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Dec. 17, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:28
December 17, 2012, Monday, Hour #2
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So I checked the email during the break and people went, well, what did that guy at the palatial Republican establishment Fifth Avenue apartment say to you?
Here's what happened.
A guy starts on his gun control rant to make himself sound like he's super smart, super caring.
It's just, you know, hold the position because you think it says something enlightened about yourself.
And I said to him, if you can guarantee that when I leave your apartment, nobody else out there is going to have a gun, then I might talk to you about it.
Well, that's a very, very short-sighted view.
No, I'm going to be short-sighted about it at all.
You're asking everybody to give up their guns.
Do you think the bad guys are going to listen to you, give their guns away?
Think they're going to turn them in?
Well, I think we could work very close.
I said, look, there's no way you can guarantee that I'm going to be safe out there if I give my gun up.
It's very simple.
I said, right across the street is Fifth Avenue.
If you can guarantee me, there's not going to be a gun in there after I give mine away, then I'll talk.
And people, what did he say to me?
Thought that I was as simple-minded and knee-jerk NRA as I could be.
They thought I was the idiot.
And that is the reaction that erudite elitists have toward people they think are the hoi polloi.
And I don't know.
I just, I think all of this, folks, is missing the point.
You know, the discussion that we're having here on this is missing the point.
What if somebody were to say to you, you can't stop these things from happening?
They've happened throughout human history.
Mass murder, criminals, evil people.
You can't stop them.
They're going to be there.
There isn't a fix, not a pure fix.
What do you think people's reaction to that would be?
Well, it'd be stronger than we have to try.
It would be, we got to get people to stop listening to Limbaugh.
But the fact of the matter remains that it's true.
And as I point out, the worst school mass death, mass killing in this country is 1927, half with dynamite.
Now, but we live when?
We live in a culture where the left wants us to give up oat bran one day and then eat it the next.
We'll be healthier.
The left wants us to stop drinking sodas that are bigger than 16 ounces.
Because why?
Well, it's healthier.
You might not die.
What?
You might not get sick.
You might live longer.
What?
Why can't we drink something bigger than 16 ounces?
And you can't.
You better not.
You can't have trans fats.
Why?
We live in a culture where the political activists in our society think they have an answer for everything, that they can prevent and stop everything bad from happening.
I would maintain to you that they have done more to exacerbate these problems because what they essentially do is putting a jackbooted foot on people's freedom and liberty.
And sometimes the most innocent, but who cares if I drink a 32-ounce Coke?
What business is it of anybody, particularly governments?
Now, Bill Bennett, just to illustrate another point that I like to make.
25 years ago when I started this program, it was filled with warnings.
If we don't get a handle on X, we're going to end up.
And this is going to happen and that's going to happen.
And I maintain to you now, we've arrived.
The threat is no longer the problem.
The reality is the problem.
Now, Bill Bennett decided, former education secretary, back in 1994, Bill Bennett published what he called the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.
It was an adjunct to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators.
which has always been around.
It was very popular.
And what Bennett did was to compile how the moral, social, and behavioral conditions of modern American society had changed since 1963.
And he chose 1963 to get a 30-year take on things.
Here's what he found.
In 1994, as compared to 1963, violent crime had increased over 500%.
Illegitimate births had increased 400%.
Divorces had increased 400%.
Children living in a single-parent home had increased 300%.
Child abuse was up 340% since 1976.
Teenage suicide had increased 200%.
And SAT scores had dropped almost 80 points.
I remember, I was here.
I was there in 1994 when Bennett released these, and he was mocked and made fun of and accused of trying to tell people how to live their lives.
He was Mr. Morality, and what right did he have?
Yet that stuff all matters.
I mean, if you want to try to find out what happened here, and if you are serious about preventing it in the future, it's going to require some courageous honesty.
And it may also require the acceptance of the fact that you can't stop all of them.
Somebody pushed somebody in front of a subway the other day.
You can't ban subway cars.
People are going to die in all manners.
It happens to everybody.
