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Aug. 5, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
49:57
Ep. 310 - Why This Keeps Happening

Today on the show we will go beyond the typical talking points to investigate why these mass shootings keep happening. The answer is deeper than the rhetoric offered by both sides. Date: 08-05-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, of course, we'll be discussing the horrific shootings that happened over the weekend, but I hope to go beyond talking points today on the show, beyond the partisan blame game, and I want to talk about what factors are really contributing to this epidemic.
I have a few ideas that I think get to the heart of the matter or at least close to that.
And we'll talk about it today on the Matt Wall Show.
Well, it was a terrible weekend in America and there's really no other way to put it.
Um...
I'm sure a lot of you had a similar experience to me.
I went to bed on Saturday night thinking about the shooting in El Paso that claimed 20 lives.
As it stands right now, 20.
Maybe that will go up because there are dozens that were injured as well, some still in the hospital.
Went to bed on Saturday night thinking about that horrible thing.
Wake up in the morning, go online.
I see people talking about a mass shooting.
It takes me a couple of minutes to realize they're not talking about El Paso.
They're talking about Dayton.
There was another mass shooting while I was sleeping, uh, you know, less than 12 hours after the first one.
In the span of 12 hours, we had two mass shootings.
Um, what I want to do today as we're discussing this, well, let me tell you first what I don't want to do.
What I don't want to do is say the same things that we always say, the same things that I always say.
I don't want to give you talking points and bumper sticker slogans.
There's no point in that because we all get it.
I don't want to make this a simple left-versus-right thing because it's not.
And because there's something just so hollow and empty about that game, so devoid of humanity, is that That game, the simple partisan political game that we play with dead bodies after something like this.
And I call it hollow and empty.
I think it's even worse than that, really, because nobody will ever admit this.
No one's ever going to admit feeling this way.
But I detected, I'm pretty sure, real glee Coming from some people after the El Paso shooting, when it turned out that the El Paso shooter was a white nationalist Trump fan, you know, someone that the left could pin on the right.
And among some leftists on social media, at least based on their social media posting, there's no indication of anything like sadness or mourning or anything.
It was just, see?
See?
This is you!
See?
It's Trump!
I told you!
See?
That's what it seemed like.
They were really happy.
It seemed as though they were happy it happened, some of them, because it was something they could use now against the other side.
For them, it became automatically just a thing to use, just ammo in an argument.
And then on Sunday, when it turned out that the Dayton shooter seemed to be a self-described leftist, supported Elizabeth Warren and Antifa, according to what he posted on social media, again, it seemed like some on the right, there was real glee, real happiness.
Like, no mourning, no sadness, just, see?
No, no, this one's on you!
I got you now, see?
No, no, this is your fault!
In so many words, right?
Not quite using those words, but almost.
It's just so sickening.
These are human beings.
These are real people who died.
This isn't just some thing to argue about.
It's a real human tragedy.
In fact, you can see, even in real time, as the narrative shifted on both sides.
It was interesting on Saturday morning, watching, as some conservatives insisted, that the politics of the El Paso shooter didn't matter.
While people on the left were saying, oh, it does matter.
And then with the Dayton shooter, now all of a sudden there are some people on the right saying, no, no, no, now politics do matter.
It didn't matter before, now they do.
Yesterday morning, didn't matter, now it does.
And then people on the left, though, shifted, and when they were saying yesterday, oh, the politics matter, and now on Sunday they're saying, oh, no, no, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
It's just the hypocrisy on both sides is disgusting.
And the thing is, People on both sides will justify this kind of hypocrisy, this kind of double talk, this kind of manipulation, this kind of game playing.
They play political games with the bodies of murdered women and children and men.
And they justify it by saying, well, the other side is doing it.
They're doing it too.
And they'll say, well, we have to do it so we can win.
Win what?
What are you winning?
What do you think you're winning?
What contest do you win by giving up your soul?
When you forfeit your humanity, when you become nothing but this partisan machine that just sees everything immediately through the lens of, how can I use this to win an argument?
When you become that, what do you think you've won?
Because you've given up yourself, your soul, your humanity.
You're nothing anymore.
You're just this thing.
You're just this zombie.
And you think you win that way?
What do you think you've won?
You've won nothing.
Let me tell you something.
If you're so worried about the other side, well, for the other side, from their perspective, since you've given up your humanity and your soul, that's a win for them.
And so if you care so much about winning, The minute you become an unthinking, human, partisan machine capable of only seeing anything in partisan terms, the minute that happens, you lose.
I mean, you lose everything.
