RUSH: Man, I’ll tell you, Obama is mad. I have not seen this kind of expression on the face of Barack Obama as often and as consistently as I have the last 15 minutes watching this fatwa he’s announcing on his executive action on guns. This is amazing. He’s really, really ticked off about this.

Anyway, folks, greetings. How are you? Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh back at it. Three straight hours of broadcast excellence headed your way. Telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882, and the e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

This is striking, what I have been watching and listening to for, I guess it’s the last fifteen minutes, maybe a little bit longer. But Obama’s got a bunch of sycophants and supporters gathered in what looks like the East Room of the White House, and he’s mad, he is scowling, he’s getting all kinds of support and ovations, but he is angry. He is scowling. His facial expressions, his eyes are piercing. He looks at that camera as though whoever is on the other side of it he hates.

He’s just saying nonsensical things about guns. I mean, he admits on one hand that everything he’s talking about here is not going to stop any of the events that have taken place with guns, like the San Bernardino massacre and that. Then on the other hand he says but even if we just stop one act of violence, it’s worth what we’re doing here. And then he’s going on and on, “I don’t understand why anybody would oppose what I’m trying to do. We’re not trying to take guns out of the hands of people. We’re just trying to make it harder and harder for people who have criminal intent to get guns.” How do you know?

The fact of the matter is that gun control is such a mandatory issue if you’re a liberal Democrat, you have to have this particular point of view on it, and the point of view is that you’ve got to get rid of guns. The point of view is that it is not who uses the gun that’s the problem; the gun is the problem, the ammunition is the problem and you’ve gotta get rid of it. And he stands up there and acts like people would be crazy to think he really wants to take away people’s guns. People are not crazy. We have listened to liberals all of our lives. We know exactly what they want to do. And those of us who’ve been paying attention know exactly how they go about it. We know how they go about getting everything they want. If they have to deflect, if they have to lie, if they have to distract, if they have to state that exactly what they want is not what, whatever. We know what they want.

They want ultimate power and control. We know why. They have contempt for average, ordinary Americans and every other type person, don’t think they’re capable of leading their own lives responsibly and don’t even want to give them the chance to. It’s just an unquenchable thirst that they have for power and control over people. And getting guns out of the hands of people would represent the pinnacle of wresting control, wresting freedom and liberty away from people and gaining control over them. And it’s just amazing to sit here and watch this, because he tries to smile now and then to soften the message, but it is clear he’s angry.

I think what I’m actually watching here is pent-up rage and anger over whatever it is that has made him angry the last seven years. Whatever he’s wanted to do and hasn’t succeeded, this clearly is one of them, securing significant gun control measures. He’s mad at Congress. You know, here’s the thing. He’s up there issuing his latest fatwas today, his executive actions, that implement — see, this is what the media is not gonna tell you. But what he is implementing today, or what he is suggesting be implemented via his executive action, are the very things, legislation that has been rejected in Congress at least three times by wide bipartisan majorities. Wide bipartisan majorities have voted down, have rejected the very things that he is seeking to implement here by executive action.

These are the same people who say we don’t need guns to protect ourselves because we can count on the police, and the very same people who say we can’t trust the police to do anything. You don’t need a gun; you’ve got the police to protect you. But then the police come under fire, are accused of being incompetent, un trustworthy, corrupt, what have you. But who gets to decide who has criminal intent? At the background check phase of this, who gets to decide that? How does anybody know who has criminal intent unless they already have a record.

But I mean even to answer that argument is to fall for the trap that Obama and the leftists lay and try to secure you into debating on the term and within the frameworks that they suggest. They want you to debate the idea that there are ways of identifying criminal intent before it happens, and they want you to say, “Well who could oppose keeping the guns out of the hands –” He’s quoting Reagan, he’s quoting George W. Bush, claiming they are just like him, and what he wants is no more than what they wanted, and all they wanted to do was to make sure that it was tougher and tougher for criminals to get guns.

Don’t be fooled. He’s not worried about the criminals getting guns; that’s not his focus. His target is on the innocent. Everybody, every liberal Democrat, every gun control advocate wherever you find them, in order to succeed, they have to take guns away from the law-abiding. Otherwise there’s no gun control, otherwise there’s no success. So how about a presumption that everybody with a gun is capable of committing a crime? See, this is where we’re headed with this. If Obama and the leftists, his buddies in the media could do it, they would try to establish as public opinion that anybody with a gun is a potential criminal and has an agent of deadly force at their disposal, and we must not tolerate this, and we must not let this happen.

