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July 17, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:33
July 17, 2008, Thursday, Hour #3
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Thanks, Johnny Donovan, Jed Babbin, sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
And before I forget to mention it, you might want to check out Humanevents and Humanevents.com, the week of Russia's 20th anniversary, starting on the 28th of this month, going through that week and culminating in maybe an all-rush day on human events.
We're going to have some of the top conservatives in this country writing about Russia's effect on American politics.
It's going to be great stuff.
Check it out, humanevents.com.
All right, break, break, break, break.
Let's go to a very serious matter that I don't know if Russia has spoken about before.
The issue is aerial refueling tankers.
The Air Force's fleet is old, averaging 46 years per airplane.
These are Eisenhower-era aircraft, and they really need to be replaced.
Okay, Babbin, you're getting boring.
You're getting into your military stuff again.
Next thing I know, you're going to be talking in jargon.
Well, no, let's just set the stage right now.
The reason, or one of the principal reasons America can be a superpower, is we have these tankers.
The reason why our military can reach out, whether it's for troops or whether it's relief supplies, whatever you want to do, the first thing that happens in any contingency is the air bridge goes up.
No tankers, ladies and gentlemen, no superpower, okay?
The Air Force messed it up really badly.
About six years ago, there was a lease deal.
It was kind of an insider trading thing with Boeing.
A lady I once knew, Darlene Druyan, was an Air Force acquisition official.
She cooked the books.
She was seeking a job with Boeing.
The whole thing was corrupt.
The thing crashed, and the deal never went through.
Thanks particularly to Senator John McCain, who was opposed to it from the get-go.
All right, flash forward a couple of years.
Now we have another big contract being awarded by the Air Force to try to get an airplane to replace these aging tankers.
The way this thing was structured was really, really awful.
The government is required by law to buy what it needs, not just what you want.
Okay.
What happened is kind of analogous to this.
Imagine you're a company president and you need a new fleet of heavy-duty pickup trucks.
And you go to your procurement guys and say, get a couple of bids, let's buy some trucks.
They come back to you with two bids.
One is for a pretty good pickup truck.
Another is for a tractor trailer rig, which they say, oh yeah, this can do a lot of nifty stuff, more than the pickup trucks can do.
And you look at them and you say, you morons, I want a pickup truck.
I don't want a tractor trailer.
You're fired.
I'm going to go get a guy who can buy me the pickup truck I need.
That's essentially what happened here.
The Air Force went out with a very fuzzy specification.
And, you know, whether you think in protectionist terms or whether you think in procurement terms, it doesn't really matter.
I'm talking about this issue for one reason and one reason only.
We need the right aircraft to support the tanker mission.
That means that when some of my friends were driving around at 30,000 feet with empty tanks in their fighters, they shouldn't have to hunt for a tanker.
It's going to be there.
Now, what's the difference?
The issue here came down.
Boeing had a pretty good tanker based on the 767 airliner.
Northrop Grumman and EADS, the European company, offered a French-manufactured Airbus tanker.
Okay, the Airbus tanker is too big and too heavy to do the job.
And how do I know this?
I look at the Government Accountability Office decision throwing out the Air Force award that bought the A330 tanker.
What did they say?
All right, let's go to the issue of what do you have to do with the tanker?
Okay, there are certain maneuvers you have to do.
There are certain things you have to fly a certain way.
You have to be able to land and be based in certain ways.
This thing is too big and too heavy to even fit on the ground in sufficient numbers, and it's too heavy in a lot of places to be even able to operate where we need it.
But let me just go to a couple of other examples.
And I only know this because I've spoken to some real experts, including General John Handy, who used to be the commander of Air Mobility Command and United States Transportation Command.
He was Capo Di Tutti Tankers, and this guy is very smart on this.
Two issues.
Let me just point out a couple of issues.
When you're refueling an aircraft from a tanker, the receiving aircraft is a little bit below and just behind, and it hooks up through a boom.
It's a big, long pipe.
It's actually a flyable pipe that a guy is sitting in the back of the tanker, the boomer, they call him, and he's guiding that boom into the receiving aircraft, whether it's a fighter or whatever.