Literally everything you lose.
You lose yourself.
Okay, so, congrats, you're a good Republican, you're a good Democrat, nicely done, but you're a bad human.
Is that a trade worth making?
It's like we all think now, well, yeah, I could be a bad person, but as long as I'm a good member of my party, it's fine.
So what I want to do today is I want to try to get beyond that.
And not use these tragedies to support talking points, because there's no point anyway.
I mean, even if I were going to do that, you already know everything.
If I'm going to do that, then everything I say, you already think, and there's no point even saying it really, right?
So rather than do that, what I want to try to do is investigate what kind of factors are really driving this epidemic.
of mass shootings. And I think I have, and I don't have the answer, okay? If there is
the answer out there, I don't have it. I'm not smart enough for that. But I do have, I think,
some answers, a few answers, and I want to talk about those today. But before I do, you know,
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All right, so what can we say about this?
What could actually be causing the mass shootings?
What we know is that nine of the top 12 or 13 worst mass shootings in history, deadliest mass
shootings in history, have happened in the past 12 years, just a little over a decade. We've had
nine of the top deadliest mass shootings ever. Five of the deadliest mass shootings have happened
in the past seven years. Three of the five deadliest have happened in the last three years.
Now, if you expand this a little bit, look at a bigger picture, you're going to find that something
like 16 or 17 of the top 27 deadliest shootings in American history have been in the last 12 or 13
years.
If you're a millennial, like me, almost all of the worst mass shootings in American history have happened in your lifetime, except maybe two or three of them.
Now these statistics matter, okay?
It's true that when you hear from the media, what you'll hear from the media this week and what you'll always hear is that there are hundreds of mass shootings every year.
In fact, I just read an article, I forget where I read it, but the article claimed that there were 250 mass shootings just this year alone.
250 already.
Which of course is a is a grossly inflated number and grossly in multiple meanings of the term there for gross.
It's an extreme inflation.
It's also gross.
Just it's disgusting to try to inflate the numbers of mass shootings when it's already bad enough.
Like you don't need to pump up the statistics.
It's bad already.
So no 250 249 in a year.
No, it's it's that's not what we're talking about because in order to get to that number They're counting any shooting where four or more people are injured or killed.
So to count to this statistic, even if nobody was killed, they'll still call it a mass shooting.
And they include things like gang shootings, drug-related violence, domestic violence.
All of that is bad, obviously.
Anytime someone's killed, it's a terrible thing.
All of those are problems.
Nobody denies that.
But it's not the same thing as somebody walking into a crowded place in suburbia somewhere or into a school and shooting everybody in sight.
That's a different sort of thing from domestic violence and certainly from gang shootings, which again are bad.
And that's an issue unto itself, which we've been talking about, especially the last few weeks.
But you can also easily, the thing about a gang shooting is that you can easily sort of avoid most of the time being shot in a gang shooting if you don't engage in gang-related activity.
If you don't sell drugs, you're probably not going to be, the likelihood of you being a victim of a drug-related drive-by is decreased substantially by just not selling drugs, right?
The thing that makes, and when we hear about mass shootings, that's not what we think about.
We think about the sort of thing that happened in Dayton, Ohio or in El Paso.
The thing that makes those so scary is that those can happen anywhere.
And these people weren't doing anything risky or dangerous.
They were just going about their day.
They were shopping, they were going out to eat, they were going to a bar, just normal things.
And next thing you know, it turns into a bloodbath.
So it's this specific sort of shooting.
That is mostly a modern phenomenon.
Obviously, people being killed, murder, is not a modern phenomenon.
That's been going on since the dawn of time.
But this specific sort of incident has gotten a lot worse in recent years.
Yes, you're still probably more likely to die from a shark attack than to die in a mass shooting.
That's true.
But we're at the point now where a few times a year, something like this happens.
And it hasn't always been that way.
It hasn't always been that common.
I just gave you the statistics.
To have nine of the top 12 deadliest mass shootings in just the last 11 or 12 years, that's incredible.
That is an incredible fact that we shouldn't just get used to or say, ah, you know, okay, but still.
Overall, the murder numbers are down.
We're not talking about overall numbers.
This is a problem.
It shouldn't be like this.
We shouldn't take it for granted.
I remember being a kid.
I remember when Columbine happened.
And it was the only thing anyone talked about for months on end because no one had ever heard of anything like this happening before.
And now, these mass shootings, by Wednesday, we won't even be talking about them anymore because we're so used to it.
And that is a problem, obviously.
