needless delay.
Okay, and then Trump called on everybody to set aside partisanship and move forward with some common solutions.
Good luck with that.
Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside, so destructive, and find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion, and love.
OK, so this was all the predicate.
This is all the baseline where, again, we should all agree with what the president is saying.
You don't have to like the president to agree with what he's saying.
The words coming out of his mouth today are the correct words.
That is obvious.
But as we will see, as we will see, what's actually happening is is something truly ugly in the country, and that is an attempt To not only blame Trump for what happened in El Paso, but to suggest that anyone who agrees with anything Trump has done policy-wise is responsible for the mass shooting of innocents.
And this is cynical.
It is disgusting.
It is un-American.
It is wrong.
And we'll see.
It's a very common tactic.
It's not just a tactic being used by presidential candidates.
It's a tactic that is now being used by members of the media on a broad scale.
And then I do want to talk about some possible solutions, things that we can do to stop all of this.
Because we're seeing the same sort of solutions being proposed over and over.
Assault weapons bans, the sort of policies that didn't work back from 1994 to 2004 when there was an assault weapons ban in place.
You hear people talk about video games.
Again, not a lot of evidence linking video games to mass shootings.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
Okay, so...
All of this is backdrop to how people reacted.
And I promise you that all of this is going to get worse.
If the theory is that inflamma... Again, here's my theory.
Incitement is a specific standard.
You did not incite violence unless you called for violence.
However, inflammatory language can boil the pot to the point that there's bubbles jumping out of the pot.
That there are sparks that are jumping out from beneath the pot.
And as the heat, as the rhetoric turns up, The inevitable side effect is going to be that there are people with eggshell skulls who go out and do stuff.
That does not mean that the people who are speaking in inflammatory but non-inciting terms are responsible for the incitement.
It does mean that you can expect that things are going to get worse in the country, both in terms of violence and in terms of politics, when we scream at each other and yell at each other and blame each other for incidents like this.
And when we don't all speak out forcefully against evil when we see it.
It is the responsibility, the sheer and absolute responsibility of every decent human being in the United States to shout out, to cry out about the evils of white supremacy, to target white supremacy, to cut it out amongst your friends.
Now I doubt how there are many people in my audience who have friends who are white supremacists.
I really doubt that.
But if you see the beginnings of it, quash it in the bud.
Fight it at every step.
Fight it.
It's not funny.
It's not memery.
It's disgusting.
It's been disgusting since 2015-2016.
Again, when I was the number one target of white supremacists online in the United States in 2016.
So I'm very familiar with these pieces of bleep.
Very familiar.
So in any case, one of the other things that happens, and this is not going to make anything better, is the attempt to lump in everyone who disagrees with you with a class of people who want to commit violence against others.
Because what that really does is it suggests that anybody who you disagree with is an enemy to be fought.
Because if we believe that white supremacism is a cancer, and then you label anyone you disagree with a white supremacist, what you're saying is that everyone you disagree with is part of the cancer.
So this starts off over the weekend with various Democratic politicians campaigning for president, blaming Trump for the shootings in a way that nobody has ever blamed Barack Obama, nor should they, for the shooting of police officers in Dallas.
Nobody's ever blamed Bernie Sanders for the shooting of Congress people, elected Congress people, at a congressional baseball game in Virginia.
Rightly, people have not blamed Bernie Sanders for that.
People are not blaming Elizabeth Warren for the Ohio shooting, as they should not.
People are not blaming members of the media who are retweeted.
By this Ohio shooter for all of this, as they should not.
But Trump.
Again, I'll rip his language as much as the next, more than the next guy, okay?
I've spent my career doing it for the last several years.
When the president is, when Trump is wrong and when he says something vile, I say that he is wrong and says something vile.
That is not the same thing as doing what folks on the left are doing, which are, I mean, Beto O'Rourke went out there and said that Trump is a white nationalist or white supremacist.
There is no evidence of that.
The best evidence of any of this, the worst you can say about Trump, is that he has failed to adequately condemn white supremacy and the alt-right.
And I think that for 2015, 2016, that was true.
I don't think that that is true for 2018, 2019.
Still, that was a grave evil.
But that is not the same thing as saying he is a white supremacist or white nationalist.
And Beto didn't stop there, of course.
Beto, then when he said that it was Trump, Trump is a white nationalist, and then he blamed Fox News.
So let me get this straight.
If you are President Trump and you say that the news is fake news because they tolerate garbage like this, Then you're very bad and you're attacking the press.
But if Beto O'Rourke says that Fox News is responsible for mass shootings in El Paso, that is not an attack on the press, that is just him being a rational, reasonable human being.
Here's Beto O'Rourke, desperate for attention, and saying something truly awful.
This president is encouraging greater racism, and not just the racist rhetoric, but the violence that so often follows.