A lot of circumstances happen.
Whether a pilot gets a little careless, whether there's a big gust of wind, something happens, and that boom connected to the receiving aircraft drifts off out of the safety margin.
What happens then is called a breakaway.
And the tanker has to, the boomer pops the boom off the receiving aircraft, calls breakaway, breakaway.
The pilot of the tanker has to push the throttles forward and climb.
The receiving aircraft drops back and drops down.
The problem you have, and you see this right in the government accountability office decision, the Airbus 330 doesn't have enough oomph.
It's not like my Mustang.
It can't accelerate away from the problem.
This could even be a flight safety issue, ladies and gentlemen.
This is a big, big deal.
If they can't fly the mission, they shouldn't get the contract.
Another point just like that.
Another point just pointing to that particular aircraft's inadequacy.
The issue comes around what's called an overrun.
Oh, okay.
Everybody says an overrun in government contract.
Yeah, okay, we're paying too much for something.
Well, this is not a case where we're going to be paying too much for something.
An overrun is a different kind of maneuver.
When a tanker is waiting and waiting and waiting, flying a big racetrack pattern, maybe 30, 40 miles long, 10 miles wide, they fly and they fly and they fly.
And then a receiving aircraft is supposed to come up and the tanker swings out of its big oval and theoretically lines up in front of the receiving aircraft.
Receiving aircraft comes up, gets its go juice, takes off.
What happens if the receiving aircraft overruns the tanker?
It's ahead of them.
What happens?
Again, the receiving aircraft has to drop down, cut power.
The tanker has to push those throttles forward and accelerate fast enough.
You know, I didn't do real well in engineering school.
That's why I went to law school.
I wasn't smart enough to be an engineer, but there was this old physics equation, F equals MA.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
The basic point is the more mass you have, the heavier the tanker is, the more force you have to have to get a given amount of acceleration.
The GAO report, again, says that this Airbus 330 doesn't have enough oomph to push ahead in an overrun.
So you have a situation where the Air Force has done something which I find incomprehensible.
They have bought or tried to buy an aircraft that can't perform the mission.
Now the government is going to have to go out and do this all again.
What do you think?
Should they even allow bids by the Airbus?
Should we have a situation where this aircraft is bought and paid for only, bought in the United States?
800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
One of the things that we have to look at in all of this, and this is something that I depart from where the Defense Department's going to go on this.
The Air Force right now has been relieved of authority.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, about a week ago, said, All right, we're not going to let the Air Force run this operation anymore.
We're going to take it over.
Under Secretary for Acquisition John Young is going to run the procurement.
He's going to make the decision on who gets the contract.
Okay.
Same press conference, Under Secretary for Acquisition John Young gets up and says, Well, we're still not going to take into account the subsidies that Airbus gets.
All right, this is a little technical, ladies and gentlemen, but it's worth paying attention to.
One of the things we have in the World Trade Organization, now the general agreement on tariffs and trade, all this fancy trade law, all these treaties we are signatory to, one of the things we have the ability to do is to complain when someone is engaging in an unfair trade practice.
Well, Airbus receives billions upon billions of dollars in loans for the world trade, they get for the development of their different airplanes.
And we have a complaint.
The United States of America has a complaint.
I think it's with two updates to it, starting in 2005, about the subsidies Airbus receives.
And we have alleged in this complaint that they received up to, I think, $35 billion.
It's not clear to me that the Airbus 330, the one they're now offering for this tanker, is even going to be, could even have been developed if they hadn't received all these billions of dollars of subsidies.
So now the Defense Department is saying, well, we're going to evaluate the cost, and we're not going to include those subsidies.
I don't think that's fair, ladies and gentlemen.
I think we are in a position where we are free traders, but we have to be fair traders also.
I don't like the idea.
I really don't like the idea of the government of the United States not taking into account the subsidies being paid to Airbus when judging the price of that tanker.
And when you have the idea that this thing cannot physically perform the mission, why are we buying this?
I'm not a flack for Boeing.