Now, just to put this in perspective, imagine for a second That rather than having these mass shootings that were so common, imagine that they were serial killings, okay?
Imagine that twice a year a different serial killer murdered 15 or 16 people in a string of murders.
Imagine that serial killers that prolific were that common, that it was two or three times a year you had, you know, one of the worst mass... Imagine that Almost every year now, we have one of the worst serial killers in history pops up.
Now, if that were the case, we would all be saying, yeah, I mean, your likelihood of being killed by a serial killer is still very, very low.
But what's going on?
How could this be so common?
How are we producing so many serial killers in comparison to times in the past?
Well, it's the same thing with mass killings.
Mass killing is the same thing, basically.
It's just that you kill everybody all at once rather than one at a time.
So it's the same sort of thing, where we have to ask ourselves, why is this happening?
What explains why it's so commonplace now?
We all know the usual suspects, right?
The usual things we blame.
Guns, mental illness, ideology.
All of those things are relevant.
But what I said is I want to talk about this without focusing on those things we always talk about.
So I'm not going to focus on those, even though it's relevant.
In many cases, the mass shooters, they obtain their guns illegally or they're using guns that aren't theirs.
They're using their parents' guns or something like that.
And it's true that they should be prevented from using those guns, but that often involves enforcing laws that are already on the books.
So when it comes to guns, if we just enforce the laws that were already on the books, we would have prevented a number of these already just from the existing law.
We don't need to add more laws.
We just need to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
We have a ton of laws in this country.
Our law book, if you were to just look at a book with every law listed in it, in every state included, it would be thousands and thousands of pages long.
There are tons of laws.
We don't need more of them.
The laws that are on the books need to be enforced.
The Dayton shooter apparently had a hit list when he was in high school.
He was caught with a hit list and a rape list of people he wanted to kill and people he wanted to rape.
He was suspended from school for it.
Now, every sane person agrees.
That if you have a hit list, and it's known that you have a hit list, you shouldn't be able to buy a gun.
I think every sane person agrees with that.
I mean, I'm a big Second Amendment advocate, but if you're telling me it should be illegal for someone with a hit list to buy a gun, I totally agree.
Obviously, I agree.
I'd be crazy not to agree with that.
But it should already be possible, with the laws on the books, to prevent someone who's known to have a hit list from buying a gun.
And at the very least, if it's difficult, then just a few tweaks to the existing laws should make it possible.
Now, I think we still don't know exactly how this guy got his guns or why he was able to get them, even though he was known to have the hit list.
Maybe it's because he was a miner.
So maybe we make some adjustments to the laws that already exist.
That's fine.
But even by doing that, it's not going to solve the problem.
And it still raises the question.
Why are there so many people?
I mean, forget about for a second how they get their hands on the gun.
Why are there so many people who want to do this in the first place?
You know, when you get to the point where someone is looking for the opportunity to kill lots of people, they really want to do it, and they're going to do it.
Now they're just looking for a place to do it, and they're looking for the tool to do it with.
When you get to that point, that's bad news.
We need to figure out, how do we stop people from getting to that point?
How are they getting there to begin with?
Um, so I don't think focusing on guns is, is, is the key.
Uh, um, it's true now mental illness.
It's true that many of these people suffer from it for mental illnesses of some kind.
And it's true that sometimes ideology is a factor.
And where it is, you know, we should look at that.
The El Paso shooter was a white nationalist who wanted to kill Mexicans to stop them from invading the country, according to him.
He made that clear in his manifesto.
That's something we need to look at.
This is the third white nationalist mass murder incident.
In just the past several months.
So white nationalist terrorism is a problem.
A big problem.
And it needs to be named, condemned, and dealt with.
No question.
There's no downplaying this.
Again, three of the worst mass shootings ever have happened at the hands of a white nationalist in the past few months.
Okay, so that's something we need to look at.
For sure.
But here's the thing.
There have always been guns in this country and a lot of them.
And in fact, prior to, I think 1986, um, machine guns weren't even banned.
Okay.
Machine guns are banned right now.
And these, these shootings are not being carried out by machine guns 30 or 40 years ago, 40 years ago.
Uh, it, it, it wasn't illegal on a federal level anyway, to buy a machine gun yet.
These kinds of things weren't happening.
Mental illness.
We've always had mental illness.
Okay?
And if you're saying that there's more of it now, that people are more mentally ill or more people are mentally ill than were before, well, now you've just punted the ball back because now we have to ask, well, why is that the case?
So just focusing on mental illness doesn't, it won't get you to the root of the problem.
Racism and ideology, again, all of that existed.