Do you think President Trump is a white nationalist?
Yes, I do.
And again, from some of the record that I just recited to you, the things that he has said, both as a candidate and then as the President of the United States, this cannot be open for debate.
He is saying that some people are inherently defective or dangerous, reminiscent of something that you might hear in the Third Reich, not something that you expect in the United States of America.
He is an open, avowed racist and is encouraging more racism in this country.
Okay, this is pathetic.
I understand that Beto O'Rourke is riding in 3% of the polls, but this is pathetic.
I don't know how to attribute this to an honest mind.
So I have two choices here.
Either he honestly thinks this, in which case he is disturbed, or he does not believe this, in which case he is a cynical politician desperate for attention.
So I don't think he's disturbed.
I think this is a cynical ploy.
I don't think that he really believes that Trump is a white nationalist.
He may believe that Trump is insensitive on race.
He may believe that deep down Trump is a racist.
By calling him a white nationalist, somebody who wants to get all the brown and black people out of the country, there is no evidence, like none, no evidence of that whatsoever.
And we'll see.
The media go back.
They take some of Trump's comments out of context.
Again, I've ripped Trump when I think his language is wrong.
But the suggestion that Trump is himself a white supremacist or white nationalist who is responsible for a white supremacist shooting in El Paso is insane.
And O'Rourke doubled down on this.
Clip 20.
He was asked by the press and he lost it, supposedly.
He lost it.
He's in El Paso for some sort of event, obviously commemorating the people who had been murdered.
And here's what he had to say.
He's been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.
I don't know, like, members of the press, what the f***?
Hold on a second.
You know, it's these questions that you know the answers to.
I mean, connect the dots about what he's been doing in this country.
He's not tolerating racism, he's promoting racism.
Again, this is...
It's tiresome.
You can criticize Trump's rhetoric.
And in many cases, you should.
Go back to my show two weeks ago.
I ripped him a new one for his tweet about the squad.
And I despise the squad.
I thought that was really bad, xenophobic stuff.
But, by the way, he did not suggest that all Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers.
He did not do that.
When people say that he uses the infestation language about illegal immigration, he was specifically referring to MS-13.
When they say things like, well, he called immigrants animals, he was specifically referring to MS-13.
If you want to find aspects of President Trump saying awful, awful things, you don't have to dig this far.
And you don't have to mischaracterize what he had to say.
But the attempt to blame him for every act of evil that happens in the United States, as we'll see, is really not about Trump.
It's really about something broader.
If it were really about Trump, then presumably when Trump starts ripping into white supremacy, you'd be saying, good, I'm glad he's doing that.
But that's not what the left is doing.
Instead, what the left is doing is they are attempting to link what he says with policies they don't like and then say anybody who supports those policies is now responsible for white supremacy.
And it was not just Beto O'Rourke over the weekend.
It was not just Beto O'Rourke over the weekend.
As we'll see, it was Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren, and Julian Castro, and Bernie Sanders, and all the- and it was members of the media.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, you need to go subscribe over at dailywire.com for $9.99 a month.
You can get a subscription, $99 a year.
Gets you our famous Leftist Ears Hot Oracle Tumblr.
You can go check that out, which is fun but not serious, folks.
Nobody's interested in making people cry just for the fun of it.
You can go check us out over at dailywire.com.
We're the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
It wasn't just Beto, of course.
Cory Booker, who is also riding low in the polls, went on CNN and suggested that President Trump is responsible for all of this.
I think that at the end of the day, especially because this was a white supremacist manifesto, that I want to say with more moral clarity that Donald Trump is responsible for this.
He's responsible because he is stoking fears and hatred and bigotry.
He is responsible because he's failing to condemn white supremacy and see it as it is, which is responsible for such a significant amount of the terrorist attacks.
Okay, I'll explain in a second why this is so radically dishonest.
It's radically dishonest for a couple of reasons.
One, it is radically dishonest because, again, nobody blamed Obama for the Dallas police shooting because he was not responsible for the Dallas police shooting.
Nobody blamed Bernie Sanders for the shooting in Virginia because he was not responsible for the shootings in Virginia.
And Trump is not resp— Trump is not calling on people to go shoot Mexican-Americans at an El Paso Walmart.
Nobody is- Where are you getting that?
Where- Again, I can- This is a major distinction.
I can hate a lot of Trump's rhetoric.
I can think a lot of Trump's rhetoric sucks and is gross.
I can think- I can think it's xenophobic.
I can even think that some of it is racist.
Like when he talked about a Mexican judge back in 2016 being unqualified because he was Mexican and was going to discriminate against him and all of this.
That is not the same thing as he promoted murder at a Walmart in El Paso.
It's not.
Okay, and all these same Democrats were defending Al Sharpton five minutes ago.