Boeing has a lot to answer for too.
And their feet ought to be held to the fire in this whole acquisition process.
I want the aircraft that will do the best job for the mission and something that cannot push far ahead fast enough if they can't do the breakaways, if they can't do the overruns.
Why is this airplane being considered?
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 800-2822882.
Got to take a quick break and we'll be right back to you.
Stick with us.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin sitting in front of the Golden EIB microphone, sitting in for Rush today, talking tankers.
We're at 800-2822882.
Let's go directly to Jim in Wichita, Kansas.
Welcome to the show.
Yes, Jess.
Pleasure to talk to you.
Well, thanks for calling.
What I was calling about back in March the 31st of this year, 22 generals signed a letter addressed to Secretary Gates, and it was printed in the base paper at McConnell Air Force Base.
Yeah.
And every one of them was a consultant to Northrop Grumman.
Well, what did they say in that letter?
Well, it's really a lot of fluff when you read through it.
They talk about impugning the integrity of our Air Force with capital OUR and the conduct of the source selection, the tanker selection, claiming our Air Force abandoned the interest of America and the American people during the selection process, and questioning the patriotism of the men and women of our Air Force, OUR.
Again, these guys were Northrop Grumman consultants.
They are retired generals, every one of them.
Well, three-star down to one star, and they all are consultants to Northrop Grumman.
I confirmed that through a congressman's office.
Well, Jim, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know what the letter said, and I don't know who these guys are.
I will tell you that there's an awful lot of baloney floating around out there in terms of both sides.
But the Northrop Grumman tankers are just not suitable for the mission.
And what really, really troubles me is guys I know in the Air Force.
I mean, I'm very familiar with this process.
I was an acquisition guy myself when I was in.
My eyes weren't good enough to fly, so I had the choice of either doing that or going to fuel gas tanks and airplanes.
The basic bottom line is this process was intellectually corrupt.
I don't think it was financially corrupt, but this is something that Mr. Gates, Dr. Gates, I think was very wise in taking away from the Air Force.
And we'll just have to see if the Defense Department can do a better job.
They have to buy something that has to meet the mission.
If the mission is not able to be met by either airplane, whether it's the Northrop Grumman, the Airbus one, or the Boeing one, that airplane should be rejected.
To me, it's a question of what the warfighters want.
I don't frankly care what the politicians want.
We need something that's going to fly the mission, maintain our ability to project power.
Hey, great call, and thanks for it.
Let's go to Jeff in Jupiter, Florida.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing great.
Longtime listener, first-time caller to the Rush Show.
I'm kind of familiar with both aspects here.
I'm a fighter pilot and I fly the 7-6.
You lucky so-and-so.
You know, it was a very dark day in my young life when the doc, my commissioning physical said my eyes were too bad to go to pilot school.
And I squinted and squeezed.
I did everything I could to get through that eye exam.
I know exactly where you're coming from.
I did lots of eye exercises in college to keep the eyes there.
But the reason for my call is you're probably familiar with some of the faux pas the Air Force has experienced in the last several months insofar as the problem with the nuclear weapons that were inadvertently loaded, problems with the ICBM parts that were accidentally sent to Taiwan.
And, you know, I read Aviation Week, which is kind of a periodical that's sort of like a Bible of the aerospace.
No, I'm fairly, very well familiar with it.
Well, and it seems to me that for the most part, the firings of General Mosley, the chief of staff, and the Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary Wynn, has been somewhat blamed on that.
And then a smaller blame focused on the fact that they were both very supportive of the F-22, which Secretary Gates may not be supportive of.
But I'm wondering if also this tanker issue was maybe the straw that broke the camel's back.
Yeah, Jeff, this is a little inside baseball.
Let's let the rest of the listeners know.
I mean, basically, what happened over the past six months or a year is there have been a lot of problems in the Air Force.
There was a B-52 loaded with, I think, six nuclear weapons.
They didn't know they were live nuclear weapons, flew across country.
They weren't armed.
They weren't armed.
Well, but they were still, they were nukes.
They were capable of being armed.