What if you could make the case that mass shootings are actually much lower today than they have been in the past in this country?
You find, do you think that anybody be willing to talk to you seriously about that?
Or would they accuse you of having your head in the sand and trying to downplay this because you realize that you might have to give up your gun and you're just trying to protect your gun, and so you're trying to come up with all kinds of reasons to not get so riled up about this?
At any rate, I think that so much of what's happening here was predicted.
And don't forget, I was just a couple weeks ago, went back and repeated from my TV show a monologue about a mass killing in Chicago involving an eight-year-old and a four-year-old.
Remember the Bob Green column?
Bob Green, living in Chicago, was like, what have we lost our soul?
That bothered people.
Oh, now it's a religious problem.
The thing is, they keep happening.
They do keep...
Obama got it right.
This is the fourth mass shooting during his first term.
It averages out to one a year.
No, I'm not making any correlation.
That's for you to make.
If you want to play that game, go ahead.
I'm just, it is interesting.
We were supposed to be unified and loving one another at peace and all these wonderful new age things by now.
To the phones, we are going to start somewhere in Florida with Patrice.
Patrice, thank you for calling and waiting great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I was going to comment on a couple of things that I've heard lately.
I am a psychiatrist.
I do work in Florida.
I've worked with chronically mentally ill patients for over 20 years.
And, I mean, although I do want to say that, you know, the majority of patients who have severe psychiatric illness are not violent, what I have found in my work clinically, it is very difficult to get somebody committed to a state hospital because there are patient rights.
And as a psychiatrist, you will have patients that may be placed on a 72-hour hold, which is a BA-52.
They may have done something preceding their coming into the hospital, which could be very violent.
They could have threatened to kill their parents.
They could have destroyed property.
They could have assaulted others.
And they may be picked up by police.
They're taken to jail.
Then they come to the mental health unit.
And what happens is over time, 72 hours, two of us psychiatrists will evaluate them.
Now, let's say we do feel that they're a danger to others.
Then we go to court, and they're placed on what is called a BA-32.
And it can take up to four weeks to get these patients in front of a judge.
But oftentimes what happens is in that four-week period of time, if you have a patient that is a psychiatric patient that does have a psychiatric illness or has a drug-induced psychosis, which we often see, in the inpatient unit, you cannot treat them unless they're in imminent danger to themselves or others.
So I have patients that are psychotic.
They're agitated.
They're irritable.
I can't force them to take medication.
I have to wait until they actually do something or are threatening or behave in such a way that we can involuntarily medicate them.
And then the public defender can continue these cases for up to four weeks.
So what happens is when they go to court.
Are you saying that mental illness has become a right that people have?
You have a right to be mentally ill, and therefore if you and my next question is, even if these obstacles weren't in your way that you've described, and even if you could commit people who you thought needed to be, where would you put them?
That's, again, a couple of issues.
They closed down G. Perce Woods, which is a state facility in Florida.
So many severely psychiatrically ill patients were placed on the street.
They went into group homes.
They went into society.
Isn't that how the homeless became homeless?
They used to be institutionalized, and a bunch of liberals came along and said they have rights.
You can't keep them there.
About a third, they say, of the mentally ill patients, you know, of homeless patients are mentally ill.
But they're not necessarily violent.
What I'm trying to say is I can tell you that in my experience, you can have a patient who's violent.
You can have a patient who is mentally ill, and I don't know the thought processes of this person who did this terrible thing.
I'm saying, and it's very difficult to not only get them committed, because you're right, very few mental health resources.
There's not a hospital to put them in, and you can't make them take medication.
And they will be discharged from the hospital.
Even as a psychiatrist, if you say, I'm concerned, I think this patient is a danger to others, the public defender will say, but they've been on your unit for how many weeks?
Have they hurt anybody?
And we can tell them, yes, but they're on medication.
But this patient is telling me they're not going to take it when they leave.
Well, you're making it sell there's nothing we can do.