Al Sharpton actively incited riots twice in New York City.
And all these people were defending him.
So spare me your crocodile tears now when you suggest that inflammatory language is responsible for violence.
Either it is or it's not.
And obviously, it only is if it's one side of the aisle, according to Democrats.
My feeling, again, for the one millionth time on this show and others, incitement is incitement when it is incitement, when you're calling on somebody to commit acts of violence.
Al Sharpton actually did that back during the Freddy's Fashion Mart routine and back during the Crown Heights routine, allegedly.
But the fact is that this is more political than anything else, as we will see, because as we'll see, it's not an obvious attempt to make the country better by rooting out bad rhetoric.
As we'll see, this is connected to something deeper, okay?
Elizabeth Warren then rips into Fox News.
Now, she's not ripping into Trump anymore.
Now she's ripping into Fox News.
Quote, we need to call it out.
Fox News is a hate for profit machine that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists.
Weird, CNN had on Richard Spencer like a week and a half ago to rip on Trump.
So isn't that interesting?
But Elizabeth Warren, again, is this an attack on the press?
Is the idea that Fox News is responsible for this now?
This sort of mentality is what leads to exactly the sort of free speech crackdowns that so many people in America are afraid of.
Fox News is now responsible for a shooting in El Paso, despite no evidence linking Fox News to the shooting in El Paso.
Bernie Sanders did the same thing.
And Bernie Sanders is the last person who should talk about this, given the fact that a guy spouting his rhetoric shot a bunch of Congress members just a couple of years ago.
But here is Bernie Sanders suggesting that Trump's racist rhetoric is a sign to take up arms.
Look, I am sure that President Trump does not want anybody in this country to go around shooting other people.
But what he has got to understand is that when you have language that is racist, That is virulently anti-immigrant.
There are mentally unstable people in this country who see that as a sign to do terrible, terrible things.
So I think the president has got to stop that racism and that xenophobia immediately.
I agree that Trump's rhetoric has been wrong many, many times.
But Bernie Sanders suggesting that inflammatory rhetoric is the cause of violence?
Kind of kind of rich coming from, again, a person whose rhetoric was heavily involved in inspiring, according to Bernie Sanders's own standard, a shooting of Congress members.
I understand that that was out of the out of the news in like a week.
Because, of course, it was a person of the left who had committed this this heinous act.
But again, you got to have some sort of consistency here.
Now, the media response to this has just been It has been insane, almost fully insane.
So let's start with Reza Aslan.
So if the idea here is that we all need to come out and condemn white supremacy, then when people do it, wouldn't you be happy?
Well, Reza Aslan was a former CNN commentator, did some documentaries with CNN.
Kellyanne Conway tweeted out, we need to come together, America.
Finger pointing, name calling, screaming with your keyboards is easy, yet it solves not a single problem, saves not a single life.
Working as one to understand depraved evil and to eradicate hate is everybody's duty.
Unity, let's do this.
Reza Aslan immediately responded, you are the depraved evil we need to eradicate.
So Kellyanne Conway is the depraved evil we need to eradicate.
And this is, as you'll see, the bleed over from Trump's rhetoric is bad and harmful to everybody on the right is responsible for this.
Everyone I disagree with is a terrorist inspirer.
Was very quick from the media, very, very fast.
Reza Aslan then tweeted out, after today, there is no longer any room for nuance.
The president is a white nationalist terror leader.
His supporter, he's a really bad white nationalist terror leader, considering that he came out today and gave a full speech about how evil white supremacy is.
Very bad at his job.
Reza Aslan says his supporters, all of them, are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.
The MAGA hat is a KKK hood, and this evil racist scourge must be eradicated from society.
Obviously, he's either insane or he's wildly intellectually dishonest.
I think that it is the latter, because I don't think that Aslan is insane.
But the notion that every single person in the United States who voted for Trump or plans on voting for him in 2020 backs racist shootings in an El Paso Walmart is patently disgusting and ridiculous.
And this was the line from a lot of folks in the media yesterday.
And again, they're applying standards that they would never apply to folks on their own side of the aisle.
So here's Anderson Cooper suggesting, well, you know, white supremacists are copying Trump's words.
That means that Trump is responsible.
The alleged killer, who, as always, we're not naming, traveled more than 600 miles from his home near Dallas, Texas, to a city that's more than 80% Hispanic.
His name is on a hate-filled manifesto posted on the website 8chan shortly before the killing began.
It is hard to ignore the fact that they echo, sometimes even using the exact same language, some of the themes of this president of a nation under siege, being invaded, facing an infestation.
These are the president's words and they can't be denied.
Okay, so if the standard is that there's an evil person who went and did an evil thing and was quoting other people and they're responsible for his evil, then maybe we should talk about that ice attack that happened a couple of weeks ago where a person attempted to attack an ice facility while quoting Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and calling it a concentration camp.