And certainly, at least in this country, racism was worse 40 years ago than it was today.
Now, you could argue that racists of today, like the El Paso scumbag, feel desperate and powerless, which leads them to these kinds of acts, as opposed to the racists of the past, who lived in a society that was tailor-made for their racism, a society where their racist fantasies were actually enacted in the real world.
where the people they were racist against legally were not treated as equal,
were not even treated as human.
And so you could say that, well, if you were racist back then,
you had less incentive to go out and carry out these acts as opposed to the racists of today.
And there's probably truth to that.
But the fact is, again, racism has always existed.
There's always been violent ideologies.
And, you know, those top nine worst mass shootings in US history that have happened recently, only one of them, or two of them, I think, had anything to do with race.
And if you were to look at the top, you know, 30 mass shootings in American history, again, you're going to find that a small minority of them were We're motivated by race, and in fact, a small minority of them were motivated by any kind of discernible ideology whatsoever.
So I think if we want to understand the current epidemic, we have to look at factors that are themselves current.
See, that makes sense to me.
If we're noticing that this problem is getting worse in modern times, especially in the last 10 or 20 years, then it makes sense to look and see, okay, what has changed in society in the last 10 or 20 years?
Or the last 20 or 30 years, even.
So let me, that's what I want to do now.
I want to look at contributing factors that are recent, that may then be more directly correlated with the mass shooting epidemic.
Let's look at some of those.
Number one, the internet.
Okay?
I think the effect the internet has on our culture and on us psychologically as people, as individuals, is something that we haven't even begun to understand or appreciate.
The internet has certainly caused a massive, massive shift in the way that we operate as people, in the way that we see the world, in the way that we interact with the world.
Now obviously the internet can't cause someone to go out and be a mass shooter.
The only thing that can cause directly someone to be a mass shooter is their own choice, their own free will and volition.
Which is why if we're looking at who to blame directly, the only person who gets direct immediate blame for a mass shooting is the mass shooter.
Right?
Not Donald Trump, not Republicans, not Democrats.
But if we're looking for contributing factors, then I think, obviously, the Internet is going to be one of them.
Absolutely.
The more time we spend online, the more detached we become from reality, from the world, from each other, it seems.
I'm obviously not the first person to point this out.
It's become almost a cliché to say, the more connected we are, the more disconnected we are.
And people that want to sound profound make those observations all the time.
But in fact, you know what?
That is a profound observation, even if it's a cliche, even if we all recognize it.
It's profoundly true, actually.
And not something we should just gloss over.
It's like we have trouble now recognizing people, other people, as people.
In fact, on the internet, We get used to seeing people as just words on a screen, right?
Because that's what they are.
Back before the internet, you could only really interact, unless you got on the phone with someone, you were only really interacting with people that are directly around you.
When you're interacting with someone directly around you, it's harder to get around the fact that they're a person when they're right there in your line of sight and they're a physical person, right?
You got their body language, you can see everything, they're right there next to you.
It's harder to get around the fact that they are people.
But when you're just putting something out there on the internet, especially when you're not even talking to anyone directly, you're just sort of putting it out there for everyone to see, it's a lot easier to become detached.
From the fact that other actual people that you are communicating with actual other people.
And that's that this is an attitude that you find I think the people don't even don't even realize they have it's like what you know.
Well, when I just began the show talking about how awful people are on social media after these mass shootings, and anytime I talk about something like that, people are always going to say to me, oh, well, that's just Twitter.
That's just the Internet.
Get off the Internet.
And you'll see that's not real life.
People aren't like that in the real world.
Well, what do you mean?
Those are actual humans on the Internet saying those things, expressing their views.
So when someone says, oh yeah, you know, you get a lot of hate mail on the internet, people are awful.
They say, oh, that's not the real world.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, there are some bots on the internet that aren't real people, but for the most part, these are real people that are expressing what they really think.
It is the real world, actually.
It's like if, you know, if someone wrote you a letter and said awful things in the letter on a piece of paper and gave it to you, And you were upset by it.
Would it make any sense for me to say, ah, it's not the real world, it's just paper?
Well, yeah, obviously the paper isn't the thing saying the bad thing, but those ideas were expressed by a person.
Yet we get so used to this, well, if it happens on the internet, it doesn't count.
And I think then what you have are people who, you know, they'll go on the internet and they'll say awful things to people.
Kill yourself.
I hope you get cancer.
I hope your children die.
Again, we're so used to seeing that kind of stuff on the internet.
And there are millions of people who act this way on the internet, and they tell themselves that it's okay because it's just the internet, but it's not.