Telling you that there is, in many instances, as a psychiatrist, nothing that I'm able to do in the system to get treatment for some of these patients who I feel need treatment, but you can't force them to get treatment.
You can't.
There's laws that protect them.
And I understand that because in the past, you know, I know there was a lot of abuse of patients that were chronically mentally ill, and I don't know what this gentleman was, what was going on with his head, but I'm saying from a reality standpoint, it's very difficult.
You know, you ought to read something.
I mentioned this in the first hour.
We'll link to it at rushlimbaugh.com if you want to find it the easy way, but you can also find it at gawker.com.
It's a piece by a woman named Liza Long, I am Adam Lanza's mother.
In fact, I might read a couple excerpts of this, but it is written by a woman who has a disturbed child who threatens to kill her, 13, threatens to kill himself.
She says, look, this kid is going to do what Adam Lanza did if something isn't done.
She describes the problems of getting committed to a hospital.
What happens when she tells him that that's what's going to happen?
He throws a fit.
She fears for her own safety.
I think you'd be fascinated by it.
I think everybody would, actually.
Well, what I'm saying is you hear people talk, well, there needs to be early intervention.
These people need to be identified.
And again, even if there is intervention and even if they are identified and even if they're in the system, you can't force them to get treatment when they leave.
You can't force them to take medication when they leave.
You don't have that authority.
If you had the authority, what would you recommend?
In what instance?
In a patient who has a secret.
Yeah, the situation that you've described.
Well, ideally, if you there's a couple of things.
If a patient has a severe psychiatric illness, and I'm saying these patients don't often react violently.
But let's say you do have a patient who has a history of being violent off his medication, who has a history of assaulting a family off of medication, who you feel that you can get stabilized and get treated, and then when they leave the hospital, they refuse to take the medication.
I mean, in an ideal world, I mean, in a world that you want to protect others, you know, wouldn't it be ideal if the court could order them that they have to go every two weeks or every four weeks to get their shot?
Because you know if they don't, they're going to be a danger to others.
But that's not how the system is.
Because unless they're imminently a danger to themselves or others, imminently hours away.
You know what would happen if you prevailed, if you were able to deal with patients that you properly diagnosed in the way in which you've described, what would happen is some Hollywood producer come along, hear about it, and make a movie about how one of these people so treated actually came up with the cure for cancer, but nobody was willing to listen because they were insane.
And that would put pressure on society not to put these people away.
It's the same, what we've done with the homeless.
Every Christmas season, you have some leftists come along and say, the homeless are the modern day equivalents of Mary and Joseph.
They're wandering around and there's no room at the end.
And they try to make this connection.
It's, I don't know, it's a vicious circle.
I don't envy you your job.
It sounds like a lot of frustration.
And it sounds like what we need is lunatic control and we don't have any.
Be right back, folks.
Don't go away.
Hey, welcome back.
Great to have you.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me, I should have said this at the top of the program.
I assume that people would understand this.
I do not come to this program today thinking I know what to do about this.
And I don't want anybody to assume that I'm sitting here thinking I have the answers because I don't.
I think I have some pretty good theories as to why we are where we are in our culture.
But how to stop this, I'm not qualified.
I don't know that it can be.
I have such a cynical view about most every health story that comes down the pike, sponsored by the left, from this stupid mayor putting a ban on 32-ounce sodas.
I think it's absurd, and I don't think it's responsible.
But we've created in the process this belief that if you don't do this and don't do that and don't do that and don't do that, somehow you're never going to get sick and you're never going to die and you're never going to get cancer and you're never going to get leukemia and you're never going to get - and it's just, it's folly.
We're lying to people as part of a political agenda to expand the size of our government.
I think what's going on is hideous.
But I don't, in this specific, I don't want anybody to misunderstand that I think I've got the answers here in terms of how to prevent this.
I don't know that it can be.
But I just want to tell you a couple of things that I do believe.
I don't believe that you can have a culture, a society, where over a million babies are aborted every year and not have a dwindling respect for the sanctity of life.