Oh, we didn't do any media coverage of that?
I wonder why.
I wonder why.
Again, there is no common standard.
It's not whataboutism.
Okay, whataboutism is where you say that the rhetoric is good.
I've said the rhetoric is bad all the way through here.
And I've been condemning Trump's rhetoric on a wide variety of scores for years.
So it's not about that.
And I've been condemning AOC's rhetoric and Sanders' rhetoric and a lot of this kind of stuff.
But I also have a common standard, which is that AOC and Bernie Sanders and Obama and Trump are not responsible for the actions of evil outliers who go and do evil things that the people who said stuff never would have approved in the first place, obviously.
But the media don't hold that same standard.
They don't.
At all.
ABC News did the same thing.
They had a panel yesterday in which everybody sort of suggested that Trump has to answer for the mass shootings.
Again, same people.
Nothing.
When it was Obama and when it was Dallas police officers being gunned down in the streets, then it wasn't Obama has to answer for anything.
Then it was we have a systemic problem of violence and distrust between blacks and whites and problems with law enforcement and all the rest.
Lack of a consistent standard is one of the things that raises the temperature.
It's not just that the media are wrong here.
It's that if they are talking about raising the level of tension in the country, it is true that the media raise the level of attention with double standards, with attempts to lump in everybody who they don't like, with people who commit acts of heinous evil.
Here's ABC doing this.
Is it fair, John, to tie the president to this violence?
Well, Dan, whether or not it's fair, he's going to have to answer those questions.
The bottom line is this president has had a rhetoric on immigration and on immigrants that has been deeply divisive.
So I love this.
Whether it's fair or not, he's going to have to answer those questions.
Well, really?
Because who's asking them?
Would that be you?
Because it seems to me that you should answer the question as to whether it's fair before he said, well, regardless, he's going to have to answer those questions.
Bernie Sanders didn't have to answer questions and neither did Obama.
If you want to ask those questions, fine, but they need to be evenly applied.
Otherwise, there's no standard.
And this undermines trust in the media and undermines trust in each other.
It means that we believe that it means that we on the right believe that you guys are being cynical, that you don't actually wish to wipe out white supremacism nearly as much as you wish to lump in people on the right with white supremacists so that you can come after everybody on the right.
And I think there's fairly good evidence that there are members of the left who are cynically using this for that purpose, which makes me sad.
We're all on the same godly page.
We should be on the same page.
This is not difficult.
The Washington Post has a headline today.
How do you stop these people?
Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre.
Again, I've condemned nearly every point that Trump has ever said about this.
But that does not mean that Trump is responsible for the El Paso massacre.
This is an important, important point.
And let's point something out.
Here's where the rubber meets the road.
Where is all of this going?
Here's where all of this going.
So the Washington Post runs an editorial today from the editorial board talking about how Trump is very, very, very mean and very, very bad.
And they start off like this.
We know by now not to waste time calling on President Trump to do the right thing.
He sows division and bigotry rather than promoting unity and understanding.
Whatever he promises, in the crunch, he capitulates to the gun lobby.
And there it is, right?
There it is.
In order for Trump to buy off the left, in order for Trump to Oh, to be allowed to suggest that he is anti-white supremacy.
He has to access.
He has to acquiesce to all of their particular policy preferences.
So they write a sample speech for Trump.
And here's what The Washington Post wishes he would say, quote, My fellow Americans, these are dark days and nights of August.
A weekend, a time Americans gather at the beach, the mall, a music festival, has brought us horror.
Let us resolve to transform our great anguish into action, permanent and effective action.
This horror will no longer be normal in our country.
Today, I'm calling on Washington, I'm calling on Congress to return to Washington for an immediate joint session to give up their district politicking and take action to combat gun violence.
An active ban on sales of military-style assault rifles, as well as high-capacity magazines.
This weapon was made for war.
It doesn't belong on our streets.
Make background checks mandatory.
So, in other words, for Trump to buy off the Washington Post, it's not about him condemning white supremacy, or fighting white supremacy, or sicking the DOJ on white supremacy.
Or monitoring 8chan.
It's not about any of those things.
It's about him embracing the proper gun control policies.
And Charles Blow does the same thing at the New York Times today.
Quote, Terror and policy, two sides of white nationalism.
The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers share the same mission.
Charles Blow, official columnist on the editorial board over at the New York Times, suggesting that the white supremacist who shot up a Walmart in El Paso is the same at root as white policymakers in Congress who happen to be Republican.
Hey, you wonder why I don't trust your take on white supremacy?
Because of your suggestion, perhaps, that if I am in favor of more restrictions on illegal immigration on the border, that I'm in the same basket as a guy who just shot up a Walmart.