Make no mistake, the effort is to taint and impugn the reputations of law-abiding people. That’s where the majority of guns are. That’s the greatest repository of gun ownership outside the military in our country, is law-abiding people. It’s like taxes. If you’re really gonna raise taxes because you want to raise revenue, you’ve gotta raise taxes on the middle class. Raising taxes on the rich will not net you that much money, compared to raising taxes on middle class. It’s the same way of thinking. You really want to get guns off the street?

You’ve got to go where most of them are, and most of them are in the hands of law-abiding people who do not and have not used them to commit criminal acts. Isn’t it interesting that every time we have a criminal act of mass shooting like San Bernardino, the immediate reaction is that we’ve gotta get guns out of the hands of law-abiding people? In the case of the San Bernardino Two, in addition to that we had to listen to how they were nice, ordinary, common, everyday people, members of a religion of peace — and then they got radicalized!

See, they weren’t even bad people to start with. It was just they got radicalized and then they got guns, and the kind of guns they had are not the kind of guns Obama’s talking about trying to control. I mean, RPGs, rocket launchers, whatever you name that was in that arsenal in that basement, in that home in San Bernardino. But Obama is not concerned about stopping gun crime; otherwise he wouldn’t be doing everything he can to release major drug dealers and other criminals from prison by shortening their sentences.

So make no mistake… (interruption) There he is. That scowl! That look! You have not… I have not been able to miss that. By the way, what makes that stand out to me is he’s got nothing but love and adoration in this room. Everybody in that room thinks Obama’s a rock star. Everybody in that room think’s Obama’s the Second Coming. He’s being applauded practically every sentence, and it’s not making him happy. He is just sneering and scowling. He’s really… When that happens, that’s when you need to pay attention.

He says, “Why are people so afraid of background checks?”

I don’t know anybody who is “afraid of background checks.”

There are some people who suspect them. I mean, when you have people like Obama and people of his ilk in charge of the background check who can and want to basically establish the fact that if you have a gun, you are a potential criminal. And make no mistake that’s what they want people thinking. They’re aiming right at the low-information voters and looking right at ’em, and they’re trying to create this impression that if you have a gun — if you know somebody who has a gun — they’re dangerous.

“You need to be on the lookout for ’em! They are potential criminals. They’ve got guns. They could shoot you; they could shoot your dog with that.” This is the kind of thing they want people to think. It’s the only way they can get what they want is to get guns out of the hands of legal, law-abiding people. You know, there’s… What’s her name? Jennifer Rubin. She’s a blogger. Changing subjects here, ’cause Cookie’s rolling sound on this. We’ll have some examples, some sound bites from Obama.

It’s still going on here. He said, “We can’t wait for Congress to act on this! No, we can’t wait for Congress. No way. Why are people so afraid? Congress needs to get on board!” The room erupted when he said, “Congress needs…” He said, “We’re no longer gonna allow Congress to hold America hostage.” The room erupted. He’s scowling and he’s sneering in a… It’s not defiance. He’s really, really ticked off at something here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know what else? Obama trotted out this, “We’re the only advanced country in the world where mass shootings happen with the frequency they happen. There’s no advanced country in the world where things like this happen as often as they happen here.” It’s a constant straw dog that he is always bringing up. “We’re the only industrialized nation… We’re the only advanced industrialized country that doesn’t have health care for its people.” We only had the best health care system in the world, and he’s running around saying, “We’re the only advanced nation the world that does not have health care for all its people”?

But we do. We did. And now he wants us to believe that we have more random gun violence in this country than anywhere in the world? Maybe we have more random gun violence in Chicago than we have anywhere in the world, but he won’t say it that way. But it’s bogus, anyway, what he’s saying. It always comes down to how the United States is at fault, or the United States is incomplete, or the United States is flawed somehow, some way — and he’s, by God, gonna fix it.

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RUSH: Back to the phones we go, the EIB Network. This John in Jacksonville, Florida. Hey, John, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.

CALLER: (noise) Hello?

RUSH: Is anybody there?

CALLER: I’m here.

RUSH: Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I just heard a bunch of noise there. It sounded like a hurricane happening. I didn’t know.

CALLER: Oh, yeah. I was standing next to a guy cleaning the floors.