I just, I don't think you can have a culture which talks about euthanasia, an old Jack Kvorkian story that was big for a while, killing people later in life for the convenience of the living.
I just don't believe that a society which can so easily kill for the convenience of the living can do that without suffering some real consequences when it comes to the sanctity of life.
I don't know what role video games, I don't play video games.
I don't know if a kid playing a video game all of his life actually ends up thinking that people come back to life after you kill them.
I don't know that.
I don't know if a kid playing a video game forever ends up with a cheapened view of life and a fun, glorified view of killing.
I don't know any of that.
But I do know because I see it each and every day that young people in this country are obsessed with fame and are willing to do a lot of insane, crazy things to get noticed because they think there's glamour and wealth and love in fame.
People watch the famous and think everybody loves them and we all want to be loved.
Everybody loves them.
Everybody thinks they're cool.
They have cool things.
They have a lot of friends.
They're rich.
All of these things make people want that.
And you couple that with the fact that everybody wants their life to matter, wants to have meaning in their lives, fame, attention.
I do know that that's not healthy.
And I do know that it has infected a lot of people.
But I don't know, and I don't know that it can be proven that a desire to be famous has a role in this episode.
Maybe it does, and we may never know.
But I do know some of these things are just not good for the foundation of the culture in which we live overall.
Look, here is an example.
This is a small, tiny example, but it's an example of something we've been discussing today.
This is a story from WLS TV Chicago, ABC in Chicago.
And here's the headline.
And Mr. Snerdley, you'll be interested in this.
Junk food addicts experience withdrawal.
A new study says the feelings you have when quitting junk food are similar to the ones experienced in drug withdrawal.
Researchers at the University of Montreal say a high-fat diet can actually cause chemical changes in the brain.
Those changes could lead to stress and withdrawal symptoms if you switch to a healthier diet.
The research was performed on mice for a period of six whole weeks.
The author says the chemicals monitored in the mice are similar to those found in the human brain.
Details are in the International Journal of Obesity.
Now, it seems harmless, right?
What is the takeaway here?
Takeaway is the takeaway is that junk food is bad, that there's an implied, I mean, you have to infer it, that junk food companies are making you sick and unwell, and that you shouldn't eat this stuff in the first place because you're going to eventually have to stop eating it.
And when you do, you're going to experience withdrawal.
There's only one problem: it's total BS.
It is 100% total BS.
Do not doubt me.
There is no comparison.
Zilch, zero.
There may be chemical comparisons.
I'm telling you, other than measured chemical reactions, which I can't address, the fact that you are going to feel when you give up potato chips the way you feel when you're trying to get off narcotics, I can tell you it's BS.
It is 100%, it's 1,000% BS.
But still, all that aside, here is yet another government-funded study, this one from Canada, University of Montreal.
The purpose of which is for some reason get people to stop eating junk food.
Who cares?
Junk food is not the problem in our society.
And it's not, certainly it is not a killer.
I mean, it's this is I don't.
I don't think childhood obesity and junk food and all that.
I'm telling you, childhood obesity, there are other explanations for it, but that's that's we the point is we have a bunch of things we can stop all this anyway.
So will somebody show me the cure for obesity?
If somebody can show me the cure, then I'll start listening and paying attention.
There is not a cure for obesity.
There is Mr. Lambo, it's called a diet.
And you go on a diet and you will stop being obese.
Yeah, and then you'll be obese when you go off the diet again.
There's no cure for it.
It happens.
Excrement happens to some people and other people it doesn't.
But here's another bit of evidence.
Got to put big government in charge, medical science, studying this, and come out with some crock junk food.
Somebody, by the way, has it been established that junk food is an addiction?
Has it?
Has that even been established?
That people can't give it up without junk food rehab?
Let me tell you something.
If there were money to be made in junk food rehab, they would have junk food rehab centers open.
And I don't know of one.
But you know what the reaction, people hear me talk about, this is why we've got to stop listening to Limbaugh.
Limbaugh is just poison.
Limbaugh is just, it's all because I just, I refuse to go along with absolute BS.
