Dennis Prager Show - A Response To Mass Shootings
Aired: 2023-11-01
Duration: 09:40


=== Mentally Ill and Murder (08:05) ===

[00:00:00]  A man who's, is he still on the loose?
[00:00:02]  Is that the latest?
[00:00:04]  Mm-hmm.
[00:00:05]  They know who he is.
[00:00:07]  And murdered 18 people injured.
[00:00:12]  I don't like wounded.
[00:00:15]  Wounded is, you know, sounds too mild.
[00:00:23]  22. Excuse me, 18.
[00:00:26]  It was originally I read 22.
[00:00:28]  Human being murdered 18 people randomly.
[00:00:34]  Are there any gun laws that would have stopped him now?
[00:00:42]  I always ask that when people immediately go to guns.
[00:00:47]  They say he's mentally ill.
[00:00:48]  He was in a mental institution until recently.
[00:00:52]  I don't know.
[00:00:59]  I don't know what to tell you.
[00:01:01]  I hate that because I really like to tell you.
[00:01:04]  I like to explain life.
[00:01:05]  I like to give you theories that are plausible.
[00:01:11]  Is there some uptick in mental illness in this country?
[00:01:17]  If so, why?
[00:01:19]  Is it the processed food they're eating?
[00:01:22]  I doubt it.
[00:01:27]  Within mental illness, how many mentally ill people yearn to murder as many people as possible?
[00:01:39]  Do they know it's wrong?
[00:01:41]  Does mental illness preclude you from knowing that it is wrong?
[00:01:47]  If this guy, whom I would personally execute if the call came out, For volunteers to execute a person, I would volunteer.
[00:02:01]  I passionately, rationally, morally believe in capital punishment for murder.
[00:02:09]  A society that treats murderers gently is a society that has lost its ability to be shocked by the worst crime, murder.
[00:02:24]  I just finished literally last night.
[00:02:26]  I finished the fourth of the five-book commentary on the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, my rational Bible.
[00:02:34]  Now it goes to editor after editor after editor so that there is not even a hope, not often there's no hope, not even a chance, although that still is not perfect, of any errors.
[00:02:52]  And there is a law that if you kill somebody, now, obviously, if you kill somebody premeditatedly, you're put to death.
[00:03:05]  It's the only law in all five books of the Bible.
[00:03:09]  But what does the Bible know, huh?
[00:03:12]  We're much wiser.
[00:03:16]  We keep all murderers alive and think we're moral giants for doing so.
[00:03:24]  I don't.
[00:03:27]  Anyway, if you killed somebody and it was any at all negligent, you went to a city of refuge.
[00:03:38]  So that would be a good example of the drunk driver.
[00:03:42]  Negligence.
[00:03:43]  It wasn't deliberate.
[00:03:44]  It wasn't premeditated.
[00:03:46]  Didn't even know his victims or her victims.
[00:03:53]  But still, something terrible happened.
[00:03:57]  Innocent human beings were killed.
[00:04:01]  Stalin is supposedly the person who said, "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." Everybody...
[00:04:17]  one thing that I think unites left and right, and almost nothing unites left and right, Is horror at this mass shooting.
[00:04:27]  But we have different reactions.
[00:04:31]  Guns is the primary reaction on the left.
[00:04:38]  I don't know why he did it.
[00:04:41]  It is obvious if he were mentally ill to the point of where we could relate to understanding the term, he wouldn't be fleeing.
[00:04:56]  It's an odd thing.
[00:04:59]  You're mentally ill enough to murder men, women, and children in a bowling alley.
[00:05:08]  But you're not that mentally ill that you figure out how to, at least for days, evade the police.
[00:05:19]  So there's some degree of our choosing.
[00:05:26]  What mental illness is?
[00:05:30]  See, I don't know that murdering people is wrong, but I do know that I don't want to get caught.
[00:05:39]  Okay, then look, it's possible.
[00:05:43]  And again, I asked, why is there an uptick in mental illness?
[00:05:46]  I'll tell you what there is an uptick in.
[00:05:49]  And I think it is related to...
[00:05:55]  The number of mass shootings.
[00:05:57]  But it may not be.
[00:05:59]  I just offer this for conjecture.
[00:06:04]  This is a society that is embracing chaos.
[00:06:08]  So the mentally fragile in a chaotic society will act chaotically.
[00:06:14]  Did this man have any social bond?
[00:06:23]  Was he married?
[00:06:24]  Do you know?
[00:06:24]  Do we know?
[00:06:25]  There's no mention of a wife, right?
[00:06:30]  Right.
[00:06:31]  George Gilder, in a book that I've been actually advertising recently.
[00:06:37]  What is the new title?
[00:06:38]  Men in Marriage?
[00:06:39]  Yeah.
[00:06:40]  So I read it in high school, the original edition.
[00:06:43]  Sexual Suicide and Naked Nomads.
[00:06:45]  Two different books.
[00:06:47]  And he pointed out, he said, the one thing that...
[00:06:55]  The largest percentage of men and women at age 40 who have never been married are living in America today.
[00:07:11]  The largest percentage ever recorded of never married.
[00:07:17]  Think that's a factor?
[00:07:20]  Never church is a factor?
[00:07:23]  Or is it all mental illness?
[00:07:26]  People were not mentally ill in the 1930s and 40s?
[00:07:33]  You know that people were happier?
[00:07:36]  I read this to you.
[00:07:39]  The data, there was less suicide and less depression during the depression than today.

=== Chaos Breeds Chaos (01:49) ===

[00:07:52]  Because people had bonds.
[00:07:54]  There was no chaos reigning around them in their lives.
[00:07:59]  This chaos.
[00:08:01]  The left creates chaos.
[00:08:04]  It loves it.
[00:08:07]  Because their inner life and conscience are chaotic.
[00:08:14]  So, chaos breeds chaos.
[00:08:19]  That's my take.
[00:08:22]  Mental illness alone just doesn't do it for me.
[00:08:26]  Maybe it is.
[00:08:27]  I'd like to know if the man was on any medicines.
[00:08:30]  I'm not against psychiatric drugs.
[00:08:34]  I'm also less inclined to think that they have no ill effects than I once was.
[00:08:45]  Well, it's certainly not the ubiquity of guns.
[00:08:48]  Guns were available to Americans.
[00:08:53]  In the early part of the 20th century, and there was so little of this, my heart breaks for these people.
[00:09:09]  I know that many of you differ with me.
[00:09:12]  I believe God made a world in which randomness, or luck if you will, does play a role.
[00:09:19]  I don't think God chose every one of those 18 to die.
[00:09:24]  If you don't believe there's any luck in life, that's your belief.
[00:09:28]  I respect you.
[00:09:31]  I find the belief untenable.
[00:09:35]  I believe there's an afterlife where things are worked out and some divine justice.