We have had ICBM parts mistakenly shipped to Taiwan.
Very recently, both the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Mosley, and the Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary Wynne, were fired by Bob Gates, the Secretary of Defense.
There were a lot of things that went into that.
I don't know precisely what the reasons were.
I suspect all of it was.
The part that bothers me, the part that really bothers me is Buzz Mosley, regardless of what else he did or didn't do, he was fighting for the Air Force budget.
And, you know, I think that a lot of people are looking at the Air Force as the place to pay out of a lot of other different things to maybe bring the Army out of the doldrums and so forth.
There's a lot of things going on in the Defense Department budget right now.
There's a lot of toys the Army would like to have, and there's a lot of folks that don't believe the F-22 is really a necessary weapon system, and the Army like kind of a bigger piece of the pie, I think.
Well, it may very well be.
Hey, great call.
Thanks for it.
Let's go to Jim in Flushing, New York.
Thanks for the call.
How are you today?
Good show.
Thank you, sir.
On this tanker deal, there were so many things about it.
I guess the first thing is the Air Force kept changing the requirements.
You're absolutely right in saying that the Airbus was a larger plane.
It's too large.
It's not just larger, it's too bloody.
It's probably the Triple Seven had that been an option, and that's what the Air Force wanted.
Yeah, but the problem is you've got to have the ship that can fly the mission.
There's no question about it.
And this is not the one.
But there was another issue that was going on with this.
If they bought the larger airplane, the Air Force, they would be able to save some money by not as many as the 767 and also cut back on C-17 cargo buys because both of them could have been used to carry cargo.
No, but that's the problem with that.
Spend more money on F-22 Rapture.
Jim, Jim, that's just fundamentally wrong.
I mean, the problem is, and you can talk to any real tanker guy, all of this fluff and nonsense about using the Airbus for cargo and passengers and all the rest of that, every time, every hour you spend flying a mercy mission, a cargo mission, a hospital mission, is one less hour spent tanking aircraft.
This is supposed to be a tanker.
And as one retired four-star general told me recently, anybody who thinks this is going to be used for anything else doesn't know what they're talking about.
No, listen, I'm exactly on the same page you are.
And all I'm saying is that they tried to cut corners to use more money for another program.
Well, that may very well be.
The 767 is the tanker.
It's flying.
It's ready to go.
They have the plane.
They're ready to go with this thing.
Well, they're almost ready to go.
Hey, good call.
Thanks for it.
We've got to go to a hard break, ladies and gentlemen.
We're also going to break subjects.
Right now, the District of Columbia is doing again what they were just told by the Supreme Court of the United States they can't do.
This is going to be another gun control fight like you won't believe.
D.C. is not going to combine and abide by the Supreme Court's decision.
It's amazing.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh coming right back to you.
Gun control in D.C.
We haven't seen the end of it yet.
Jed Babbin for Rush.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back, everybody.
Last half hour of this show.
I want another hour.
HR, can I have another hour?
Oh, sorry.
Well, I'll tell you what.
This is more fun than the law allows.
All right, break break, break break, new subject.
Ladies and gentlemen, we all cheered.
We all cheered when the Supreme Court of the United States tossed out the District of Columbia's handgun ban.
Pretty much, well, yeah.
I mean, they upheld the Second Amendment and said it was an individual right, an individual right.
And the long discussion in that decision was all about what?
All about self-defense.
And self-defense, it seems to me, means that if you're going to have a handgun in your house, guess what?
It's going to be not taken apart into little bitty pieces.
It's not going to be locked up with a trigger lock that you have to search for the keys.
Honey, will you ask the burglar to wait so I can find the keys to my gun?
No, it's going to be there.
It's going to be there so we're going to be able to use it, right?
Well, guess what?
The liberals, this is why, ladies and gentlemen, I'm so glad.
I'm so profoundly glad that the District of Columbia is not a state.
It will never be a state.
It will never have senators and real congressmen.
These people don't get it.
They don't want to follow the law.
The new gun law, a new law is now just passing.
The Supreme, not the Supreme Court, I'm sorry, the D.C. City Council.