Maybe that's why we don't trust you and the media to set these standards.
Maybe that's why Republicans won't appear on CNN, you guys.
Charles Blow says, Is this stochastic terrorism at play, in which rhetoric by some incites action by others?
Possibly.
There's no doubt that Trump and Republicans are making poisonous anti-immigrant rhetoric part of their platforms, but I think laying all the blame at their feet is too convenient and simplistic.
I think a better way to look at it is to understand that white nationalist terrorists, young and rash, and white nationalist policymakers, older and more methodical, live on parallel planes, both aiming in the same direction, both with the same goal, to maintain and ensure white dominance and white supremacy.
That policymakers believe they can accomplish with legislation in the legal system what the terrorists are trying to underscore with lead.
In the mind of the policymakers, border walls, anti-immigrant laws, voter suppression, and packing the courts are more prudent and permanent than bodies in the street.
But try telling that to a young white terrorist who distrusts everyone in Washington.
The terrorists want to do quickly what the policymakers insist must be done slowly so the terrorists stew in their anger.
So in other words, I mean, the end of this column is so morally egregious.
Charles Blow is morally bankrupt.
Morally bankrupt on the highest level.
What a disgusting column.
He says, it's not simply a matter of whether Trump's rhetoric or any other politician led these shooters to do what they did.
Maybe.
It is also about recognizing that all of these people are on the same team and share the same mission and eat from the same philosophical trough.
It's just that their methods differ.
The white supremacist terrorists and the white supremacist policymakers are bound at the hip.
So in other words, I disagree with Charles Blow about immigration.
Therefore, I am responsible for a shooting in El Paso.
To that, I have two words and one of them is unprincipled.
I've taken more abuse from the white nationalists and white supremacists than Charles Blow has.
I promise you that.
I've spent more on security.
I've gotten more death threats.
I will fight those people to my dying breath.
They are evil.
They are the scum of the earth.
And your suggestion, Charles Blow, that if I agree that legal immigration should be expanded and illegal immigration should be curbed on the southern border, and that we should expand services on the southern border for people who are detained, that I'm in the same boat as a piece of dreck who goes and shoots innocent people?
F you.
And F the horse you rode in on.
I mean, this is just...
You want to keep this boiling point high?
Keep doing this kind of stuff, guys.
Really, well done.
Well done.
We could all be on the same page.
We could all be the brothers and sisters we're supposed to be, where something tragic and evil happens in the country, and we all come out, and we all say how evil it is, and then we figure out ways to solve it, and we figure out ways to fight it, or you could politic off the back of it.
You could start fundraising like Kamala Harris did over the weekend.
You could go out on national TV and suggest that the president is responsible for inciting violence when he's never called for this sort of violence.
You could suggest that everyone who votes for the president Or gives money to the Republican National Committee is responsible for this, or that the NRA is responsible for this.
Or he could be a responsible American and join the rest of us and actually try and figure out what the hell to do about all of this.
But I don't think that's what a lot of folks want to do today.
I think what a lot of folks want to do today is help rip down the social fabric that is necessary to prevent all of this.
You want to know why more and more shootings are happening?
Because we are more isolated, because we don't trust each other, because the social fabric is fraying.
And instead of rebuilding those institutions, you're setting the institutions on fire.
And then you're suggesting you've done a world of good by burning down the entire city.
You burn down the palace, and then you're surprised when we stand weeping in the ashes.
Well done, everyone.
What a great weekend.
Well done, everyone.
And second, we're gonna talk about some of the solutions that have been proposed, and again, how this really isn't about solutions for a lot of folks.
For a lot of folks, this is about demagoguery and scoring political points.
And then we'll talk about some actual solutions, because believe it or not, there are some actual things that we could do today.
I mean, the response to this stuff is just egregious.
It breaks my heart that we can't all be on the same page on this.
Why aren't we all on the same page on this?
Why in the name of God can't we be on the same page in the easiest thing ever, fighting white supremacist terrorism?
It's the easiest God bleep thing in the entire world.
Man, I really have to try hard not to curse today.
It's the easiest thing in the entire world and somehow we're managing to botch it.
Somehow we're managing to botch it.
How?
How?
Okay, so some of the solutions that have been proposed.
Okay, so let's talk about what actual solutions would look like and then we'll see how the botchery is taking place.
Okay, so there is a piece in the LA Times talking about mass shootings and what they've learned about shooters by Jillian Peterson and James Densley.
It says, in the last week, more than 30 people have died in three separate mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton, Ohio.
And people didn't pay attention to the Gilroy shooting because again, the media like to pay attention to narratives that underscore their political themes.
They don't pay attention to mass shootings that don't underscore those political themes per se.
And so these writers say, for two years we've been studying the life histories of mass shooters in the U.S.
for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S.
DOJ.