RUSH: Oh, okay. Okay. That would explain it.

CALLER: All right. Well, good morning. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: The reason I called was to take a minute to discuss some of this presidential action on the gun show loophole and the fact that there really isn’t one. Yet all the media keeps talking about how it’s gonna close the gun show loophole. But it does not exist.

RUSH: Well, I didn’t get a chance to watch all of Obama because he was still going when the program started, so I didn’t hear him talking about the gun show loophole.

CALLER: Right. Well, it was multiple times. While I was on hold waiting to talk to you they did news break-ins, and three times during that the lady talked about how he’s “closing the gun show loophole” and “the Internet sales loophole.” And there’s really not one. If you go to a gun show as a licensed dealer and display guns for sale on your table, you have to do a call-in, a background check, just like you’re at your store. And in fact, you’re forbidden from selling guns anywhere but at the address at your store or at an organized gun show. So if you’re a licensed dealer, you can’t just go meet somebody at the Sears parking lot and make a gun transaction. That’s not legal.

RUSH: I know. You’re right. This “gun show loophole” is nothing more than a manufactured distraction. It may have been a reality in the old days, but the truth of the matter is the vast majority of gun show sellers are dealers with licenses who are simply doing a satellite location that day at the gun show rather than at their shop. But the “gun show loophole” just sounds so sexy. The gun show loophole! It’s an effort to taint gun shows and so forth. But it’s one of these things that doesn’t really exist. It’s this phantom target that Obama and people like him on the left can aim at. I like that: “Aim at!” Yeah, yeah.

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RUSH: Here’s Rebecca in Englewood, Colorado. Glad you waited, and welcome to the program. Hi.

CALLER: Rush, I cannot believe I’m talking to you. Hello.

RUSH: I’m glad you got through.

CALLER: Yes. My issue is that with the doctor thing and the guns, what is going to happen is people are going to fear going to their doctor for certain things. I’m going to tell my kids, “Don’t tell them anything,” and that’s such an issue. That’s what they’re doing.

RUSH: Well, it does… I understand it. It blows the whole notion of doctor-patient confidentially sky-high. If you go to the doctor aware that if he decides that you’re mentally disturbed — even just that day. You don’t have to be every day. He doesn’t see you every day, obviously. But all the doctor has to do is consider or worry or fear that a patient might be unbalanced, and if he thinks that, he’s required to report it.

Here’s the way the doctor’s gonna think about it. So a screwball comes in, a regular patient that he knows. That day the patient’s wacko, doing some weird things, and the doctor says, “What if this guy goes out and gets in an accident or what if this guy kills himself or hurts himself and I haven’t reported it? Oh, my God! What if they come after me and ask, ‘Why didn’t you report it?'” So he’s gonna feel pressure to report the patient, just to keep the Feds off him. I mean, this is the way our society is being conditioned:

Fear of the government to enforce compliance with government policy. So if you’ve got a doctor, they’re already under the gun because of Obamacare. They’re already targets. I mean, Obama’s out there talking about how they do unnecessary surgeries to pad their income. They do unnecessary tests. I mean, they’re aware of that, so the government’s already got them in the microscope and the crosshairs, and then now the doctors are supposed to report unbalanced behavior or mental illness.

And doctors in California can have their patients’ homes raided. You have doctors now permitted to ask patients about guns in their homes. If the doctors fear the government, they’re gonna take the safe approach and report it, and then this government says, “Okay, we’ve had a doctor report that Patient X over here is a nutcase.” That puts ’em on notice. So you’re right. People, as patients become aware of this, they are probably going to be withholding some information from a doctor so the doctor doesn’t think that they’re wacko.

CALLER: Yes. I agree. Well, thank you, Rush. Thank you very much. I’ve read all your Rush Revere books.

RUSH: I appreciate that. I really do. We had a banner year again with the two Rush Revere Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans books. We put out two more books this past year. The most recent is Rush Revere and the Star-Spangled Banner. I appreciate that. I really do. But these are legitimate concerns people are gonna have, and you have to understand this is exactly the kind of thing that the Regime banks on. I mean, the IRS is probably the most successful collection agency in the history of the world. And how do they do it?

Fear.

Everybody is scared to death of what the IRS can do to them. Even though the odds of the IRS actually zeroing in on a citizen are not very high, the people they do zero in on often have horror stories to tell. So you do whatever you can to stay clear. Do you know how many people willingly, knowingly overpay their taxes? I don’t know if you know people today. If your taxes are withheld, there’s not much you can do. Well, you can. You can actually have more withheld than necessary by claiming fewer exemptions.