It's aptly called the Firearms Control Emergency Amendment Act of 2008.
And what's it going to do?
Yes, you can now apply to have a license to keep a gun in your home.
Also, of course, if you're a felon and you illegally have a gun right now, you can register it under this new law.
You'll be, of course, given an amnesty.
Yeah, well, why not?
You know, I mean, it's the District of Columbia.
This is where, you know, you step through the looking glass just to cross the bridge to get to work.
But the point is now they're saying, well, they're still going to require handgun locks, that things be disassembled, unloaded, stored away, and not dangerous to anybody, particularly burglars and intruders.
And they're also standing on, I'm not entirely sure of the details here, but they're also standing on the ban with semi-automatic weapons.
Now, apparently that goes to the number of cartridges that a handgun can hold.
I guess if you have something that can hold more than 10, you can't have it.
10 or 9 or less, and you can have it.
It's very complicated.
Basically what it does, basically what it does is continues the D.C. handgun ban in most part.
For the most part, they are still going to ban handguns there.
They're going to make it impossible for citizens to defend themselves.
Now, I have another view.
And I'd like to know what you think about this.
800-282-2882 on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
It seems to me we have a lot of different licenses in this country, okay?
My wife and I were married in Maryland.
We live in Virginia.
Nobody in Virginia says our Maryland marriage license isn't correct and shouldn't be honored.
And, you know, people now say, well, gay marriages, if they occur in, what, Massachusetts or New Jersey or California or wherever, I'm sure they're going to be compelled to be honored across the country.
Driver's licenses are.
Well, I happen to have a carry permit from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I've taken the training.
I trained, I took a tactical pistol course in a little place called Blackwater back before 2001.
So I know what I'm doing.
I've got my license, and it's perfectly legal for me to carry a weapon concealed anywhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Now, why?
Why, ladies and gentlemen, if my carry permit is valid in Virginia and my Maryland marriage license is valid in Virginia and my Virginia driver's license is valid in Maryland and Virginia and in the District of Columbia, why shouldn't my carry permit be valid everywhere I go?
It seems to me under the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution that you have the ability to have records and judgments of each and every state honored by each and every other state.
Now, if one thing is going to be honored, like a driver's license, why shouldn't my carry permit be honored everywhere I go?
I live in Virginia.
I commute through Maryland and I work in the District of Columbia.
Why should not my carry permit from the District, not from the District of Columbia, heaven knows, but from Virginia be obligated to be honored everywhere else?
I think that's much more fair.
And I really think, I really think the Congress of the United States should jerk the chain very short on the District of Columbia.
They are now enacting yet another gun law that is not going to comply with the Supreme Court decision instead of going through another decade of litigation, another decade of fussing and fuming, another decade of costs and denial of basic rights.
Why shouldn't the District of Columbia be compelled to follow the Supreme Court of the United States decision?
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
Okay, here we go.
Dave in Washington, D.C. Welcome to the show.
Hi, Jed.
How you doing?
Gratifications and good steaks and cigars.
And your Mustang can't outrun Mike Harley.
You know it.
Dave, Dave, I love you, babe, but don't call the show.
Call me later.
All right.
Listen, Jed, there are going to be more suits against this gun law coming up, especially the semi-automatic ban that they're trying to uphold.
This is going to continue.
Well, I understand that, ladies and gentlemen, this is Dave Vann, a pal of mine, former D.C. cop, and we have had many conversations about the merits of various handguns.
No, I agree with you, Dave.
Look, we're going to have a lot of lawsuits.
This thing is going to go on and on and on.
And it's not just the issue of the District of Columbia, but the District of Columbia itself, the D.C. law is not going to comply, is not going to comply with this.
I'm not, Jed.
Phil Mendelssohn has said that they are going to pattern this after New York's, which means they're going to try and make this a year and a half process.
And they're going to face continuing lawsuits.
And what the residents of D.C. need to do is call the mayor and the city council and say, if you do not comply with the spirit of the Supreme Court, come election time, you're going to be looking for another job.
Well, I only wish that would happen, Dave, and really good call, thanks for it.