Morally, there's no difference at all between saying someone in a YouTube comment section, kill yourself, and saying it to their face.
In fact, it's worse on the comment section because you're a coward on top of it.
But I think we get so accustomed that way to treating people that way that eventually it does bleed over into three-dimensional space.
When you get so used to just being an awful person and treating people terribly.
And being, you know, at a certain point, I guess this is the point, when you're a sociopath on the internet, it may be possible for a while to be a sociopath on the internet and act like a normal person in, quote, the real world, in three-dimensional space.
Eventually, though, so you're not gonna be able to keep up that double life, that split personality forever.
Eventually, you're either gonna start being a decent person on the internet, or more likely what happens is that you end up being a sociopath in, quote, the real world also.
And so I think that's part of the problem.
Number two, 24 hour cable news.
You know, the problem with 24 hour cable news is twofold.
For one thing, it makes every mass shooting into a whole big television event and thereby encourages mass shooters to do this because they're looking for attention.
They're looking for infamy and they know they're going to get it.
So we all know that part of it.
Right.
We point that out all the time.
The second thing, though, the slightly less discussed element here is that 24-hour news encourages us, again, to be detached from reality.
It encourages us to see these shootings like they're TV shows, like it's a plotline on Law & Order or something.
What do cable news channels always do?
Anytime there's a big tragedy, they have a graphic for it, they have theme music, they do a little...
They bring in all the different analysts.
They go on site, even though there's no reason for them to be on site whatsoever, doing a show.
Yeah, you send a reporter out, but you don't need to bring the anchor out and have a table set up and have an analyst.
You don't need to be on site for that at all.
But you're just there because it makes for more engaging television.
And so what the cable news channels are doing is they're trying to turn these real human tragedies into engaging, entertaining, Television events.
Now, they would never say they're trying to make it entertaining.
And the people that are at these cable news channels, they're not directly in their head thinking, how are we going to make this entertaining?
It's just they're doing their job.
And the fact is, they need you to watch.
And they need ratings.
And so they're going to do the things that are going to up those ratings.
And after a while, when you get used to seeing murder, And tragedy and mayhem and chaos as entertainment, as a television event.
I think it's going to further that detachment.
So that's an issue.
And again, recent internet and cable news, both are very recent things that didn't exist, you know, up until the last couple of decades.
At least we're not nearly as ubiquitous up until the last 20 years or so.
Number three.
Broken homes.
Broken homes have always existed.
There's always been divorce, there's always been deadbeat dads, and so on.
But, as almost everyone knows, that problem has gotten worse in the last few decades.
And we now have two generations of people, my generation and the next generation, who, you know, a wide swath of people in those generations have grown up in or are growing up in homes That there's no father present, the marriage is broken or falling apart, they're living amidst emotional turmoil, and that obviously plays a factor here.
If you look at these mass shooters, now the two recent scumbags, I don't know, maybe they both come from intact homes, I'm not sure.
But if you look at them, you're going to find that a disproportionate number of them come from divorced families.
That's not a coincidence.
Again, that doesn't mean that if you get divorced, your kids are automatically going to become mass shooters.
It's just that we're talking about contributing factors.
Think of it like an avalanche, like a snowball going down the mountain.
It's just one thing after another, after another, and eventually you end up with a huge, deadly avalanche.
The fourth thing, psychiatric drugs.
We know that dozens of violent attacks in schools have been carried out by kids on or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs.
And, but not just kids and not just schools.
The Las Vegas shooter was on anxiety medicine.
The Colorado theater shooter was on antidepressants.
The Charleston shooter was on psychiatric drugs.
The Virginia Tech shooter was on psychiatric drugs.
Many, and again, the most recent ones, we don't know, but we're not going to be surprised to find out if it is the case that they were on some kind of medication or just came off of it.
Now, defenders of these drugs will claim that, well, you know, you can't draw a straightforward connection between psychotropic drugs and violent or suicidal behavior, and that's true.
Now, we know that these drugs leave a lasting mark on the brain, but we don't know exactly what sort of mark they leave, or how long it will last, or how it might manifest itself.
As a pediatric psychologist, Ronald Brown, he said, this was his quote, he said, there's more use of psychotropic medication with children than there is research data on it.
In other words, we're using it more than, you know, there's greater use of it than there is knowledge of it, I suppose is the way to put it.
It would seem to me that the lack of data about this stuff is reason enough to pull way back.
I'm not saying never use it.