But a lot of people do this. I know a lot of people that overpay some significant amount (a little amount, whatever) just because they think it’s gonna buy them anonymity. Or the way they figure it is this. I’ve had ’em tell me they think if they come up for audit and an IRS agent’s going through tax return and looks at that, they’ll say, “Well, this guy paid more than he should have, based on this. We don’t need to audit this guy,” and throw it away. That’s what they hope happens. But it’s not by any means guaranteed to work because the IRS has successfully constructed this attitude of fear in so many people that they just happen to…

This is what the Regime has tried to do with as many other departments of government as they can, and now they’re empowering doctors to report instability or mental illness and empowering doctors to conduct surveys of their patients on gun ownership: “Where the guns are in the house? Who has access to them? Where is the ammo?” You know, a lot of people — doctors — are gonna lead the pack of being afraid not to report, and they’re going to use a wide berth in determining somebody’s mental illness.

‘Cause the last thing the doctor is gonna want is some knock on the door from a federal agent claiming, “So-and-so, one of your patients, just got into an accident out there, and you didn’t tell us that they’re mentally unstable.” He might have a liability issue. This is the way totalitarian regimes work. Well, we tried to warn everybody about this before all of this happened. But, sadly, this is the kind of stuff that before it happens nobody wants to believe is possible. “Ah, come on, Rush. You’re exaggerating.”

“Oh, come on, Rush! You’re being paranoid.”

“Come on, Rush! Can’t you just can’t you get past the fact all they are is Democrats?”

“Screw it, Rush, they’re gonna be out of office someday. Don’t worry about it! That kind of thing would never happen in America.”

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RUSH: Here’s Brian in Iowa as we head back to the phones. Brian, I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. Hello.

CALLER: Hello. So I was talking to your screen caller about the unlawful executive order that our president has done, again, but —

RUSH: Well, let me ask you Brian, before you, let me ask you a question. Are you aware that the president started crying today at the end of the ceremony or the appearance in the East Room where he announced his executive action? Did you know he started getting a tear running down his cheek, started crying about it. Variety magazine’s even written about this it was such a great act.

CALLER: No, I had no clue. You know, I listened to him for a little bit and then I shut him off because I can’t stand to listen to him. What I was saying was, if you look back at the last five mass shootings that we’ve had, each one of those people had passed a criminal background check.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: They had no criminal activity on their rap sheet. They had nothing on them.

RUSH: And they all, by definition, were loony.

CALLER: Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, how is it that you’re gonna close up these loopholes? You can’t. You can’t do it. I buy guns privately through people off of Facebook.

RUSH: Ah, the old Facebook loophole, eh?

CALLER: Yeah. How can you stop it? There’s nothing. If I’m around a bunch of my friends that hunt, and I say, “Hey, you know, I like that gun,” and he says, “Oh, you know, I don’t like it.” And I’m like, “Well, I’ll buy it from you.”

RUSH: Brian, let me tell you —

CALLER: I can just do a private purchase that you can’t stop.

RUSH: Let me tell you how they’re gonna stop it. You’ve asked a really good question. And the answer to your question is what I think this is really all about. This little thing off to the side here where your doctor can ask you about guns you own and where they are in your house, do you know what happens if you refuse to answer?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: The doctor notes that you refused to answer. And that answer is assumed to mean you are not being truthful and therefore you do have guns, and you become a person of suspicion. The other thing that they’re going to do is now doctors have to report any of their patients who they think are mentally ill or unstable. Brian, the objective of this, as I said, they know they can’t stop your purchase and sale example that you gave, buying a gun on Facebook, or trading guns with some hunter out there in the field with the wild boar running around, they can’t stop that. The ongoing effort here is to stigmatize people like you, Brian.

The effort on the part of Obama and Democrat Party, they know full well they can’t succeed in getting guns out of the hands of people unless they succeed in getting the guns out of the hands of people that don’t commit crimes. The law-abiding. So the challenge for them is how do they get guns out of the hands of the law-abiding? That’s what this effort is all aimed at. This effort is aimed at stigmatizing. It is an effort to allow them to create in as many minds as possible the very fact you have a gun means you pose a threat.