Ladies and gentlemen, the problem is the voters in the District of Columbia are not going to do that.
The Congress of the United States, the Congress of the United States, still has jurisdiction over what goes on in the District of Columbia, and they should assert that jurisdiction.
There are good Republicans on the D.C. committee.
You know, there are some guys who are pretty liberal too.
You know, Tom Davis, he's pretty liberal and he's retiring this year.
But there's no reason why those folks shouldn't stand up exactly to do the right thing and to compel the District of Columbia to pass a law that passes the test laid down by the Supreme Court.
Jed Babin for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
How about Dave in Spartanburg, South Carolina?
Thanks for the call.
Hey, Jeff.
My comment is I don't understand the excitement with the Supreme Court ruling because as long as there are still life procedures and requirements on the local level, in essence, the freedom is not there.
The Second Amendment of freedom is not there.
We still have to get through a procedure by which the government grants us the privilege to own and possess a firearm, whereas the right as enumerated by the Second Amendment was still not honored by the Supreme Court.
Well, I think you're right in large part, but I think this is a decision that, given the makeup of this court, is something we shouldn't really look into, you know, the gift horse in the mouth here.
You know, this is something that goes a lot farther than the Supreme Court ever had in the history of the Republic.
You know, we have a situation now where the Supreme Court has said, and never said it before, that this is an individual right.
So what you're going to see, Dave, and yeah, it's going to be costly.
Yeah, it's going to take a lot of time, but you're going to see an awful lot of people come up and litigate for their rights.
They're going to challenge these laws all around the country.
The National Rifle Association now is instituting laws against a lot of the different restrictive laws like the New York City gun law that really are going to shake some of these city governments and state governments to their rafters.
They're going to change things.
It's going to take a while, but you know what?
In a democracy, sometimes that's not a bad thing.
It takes a while to perform profound change.
I'm pretty confident, though.
I'm pretty confident in the litigation system.
And again, I've been a trial lawyer for three decades, and I've seen an awful lot of good judges and bad judges, but on balance, on balance, the American court system works.
And I think that this D.C. versus Heller decision proves that.
It proves that you have a situation where the courts are going to help us enforce the rights the Constitution gives us.
And I think, I think you're going to see an awful lot of people in governments around the country, even here in New York City, who are going to be held accountable if they are going to stand in the way of the individual right to keep and bear arms.
And I'd like to see a federal bill.
I really would.
I'd like to see some congressmen stand up and really get across the idea that carry permits ought to be valid nationwide.
I don't know why D.C. and Maryland should be able to declare my carry permit from Virginia not valid in their states and localities.
Why don't they do that to my driver's license?
It seems to me you got one, you got them all.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, got to take a quick break.
Coming right back to your calls, 800-282-2882.
Stick with us.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
We're talking about the D.C. gun ban, or actually the new version they're trying to pawn off and get past everybody.
They don't want people to own guns, they don't want to obey the Supreme Court's decision.
What do you think?
800-282-2882.
Let's go to Elizabeth in Orlando.
Welcome to the show.
Hello.
How are you today?
I'm great.
Well, I just wanted to remind you, in case someone already hasn't, that DOMA exists.
And so licenses do not, marriage licenses do not have to be recognized from state to state if the state doesn't want to recognize it.
Well, let me just suggest, ma'am, that DOMA may exist, but until it's challenged constitutionally, in which case it will fall apart.
Oh, I hope so.
I really do.
I do.
Well, I don't hope so.
I agree with you.
I agree with you that all licenses like that should be recognized throughout the United States.
That's why we're united.
We're all one country.
Well, there you go.
Hey, good call, Elizabeth.
I just really think we've got to figure out a better way to handle this situation than let it go on for another 10 or 15 years in the courts.
You know, the District of Columbia should not be able to flout the Supreme Court of the United States.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
All right, let's go to Tracy in Pittsburgh.
Welcome to the show.
Hi.
Hey, thanks for taking my call.
I have a carry permit in Pennsylvania, and my parents live in Columbus, Ohio.