Conventional wisdom.
Everybody join the crowd, start thinking identically the same way.
Now, I'm not defending junk food.
I'm telling you, on the scheme of things, junk food matters about as much as the grain of sand on the beach.
If somebody wants to eat it, it's their business.
I don't care to run my life running around worried about who's eating potato chips trying to get them to stop.
But there are people who do, and to hell with them, as far as I'm concerned.
Leave me alone and everybody else.
Anyway, who's next?
We're going to get it.
Los Angeles.
This is Scott.
Great to have you on the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
You bet.
All right.
I was thinking about the gun control.
And isn't this school in Connecticut the microcosm of the utopian society gun control?
No teachers have guns.
No students have guns.
They basically have security.
If a student sees another kid with a squirt gun or something like that, they're supposed to go report it.
You've created the gun-free zone.
Well, they did just upgrade the security procedures at the school, too.
And didn't this kid have to break a window?
He had to break glass to get in because he couldn't get past the established admittance procedures.
So he had to break glass to get in there, break a window.
Yeah, it sounded like he had to do above and beyond to get buzzed into that.
So you had the perfect gun control.
It's just like a microcosm of the world.
You can say it was a miniature child prison.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Obama's media is just spinning this like crazy.
It's not just Obama's media.
It's Clinton's media.
And it's Chuck Schumer's media.
And it's Dianne Feinstein's media.
It's the leftist who got nothing right.
They got nothing right in this story.
It's interesting Dianne Feinstein's going to start the next Congress with a gun bill.
How about starting off with that budget you're supposed to pass four years ago?
Yeah, spending.
I think we got some bigger problems.
Do you think Diane Feinstein even knows the difference in a semi-automatic and an automatic weapon?
Well, they call them assault weapons.
What weapon?
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
We had an assault weapons ban.
Right.
And it didn't work.
So we let it subside, and now she wants to reinstitute it again.
Gives her something to do.
Well, it didn't work the first time.
We had an assault weapon.
You know, that's another illegitimate term.
Tell me, Scott, are you a gun guy?
Do you know about them?
Yes.
Okay, what is an assault weapon?
As opposed to a pistol?
Well, I kind of see that every single weapon is an assault weapon.
Exactly.
But they've created this term assault weapon.
It's a bad weapon as opposed to a good gun.
What's a good gun?
A good gun is one where the Democrats take them away from us and give them to the Mexican drug cartels in the Fast and Furious program rush.
A good gun is the one that hits target.
Oh, that's.
But see, I'm in trouble for saying that.
Don't say it.
A bad gun is one that doesn't hit the target.
Yeah.
But no, they create this whole assault weapon.
And semi-automatic and automatic weapons.
They listed a revolver now as a semi-automatic weapon, too.
I think I saw something on that where they're starting to classify revolvers as semi-automatic.
Well, maybe we should go through these definitions of these terms again because semi-automatic and automatic weapons.
You know, people think an automatic weapon is one where you pull a trigger and multiple bullets fire.
But that's not right, is it?
No, because you can break down what's automatic if it's discharging the casing.
Yeah, it's discharging the casing and loading a new one, but it's not firing multiple rounds.
Right.
Because as some of your shotguns, like if you go skeet shooting, you have to break the barrel and remove by your hand.
Those would be manual guns.
But I've also got some where you shoot and it will discharge the casing automatically, being an automatic weapon possible.
Well, these terms have popped up, and they're part of the word, the terminology effort here to advance a particular political agenda.
And that'd be fine if they were true.
But the terms are misleading and inaccurate in how they describe these weapons.
But of course, the real big one is the assault rifle as opposed to the standard rifle and the assault weapon.
As you say, every weapon is an assault weapon.
Even a Derringer would be.
Scott, I appreciate the call.
We got to go, folks.
We'll be back, though.
Don't go away.
And we're back.
El Rushboat serving humanity here on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Let's go through these gun terms just for the heck of it here, for what it might matter.
Assault weapon.
Assault rifle.
There is no such thing.