And if they can get a doctor one way or the other or some other agent permitted to report on you, then they can find out and have what they would hope for in the future to be a legal way to go get your gun from you. They’re not gonna abridge the Second Amendment, they’re not gonna get it written out. They’ve gotta find a way culturally to pull this off. And they’re very patient about it. It may take ’em ten years to do this.

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RUSH: I’m just sitting here thinking, CNN’s interviewing a gun owner, and where do you think the gun owner’s store is? Georgia. (imitating Southern accent) “Yes, they’re gonna go find gun shops in the South and they gonna talk to gun shop owners in the South.” Now, you might be thinking, “Rush, CNN is in Georgia. It would makes sense they’d find them there.” They are also in New York. But they sent somebody out to find a gun shop in Georgia. It fulfills the image that they have of Second Amendment supporters and gun enthusiasts, hunters and so forth, a bunch of hayseeds.

You know, Obama, I mentioned this, he had a tear. He cried at the end of his show today in the White House. And he said (imitating Obama), “I think, you know, I got nothing to prove. I’m in my last year, and I really don’t — I don’t know why, uh, we have to impugn people’s motives. I don’t know why we have to.” Well, sir, I tell you, your motive is all that matters, because your motive tells us the why, obviously. The motive is what’s crucial here. The motive tells us how serious you are about this. The motive and the objective are all we need to know.

You know, they’ve tried this with alcohol, as you well know. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, they’ve tried to penalize, punish bartenders and bars for selling adult beverages to people who later had accidents or a DUI. Don’t think that they’re not gonna go to doctors here. You know, folks, who do you think might be, as far as the left is concerned, a prime target for somebody a family member could claim is mentally ill or a doctor could decide is unstable or not all there? How about veterans returning from the theater of combat? I mean, as far as many Americans are concerned, they’re all upset.

How many movies have there been portraying returning veterans as incapable of adjusting to peacetime, posttraumatic stress disorder. I would wager that many Americans think that your average returning soldier from Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere where there are hostilities comes back and cannot cope for some reason or other. Insomnia, flashbacks, undiagnosed and diagnosed PTSD. And, by definition, these returning vets need medical treatment, and so they go to doctors. And now doctors are required to call the FBI, report to the FBI about any patients that might appear to be upset, mentally unstable, maladjusted, whatever term you want to use.

And many of these veterans of course have firearms, do they not? They have been trained in their usage. The very people who are most familiar, trained and proficient with these weapons would be among the prime targets for having their guns taken away from them simply on the basis that they’re not mentally competent to possess them anymore. And all it might take with Obama’s new regulations here is their doctor calling the FBI and saying, “Staff sergeant so-and-so Kowalsky just left my office, and I don’t know, FBI, I’m very, very concerned about the mental state of staff sergeant Kowalsky.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” says the FBI, “we appreciate your call. Leave it to us. We’ll take it from here.” Liberal members of your family who know that you have a gun and don’t particularly like it, might they now have avenues. And you think the doctor might not cooperate. Well, how many doctors can no longer afford malpractice insurance simply because of Obamacare? And do you think the doctor is ever going to claim that any member of a minority group is unstable? Can you imagine a doctor reporting, what’s her name, the prosecuting attorney in Baltimore, what’s her name? Mosby, Marilyn Mosby goes to the doctor. She’s obviously unstable. She goes to the doctor, do you think the doctor would report to the FBI that the DA was just here, and I don’t know, she doesn’t seem right. Or that Mahmoud Sahib Skyhook was just here, and Mahmoud didn’t seem to be all that right to me, you think that’s gonna happen?

No, it isn’t, because the doctor is not gonna be accused of bigotry or religious prejudice or racial prejudice. So guess who’s gonna get reported on here? At least the odds are. And Obama’s crying. “I have nothing to prove. I’m in my last year. I’m just doing what I think is right.” Well, these leftists, folks, Obama’s quest to transform the country is not gonna end with him leaving office. He’s not just gonna sit around idly in his post presidential days and watch people dismantle what he’s done. He’s gonna try to preserve it. We haven’t seen anything yet.

I’m telling you, the next 12 months and then the aftermath when Obama’s out of office he’s still gonna have his media cadre on his side, whoever the incoming president is, Trump, Cruz, whoever it is, is gonna have Obama on their case and the media every day. And if there’s just the slightest shred of evidence that anything they’re doing is unraveling what Obama did, look out. Don’t doubt me. In fact, make a note of the prediction.