We've built a database dating back to 1966 of every mass shooter who shot and killed four or more people in a public place and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.
Our goal has been to find new data-driven pathways for preventing such shootings.
Our data reveal four commonalities among the perpetrators of nearly all the mass shootings we studied first.
The vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age.
The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and or severe bullying.
The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns including depression, anxiety, thought disorders, or suicidality.
Okay, so thing number one we can do, we can make sure that kids are better taken care of.
Maybe one of those things involves re-involving ourselves in the fostering of communities and making sure that stable two-parent households stick together and making sure that people are better parents and creating social consequences for folks who are not.
Okay, second, practically every mass shooters we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting.
They'd often become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance.
For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger.
For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role.
Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.
Okay, so one of the things that we should be pursuing in response to this particular concern was what David French has pointed out for years now, gun violence restraining orders.
Which would allow people who are close to potential shooters to call up the authorities and then have them prevented, these people who don't have a criminal background, from being able to buy guns for a prescribed period of time and for a judge to continue that for as long as the person is unhealthy.
And these are called gun violence restraining orders.
They are backed by people across the political spectrum.
They should be fairly easy to do.
David French wrote about this back in 2017.
He said a well-crafted GVRO law should contain the following elements.
It should limit those who have standing to seek the order to close relatives, those living with the respondent, and perhaps also school principals or employers.
So you see somebody starting to break down, you can call the cops, and then you can get the person in front of a judge for an assessment as to whether they should be able to own or buy weapons.
Two, it should require petitioners to come forward with clear and convincing evidence that the respondent is a significant danger to himself or others.
Three, it should grant the respondent an opportunity to contest the claims.
Four, in the event of an emergency, ex parte order, a full hearing should be scheduled quickly, ideally within 72 hours.
And five, the order should lapse after a defined period of time, unless petitioners can produce clear and convincing evidence of the continued need.
Right, that would be a fairly good, tailored solution.
To the problem of tipping points for potential shooters.
Third, according to the LA Times, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives.
People in crisis have always existed, but in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety and death.
Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them.
Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters.
Okay, so there have been a couple of measures that could be taken to deal with this.
One is a voluntary measure undertaken by the media not to name the shooters.
How difficult is this, guys?
that their will to murder is justified.
Okay, so there have been a couple of measures that could be taken to deal with this.
One is a voluntary measure undertaken by the media not to name the shooters.
How difficult is this, guys?
We've been doing it at Daily Wire for at least a couple of years.
As soon as we recognize the danger, we stopped printing the names of shooters.
I won't mention them on my show.
You shouldn't either.
Don't make them famous.
Don't make them famous.
Don't print their full manifestos.
You can discuss what the generalized views are, but printing their manifestos makes them famous, as we saw from the Christchurch shooting.
Taking that seriously would be one measure.
Measure number two.
There's been a lot of controversy today over what should be done with 8chan.
8chan is this board that has now been populated by the reprobates of the internet, by a lot of white supremacists and people who are coordinating and cheering on violence and all of this.
Now, one of the problems with shutting down access to 8chan is that it actually is right now a centralized area that law enforcement can actually follow, right?
I mean, once you get rid of it, it goes underground again, and then it's harder for law enforcement to follow.
So while it may be worthwhile for companies to want to disassociate and not work with 8chan, I get it, right?
I mean, that's Cloudflare.
That's what they did today.
And I fully sympathize with the corporate decision-making behind Cloudflare.
At the same time, I'm not sure that's actually a good law enforcement strategy, and you'd want to talk with people from the FBI or DOJ to determine whether that is productive or counterproductive.
That's a practicality question, not necessarily a moral question.
Fourth, according to the LA Times, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans.
Once someone decides life is no longer worth living and that murdering others would be a proper revenge, only means and opportunities stand in the way of another mass shooting.
Is an appropriate shooting site accessible?
Can the would-be shooter obtain firearms?
In 80% of school shootings, perps got their weapons from a family member according to our data.
Workplace shooters tended to use handguns they legally owned.
Other public shooters were more likely to acquire them illegally.
In other words, Maybe there's gun measures we can take, and maybe there's not.
And this is where we get into the gun control talk.
Okay, so there have been... This is where you get into the danger of people demagoguing the issue, specifically because when it comes to gun control, you need to narrowly tailor these laws because a hundred million people in the United States, minimum, maybe 150 million people in the United States, actually own weapons.
There are 300 to 400 million weapons in circulation in the United States.
Any suggestion that you're going to criminalize gun ownership and you're going to come confiscate hundreds of millions of guns across the country is likely to end in a lot more violence and bloodshed, particularly because we do have a Second Amendment that is well-based.
And all of the talk about how gun violence is endemic to gun ownership is simply not true when you look to Vermont or New Hampshire, which have extraordinarily high levels of gun ownership, but extraordinarily low levels of gun violence.