I'm not saying there's nobody out there who's a good candidate for psychotropic drugs, but the use of these drugs has skyrocketed in recent years, even though we know so little about it or how it affects people.
Now, you know, The side effects for these drugs, if you look on the bottle, it'll say things like suicidal thoughts, violent or erratic behavior, that kind of thing.
And it says, oh, well, if you experience that, if your kid experiences that, go talk to a doctor.
Well, think about we're dealing with drugs here that according even to the bottle itself, even to the side effects, we're dealing with drugs That can put thoughts in your head.
That's always freaked me out.
When you see a drug that has suicidal thoughts as a side effect, well, how does that work exactly?
You're telling me that this drug, if I take it, it could make me think something?
Not only make me think something, it could make me think that I want to destroy myself?
For the third time, I'm not saying you should never take a drug with a side effect like that.
There may be occasions where it's justified, but We are, we're just, we're dealing with something that is pretty mysterious.
The relationship between consciousness and the brain, where exactly your consciousness comes from, what exactly neurologically drives somebody to do these kinds of things.
We don't know that exact fact.
We know very little about that.
That's still a mystery to science.
And I think it will always remain a mystery to some extent, because I think that the answer is not completely scientific.
But regardless, And yet we're shoving these drugs into kids faces.
And, um, when, you know, when you've, when you're, when you're given a drug to someone and a known side effect is that it could make them destructive or suicidal, and then they go and they act destructively and suicidally.
I feel like that's probably not a coincidence.
The last thing, and this, and this kind of, uh, maybe summarizes everything else is nihilism.
Now with this one also, nihilism is not new.
There's always been nihilists out there.
There's always been a tendency in some people towards nihilism.
But nihilism now has become a way of life.
It's become, although unnamed, Most of the time.
Most nihilists won't call themselves nihilists, and many of them probably don't even know what the term means.
But it's really the most mainstream philosophy in our culture today.
It's how our culture operates.
There is a general purposelessness in our society.
People don't know why they're here, what they're for, why any of it matters.
The most essential question that we can ask ourselves, a question that human beings have been asking themselves since the dawn of time, Since the dawn of human civilization, is why am I here?
What am I supposed to do?
What am I for?
What are people for?
It's the name of a great essay collection by Wendell Berry.
And that's the question.
What are people for?
What am I for?
People don't have answers to that.
And atheists get mad when you point to godlessness and nihilism, purposelessness as a cause or a factor in these things.
And they say, well, just because I'm an atheist doesn't mean I'm going to go kill people.
And that's true.
And they'll also point out that many of these mass killers are not atheists.
In fact, probably most of them aren't.
Aren't officially, you know, announced atheists.
And that's true too.
But, and those are fair points.
But it's also true.
Profoundly true.
That people need a sense of transcendent purpose in their life.
They need a sense of the transcendent.
And if they don't have that, if we don't have that, as people, then we're lost.
Okay, so combine all these factors.
And you can throw in the first three that I kind of skipped over because that's what we always talk
about. But if you have someone from a broken home, with a history of living at home of emotional
chaos and abuse and abandonment and neglect, put them on on the internet for hours a day, maybe start shoving some
psychiatric drugs into their head.
Have them watching cable news.
Watching the other mass shooters and seeing the infamy and notoriety that those other mass shooters attain, get them used to watching mass killings as if it's some sort of entertainment.
And then you throw in maybe an extremist ideology, you throw in a little bit of racism, some hatred, you throw in laws that are not being enforced that make it easier for them to attain deadly weapons when they shouldn't be able to, even according to the laws we already have on the books.
Put all that together and it's not hard to see how we end up where we are right now.
So what's the solution?
Well, as I said, I don't have the one solution.
I don't think there's a flip we can switch.
Or a switch we can flip, rather, I should say.
There's not a switch we could flip and just, boom, turn off the lights and we've solved the problem.
Obviously, that doesn't exist.
But I think we could look.
The solution is going to be something... It's not going to be easy.
It involves massive cultural shifts.
And also massive shifts in our own lives so that we don't end up like this ourselves and our children don't end up like this.
And I say, we don't end up like this.
I know you might say, well, I would never do this.
And I believe you wouldn't.
I wouldn't either.
But you know, the fact is all of these people that go out and commit mass shootings, I'm sure at some point in their life, many of them, they also would have said, I would never do that.
But they end up spiraling and going into a very dark place because of a lot of these factors, I think.
And so if we aren't worried about ourselves, at the very least, we should be worried about the next generation, about our kids and our kids' friends.
So we need to look at all these things.
And so it's going to involve little things like don't spend as much time on the internet.