So I have reciprocity as West Virginia.
But when I cross the West Virginia line into the Ohio line, I'm supposed to pull off and unload my gun.
Now, if I'm driving at night and something happens and I get stranded, I want it to be loaded.
Yeah, look, I hear you loud and clear, and I agree totally.
You know, there is a confusing network of reciprocity.
I guess my Virginia carry permit is honored in six or seven other states.
I couldn't even tell you what they are.
I think one of them is Kentucky.
But the point of the matter is, it shouldn't have to be this way.
I mean, we should, if someone has the training, if someone has a carry permit, they've got the background checks, all the things that need to be done have already been done, and probably more that needs to be done has been done.
The real issue is, why shouldn't that be honored across state lines?
I think, you know, people such as yourself, you travel in interstate commerce, you have a valid permit, you should be able to have your weapon with you and loaded and ready because it's no doggone good.
I mean, Tracy, how long would it take you to dig it out of a suitcase and put it together and load it?
Well, a long time.
But what I do is I take the bullets out and I put them in my pocket and I hide the gun in my purse.
Well, I hope you've got a purse.
If I have to try and load it real fast, I can't.
The other thing that bothers me is if I'm driving at night and I have to pull off at a rest stop in Ohio, it has right on the doors, no guns permitted.
In the rest stop.
Sorry.
That's a perfect place.
If somebody's going to try and do something, it's a rest stop.
Well, I hear you loud and clear, and I agree.
Look, this is the prevalent problem we have.
I mean, people such as yourself, ladies who might be traveling alone, I mean, older men.
I mean, not everybody is walking around as the Chuck Norris impersonator.
You know, we all need maybe a little bit of help, and it's a right of self-defense.
That's one of the things that the Heller case emphasized again and again and again.
That's why the District of Columbia's new law is so offensive to me.
When you tell people that one of the most fundamental rights under the right, nature's law and the United States Constitution, the right of self-defense, you can't take that away from people by requiring them to take their guns apart, to store them separate from the ammunition, to put trigger locks on them.
All of those things deprive you of the right to defend yourself.
And that, to me, is what is offensive about this D.C. new law.
That's why people have to stand up against it.
Hey, great call.
Thanks for it.
I think we're getting ready to take another one of those breaks, and we're going to come right back to your calls.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, I think the District of Columbia should not be able to put forth yet another gun law that is going to strap people from their guns.
That's going to prevent them from protecting themselves.
All right, Jed Babbin for Rush.
Stick with us.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back, everybody.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, 800-282-2882.
I can't believe we've blown through about three hours already.
Let's see if we can't get one more call before the end of the show.
Let's go to Ken in Dallas.
Welcome.
You want to talk about the D.C. gun ban?
Yes, sir.
I have two solutions.
One, residents of D.C. should civilly sue the city for violations of their civil rights.
And two, since we have a Supreme Court decision, the Justice Department should order the U.S. Marshals to arrest the City Council and the Mayor if they fail to enforce the Constitution.
We have a constitutional decision, and they are required to follow the law.
Well, I agree, but my pull point is this should not require people being prosecuted, lots of litigation.
Let's not wait another 10 years for this.
Ken, great call.
Thanks for it.
I just wish the Congress would do its job for once and step on the heads of some of these D.C. City Council members, pass a law saying follow the doggone decision.
Jed Babbin for Rush Limbaugh, I can't believe we've gone through three hours already.
Rush, thank you again for inviting me into your home here.
I really enjoyed talking with you and all your listeners.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a great pleasure to be with you.
Think about this too.
Think about how best to honor Rush and think about checking out humanevents.com the week of July 28th.
We're going to be all over this.
We love Rush just as much as you do.
All right, Jed Babbin, editor of humanevents, humanevents.com.
I've had a wonderful time talking to you today.
Think more, think more, please, about how to relieve the oil problem.
Let's put a little more heat on Harry Reid.
Let's get that offshore oil drilling going.
Exactly.
Jed Babbin for Rush.
Find a conservative and vote for him at least once.
I love being with you.
Thanks very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Thanks, HR and the crew.
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