In any case, You have politicians demagoguing this by shouting to this guy, do something.
This has been the typical way in which we deal with this stuff.
So you end up with, for example, Kamala Harris coming out and saying, I'm gonna do something about guns.
What is the something?
What is the something?
She doesn't make that clear, but it's something, guys.
That's demagoguery, okay?
When you can't name the solution, or when your solution is obviously not tailored to the problem, it's just throwing crap against the wall to see what sticks, and you're doing it while sending out fundraising letters, as apparently Kamala Harris did over the weekend, that's demagoguery.
What is your message to President Trump and Republicans in Congress?
Have the courage to act.
Do something.
Do something.
Because when I'm elected president, I'm going to do something.
That's my message.
Okay, so your message is that you're unilaterally going to do something?
What is the something that you're going to do?
There's an editor at the Global Opinions at the Washington Post, Karen Attia, who tweeted out something similar.
And she tweeted out, let me get the exact tweet, "Because a lot of us reject this vision of America that tolerates regular mass shootings as if they are unpreventable natural disasters, doing something more constructive is dismantling America's gun control now." That is the head of global opinions at the Washington Post.
Quick point of fact, universal background checks, so-called universal background checks, which should involve making, if I give a gun to my wife, then I'd have to go through a background check I'd have to go to a federally licensed firearm dealer, for example.
That would not have stopped any of this.
These guys would have passed background checks in both Ohio and in El Paso.
The attempt to ban quote-unquote assault weapons has always been extraordinarily vague.
The New York Post has a very bad editorial today talking about how Trump should take action on assault weapons.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
The New York Post suggests the Second Amendment leaves ample room for regulating gun rights, just as every other constitutional right has its limits.
They blame the NRA for all of this?
Okay, let's be real about this.
The NRA is popular because people support gun rights.
Gun rights are not popular because the NRA is powerful.
Anybody who suggests differently doesn't understand the dynamics of American politics, or purposefully are not doing so because they are making a cynical attempt to lump in support for the Second Amendment with corruption.
But the New York Post says, we need to begin with a return to an assault weapons ban.
We know that label doesn't actually describe a clear class of guns.
Some of the studies show the last ban, in effect from 94 to 2004, had a limited impact, but that simply means the next ban should be better written, with a clear definition, focused on factors like firepower, rate of fire, muzzle velocity, etc., not on cosmetic features.
Okay, and then people will use handguns, which by the way are responsible for vastly more gun deaths, and are used in vastly more gun deaths, than rifles are.
And then the New York Post editorial foolishly says, That doesn't cover the semi-automatic weapons regularly used only in mass shootings.
That's nonsense.
That's simply nonsense.
Those are guns in common use.
The AR-15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the United States.
A semi-automatic rifle is just a rifle that fires one bullet every time you pull the trigger.
There are a hundred million of those in circulation in the United States.
There is no magic gun that is only used by mass shooters.
We've seen handguns used.
We've seen rifles used.
I mean, hell, in different countries, we've seen knives used.
So this is not to suggest that there aren't gun regulations that would be appropriate.
I just suggested one, the gun violence restraining orders.
But we're not gonna settle on those.
Instead, we're gonna have a dumb political fight over something that's not going to get done because it's not actually gonna prevent the problem.
Charles Cook has a good piece on this over at National Review.
He says, the editors finished their plea by running through a bunch of falsehoods, begged questions, and non sequiturs.
They insist an assault weapons ban would represent a moderate, unifying step.
It wouldn't.
Such a move is supported by only two in five Americans, and has proven impossible to enforce, even in pro-regulation states.
They suggest that the founding fathers gave us the right to bear arms in a time of muskets, and did not foresee the evolution of weaponry.
This is false.
The founders did not invent the right, and they were fully aware of innovations in technology.
And throughout, they assume that the debate is between those who just want the killings to stop, and those who don't care.
Unsurprisingly, not true.
Toward the end of the missive, the editors cite New York City as the model.
Which, it has to be said, rather gives the game away.
One of the big reasons crime has fallen so far in New York City, they write, is a crackdown on guns.
That proposition is debatable, but irrespective of its veracity, for the Post to mention New York City as a model, in the same piece as it decries extremists who see every marginal change as nothing but a step on the road to a universal ban, is ridiculous.
New York City has the strictest gun laws in the country.
So again, there are honest policy disagreements that can be had about all of this.
But that does not mean that we don't care about mass shootings.
And that continued suggestion, which is a holdover from going all the way back to Sandy Hook.
That is a it's a vile suggestion.
OK, so what are some of the other things that have been proposed?
So on the right, there's been this this upsurge in people talking about violent video games.
Trump himself talked about violent video games in his speech this morning.