Don't spend as much time watching cable news.
As adults, we can keep our marriages together, give our kids a good home life.
Be very careful about the drugs we put them on.
Discover a real purpose in life and instill that sense of purpose in our kids.
All those things.
I think if we did even just those three or four things I just mentioned, if we did that from here on out, I think this problem would almost completely go away.
I mean, you could change not a single law.
You could change nothing else.
But if we just made a few changes, less time on the internet, keep our families and marriages together, sense of purpose, just that.
Three things.
This problem would almost completely go away.
All right.
Let me get to a couple of emails before we wrap things up here.
This is mattwalshow at gmail.com is the email address.
This is from QB.
It says, Matt, advising people to be paranoid in public places and calling mass shootings routine is deeply irresponsible fear-mongering.
You said on Twitter that white supremacists have killed 80 people globally in the last 10 months.
That's about 100 people per year on average out of a population of roughly 7.5 billion.
That's less than lightning fatalities.
These incidents are not so much as relatively routine, and to call them that is absolutely annoying and inaccurate.
Causing panic is in no way conducive to your stated goal of limited government, as every expansion of government is called for in response to a panic.
Stop it.
Millions of Americans go out every day, and even the Washington Post admits that only 1,700 Americans were killed in mass shootings since 1966.
That's fewer than peanuts have killed.
Stop the fear-mongering.
It's sickening.
All right, QB, well, and he's referencing, I said on Twitter, that we need to have situational awareness when you go out in public.
First of all, you should protect yourself, defend yourself.
Uh, be able to protect and defend yourself and give, give yourself the, yourself the means to do that.
But also look, when I go out in public with my kids, especially, I took my kids to the theater, to the movie theater, uh, the other day.
And you better believe I, I took note of where the exits are.
I made sure to sit close to them.
I made sure I had a path to them.
And when I, whenever I go into a crowded, crowded public place, especially with my kids.
Um, and I admit that for me, I'm in a slightly different position from, from other people in that, you know, There are people out there who know who I am and don't like me.
And so that gives me even more reason to be aware.
But even aside from that, even if I didn't do this for a living, I would still be situationally aware and I would recommend the same for others.
Now QB doesn't like that.
He says that, uh, he says that that's, that's being paranoid.
I don't think it's being paranoid.
Now, as I said, yes, there, there are statistically, um, your chances of being killed in a mass shooting are very low.
Fine.
You can't get around the fact, QB, that, as I've been talking about, nine of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
That's 250 years of history.
Nine of the worst ones have happened in the last decade, almost.
Okay, you can't just, ah, whatever.
So you accuse me of paranoid fear-mongering.
I accuse you of just waving your hand at it, like, I don't even worry about it.
That's what you're saying, right?
Don't worry about it.
I think that's irresponsible and reckless.
Why shouldn't you at least be aware of your surroundings?
Are you actually telling me that it's irresponsible for me to tell people to be aware of their surroundings?
It's irresponsible to call for irresponsibility.
Come on.
I think you need to wake up and realize, just because it's still very unlikely... Look, there could be a disease that wipes out 10% of the American population and you'd still have a 90% chance of not dying from it.
Okay?
There's still a very good chance.
If there was a flu epidemic that took down 10% of the American population.
The chances of you being among that percent?
Well, you have a 90% chance of it not being you.
What if 1% of the population was wiped out by some sort of pandemic?
Well, you still have a 99% chance that you're not among that.
That's still a lot of people.
And it's still a huge problem.
And it's still something you should be aware of.
And if it's a disease, do little things like wash your hands and just be careful.
And you've got these mass shootings happening everywhere in the country.
Yeah, it probably won't be you.
It could be, though.
So just be aware.
This is something, look, I agree that we shouldn't inflate the numbers.
I did that at the beginning of the show.
I stipulated.
People say 250 mass shootings in a year.
Well, if you define it a certain way, then yeah.
But if we're talking about the kind of mass shootings that we all think of when we say mass shootings, then no, it's not anywhere close to 250 in a year.
Um, if we get to that point where it's 250 of this kind of mass shooting in a year, then that's just the end of American civilization completely.
That's, that's the, you know, it's probably the end of human civilization if it's that, if it's that common.
So yes, I agree that we shouldn't inflate the numbers and it's good to point that out, but I think that some people on the right, some conservatives have a tendency to go way to the other extreme and just deny that it's even a problem and say that it's, ah, yeah.
And I think that's really stupid also.
And, uh, and it seems like you're just sort of stepping over the dead bodies because you're worried that it would be politically inconvenient if you acknowledge it.