Go to a gun store and tell them you want an assault weapon.
And the guy will look around and show you his entire inventory and say, pick one.
But there is nothing, no brand, no label that identifies the weapon as an assault rifle or assault weapon.
There's no category.
It has been purely manufactured, invented purely for political agenda advancement reasons.
The term assault weapon first began being used in the early 1990s by people opposed to the Second Amendment.
There was legislation in 1994 that banned assault weapons.
And they had a definition.
And what they did was simply repeat a bunch of cosmetic features.
Talked about single action, dual action, triggers, and so forth.
It was all designed to impact the low-information citizen into believing that certain weapons are invented for the express purpose of mass murder.
Weapons you can buy.
Now, there are weapons made for mass murder, chemical weapons, biological weapons, tanks, missiles, rockets, but we're not talking about that.
This was a purely manufactured term.
And guess what?
Because it didn't mean anything, because there was no way to enforce it without violating the Constitution at large, the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.
But guess who's back and wants to reinstitute it?
None other than Dianne Feinstein and Senator Joe Lieberman, who are calling now to renew the assault weapons ban.
Well, it must not have done much good because they allowed it to expire in 2004.
So once again, we have another purely political move here being authored by Die Fi and only because it sounds like somebody cares.
I realize I'm in the minority now, people that deal in facts and reality and not image and inertia.
And I realize I'm peeing against the wind here.
But I still want you to know what the facts are about all this.
Because we're outnumbered by these low information.
And we're in a situation like this.
I guarantee you, the odds are we're going to have a majority.
Yeah, yeah, we need the assault weapons ban, not knowing what the hell they're talking about because there is no such thing.
The AP, again, according to John Hinderocker at Powerline, AP, reported that the Connecticut gunman had hundreds of rounds of ammo, enough to kill almost every student.
Carrying an arsenal of hundreds of rounds of especially deadly ammunition.
You see, especially deadly.
Hollow points.
Especially.
Is there good bullets and bad bullets?
This guy had the bad bullets.
Had enough to kill just about every student in the school if given enough time.
But to anybody who knows what they're dealing here, dealing with or talking about hundreds of rounds is actually a small quantity.
It's not the number of rounds that you have, it's how you intend to use them.
Same thing with the gun.
It's not how many guns you have, it's how you intend to use them.
Now, this kid used a Bushmaster rifle that was his mother's.
The Bushmaster is a semi-automatic rifle.
Pop quiz.
I just explained it, but I just, I want to, I want to check.
No wrong answer here.
Snurdy, what is a, what is the, what is the defining characteristic of a semi-automatic weapon?
I just announced it.
You don't know because you were screening calls, right?
That's not that you weren't screening calls.
You were listening.
Does not shoot multiple rounds.
Semi-automatic fires one bullet at a time and discharges the casing and auto-reloads the next one.
That's all it does.
It does not fire multiple rounds with one pull.
A semi-automatic weapon fires one bullet at a time and puts another bullet into the chamber.
It's called an assault rifle to create the image that is an instrument of mass death with one pull of a trigger.
It's a political invention.
The whole term assault rifle is a political invention.
Semi-automatic and automatic.
Really, there's not much difference.
One bullet at a time.
You have to squeeze the trigger every time you want to fire a bullet.
Now, what made Adam Lanza stop?
He stopped when somebody showed up and pointed a gun at him.
And that's when he killed himself.
And that is what happens in practically every instance like this.
Once the shooter has a weapon pointed at him, he ends it.
The Aurora, Colorado shooter specifically chose a theater in a part of town where he knew nobody would be allowed to have one.
He drove an extra distance to get to that particular theater.
These people do make that calculation.
Just throw it in your hopper and let it matter as you will.
We'll be back.
Well, this one's going to tick off the media.
An Austin area gun store owner in Texas is offering teachers a discount.
If they want to come in and get a concealed handgun license, he will give them a discount on the weapon.
Teachers, wait till the media at large hears about this guy.
Hey, we'll be back, my friends.
Don't go away.
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