Suggested that we need to crack down on violent video games.
This was also promoted by Dan Patrick, who is the lieutenant governor of Texas.
He suggested this on Fox News.
You know, in this manifesto that we believe is from the shooter, this manifesto, he talks about living out his super soldier fantasy on Call of Duty.
We know that the video game industry is bigger than the movie industry and the music industry combined.
And there have been studies that say it impacts people and studies that says it does not.
But I look at the common denominators as a 60-some-year-old father and grandfather myself.
What's changed in this country?
We've always had guns.
We've always had evil.
But what's changed where we see this rash of shooting?
And I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill.
Okay, so again, the evidence for this is extraordinarily scanty, that the video game industry is closely tied into this.
Kevin McCarthy was getting half rightly, half wrongly grilled over this yesterday.
He was on Fox News specifically asked about video games.
Here was his response.
The idea of these video games to dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others.
I've always felt that is a problem for future generations and others.
We've watched from studies shown before of what it does to individuals.
When you look at these photos of how it took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.
But what I'd like to do is make sure...
The studies tend to show precisely the reverse, that these violent video games really don't do anything to link to all of this.
These chat boards where you have actual human beings encouraging people to go out there and quote-unquote score points as they did with the Christchurch shooter, that's a far bigger problem than people playing video games in their basement.
There are hundreds of millions of people who play video games.
Very few of them are participating in this sort of violence.
Now, to end today, there are no things I like and no things I hate, because there's just a lot of stuff to hate and mourn today.
I just want to point out, if we can't all be on the same side on this stuff, then we're done as a country.
If we can't all be on the same side when we say that white supremacism is evil, when we say that it is an act of terror to participate in an act of terror, that violence is condemned by everybody, when we can't assume the good faith of our neighbors, when we can't assume that we're all mourning today, Then the country is done.
The country is toast.
I mean, we all have to... If we're not going to mourn together over incidents like this, then we really can't live in a country together.
Because mourning is when you come together.
You know, in Judaism, we have something called sitting shiva.
When somebody dies, we sit shiva.
And sitting shiva means seven.
You sit for seven days, and you don't go out of your house.
You literally do not go out of your house.
And people bring you meals, and they come and they pray with you, and they come and they sit with you.
And I'm only saying that those who have bad intentions have bad intentions if they are going to politically manipulate on the basis of this.
to tear the other side a new one by implying that they have bad intentions.
And I'm only saying that those who have bad intentions have bad intentions if they are going to politically manipulate on the basis of this.
I think everybody of good heart is in mourning today and should be in mourning because why shouldn't we mourn?
Why shouldn't we mourn?
And why shouldn't we be motivated to fight the evil of the sick mother?
Why shouldn't we should be?
We should be.
I'm reading a story today that just it breaks your heart.
It's the worst story I've read in the recent past.
It's just horrifying.
It's from El Paso, CNN, Amanda Jackson, Emanuela Greenberg writing.
El Paso couples shopping for school supplies dies trying to shield their baby from gunfire.
Jordan and Andre Anchondo brought their infant son to Walmart on Saturday as they shopped for school supplies.
But only the little boy would survive the visit, their relatives told CNN.
The Anchondos were killed after a gunman opened fire in an El Paso shopping center on Saturday, Elizabeth Terry and Jesse Jamrowski said.
The couple, who had just celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary, went to the store after dropping their five-year-old daughter at cheer practice, Terry said.
As the gunfire erupted, Jordan shielded her two-month-old son Andre meanwhile jumped in front of his wife.
The baby still had her blood on him.
You watch these things, you see these things, you never think this is going to happen to your family, Terry said.
How do parents go school shopping and then die shielding their baby from bullets?
The Anchondos were among those killed Saturday in what authorities are investigating as an act of domestic terrorism.
The third mass shooting in the U.S.
in less than a week.
Jordan Anchando died alone at the hospital because no one was immediately able to find her, said her aunt.
It took a while to confirm and identify her throughout all the chaos.
Later Saturday, after holding out, hoped for hours that Andre Anchando might still be alive, Terry told CNN he was confirmed dead.
In addition to their two-month-old son, the couple had two more children, age five and two.
God, this piece of garbage.
And damn all the people who refuse to allow us to mourn together, to grieve together, and to fight together today.
Okay.
That's what we need to do as a country, and if we can't do that as a country, then we shouldn't be a country at all.
Alrighty, I'll be back here a little bit later today with a couple more hours of content, or I'll see you here tomorrow.
Hang in there, we will get through this together.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
And our Technical Producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sievitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production Assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Once again, our country takes a hit from Satan's glove puppets, two people who are no longer fully human because the devil got into them through their broken places and devoured the men God made them to be.
One thing we know, whether it's on the right or the left, our national dialogue does not seem to be helping.