And so it comes across QB like incredible political cowardice.
All right.
Um, let's see here.
I was going to do one more.
Do I have anything that's not related to the shooting?
This is from...
No, I don't.
This is from Erica, says, Hi Matt, something you tweeted this weekend really resonated with me, how you always check your nearest exits when you go places, and especially with your children.
I do the exact same thing, but also I can't help but have this fear when I'm in confined spaces with my kids, where I'm hardly focused on what's going on.
who is entering and leaving the exits. I rarely go to the movies, but even when I do,
I'm constantly looking over at the entrances. And when someone is just standing over by the hallway
to the exit, I find myself just staring at that person, wondering if he or she is plotting to
hurt everyone. And obviously the rational part of my brain knows that the likelihood of that
occurring is just so small, but I feel like this is my life now. Now I'm pro-gun, but also as a
parent, I want some sort of action taken.
Maybe an armed guard or police officer at major buildings and churches.
I don't know the solution, but as far as I can tell, gun laws haven't changed, but clearly there are more evil and mentally disturbed individuals now.
And honestly, I feel like it's removing God from everything.
People say you don't need God or religion to know good versus bad, but I argue that that's how we've been living for the past 30 years, and look what's happened.
What does a real solution look like to you?
How can we stop these events from happening?
Well, of course, I just talked about what I consider to be some solutions.
And OK, so we've got two sides of this issue about should we be aware of our surroundings?
And maybe two kind of extreme sides.
QB says, ah, don't worry about it at all.
Whatever.
Erica admits that I think she sort of admits that she's got some real paranoia.
Um, no, I don't think that every time someone enters a room or standing near an exit, we need to be worried that they're about to kill people, but just, just awareness.
So, um, look, I was at, we were at a theater, uh, I don't know, a couple of years ago and, um, uh, Somebody walked into the theater, a guy by himself, walked into the theater with a bag.
You know, like a big book bag.
And so that's a sitting in both my wife and I, we kind of looked at each other and thought, what's he doing here with a big book bag?
How did he even get into here with a book bag?
You can't even bring that stuff into a movie theater.
So, so we went and, uh, and told security and it turned out that, I don't know, like he probably was just trying to sneak snacks and wasn't trying to get him in trouble.
Right?
I mean, if you want to sneak snacks and go ahead, I do it all the time to be honest.
But, um, that's the kind of thing that's, it's out of place.
And I think that's the sort of thing we should be aware of.
It's the same thing they tell you at airports.
Just be aware.
You know, if you see someone leave their luggage and go walk away from their luggage, it's probably nothing.
They probably just forgot it.
But if someone is going to commit a terrorist act at an airport, you know, if they're going to try to blow up an airport, that's what they're going to do.
It's what the Boston bombers did.
They took a book bag, left it in the crowd.
You see someone doing something like that, You know, tell someone.
It's better safe than sorry.
So just to be aware of those kinds of things.
Things that are truly out of place.
Someone just walking into a room is not out of place.
Someone walking into a theater with a book bag, that's out of place.
So be aware of that.
Right?
And so yeah, I think that's a good idea.
It's unfortunate we have to live that way, but we do.
And I don't think it should make us... It doesn't mean we never leave the house.
just means that we have an appropriate amount of caution.
And as far, Eric, as you said about having armed guards and so on, I'm all for that. I think
churches should have security. I think big buildings with lots of malls and those sorts of things,
they should have security.
I don't think the government should come in and do like a TSA type of thing for every single building in the country, obviously.
Now, that is where you get to the infringement of liberty that QB was talking about.
But these places, I think, should it be a good idea for them to on their own look into security because the cops can't always be there in 30 seconds.
Cops got there in 30 seconds in Dayton, Ohio.
And if it had taken the cops two minutes to get there, there'd be hundreds of people dead, possibly.
So you can't always rely on the cops being there in 30 seconds.
And even if they are there in 30 seconds, that might not be enough to save you.
So that's why we should just be aware and cautious and able to defend ourselves.
All right.
Heavy subjects, difficult subjects today on the show, but that's just what needed to be discussed.
So thanks everybody for watching.
Godspeed.
Godspeed.
The next day, in Dayton, Ohio, a socialist, Satanist leftist slaughtered nine, including his own sister, at a bar.
Leftist partisans rush to blame Trump and conservatives.
Conservatives, eager to fight the unfair attacks, try to disavow any connection whatsoever to the ideology of the El Paso shooter.
We will examine the reality.
There are very terrible people on both sides.
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