RUSH: A columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times.  This is so good.  This guy is a columnist, and he was assigned the task of showing “how easy it is to get a gun.”  We had the Morning Update today about this CBS reporterette who wanted to do the same thing.  They’re all going into gun shops and trying to show how easy it is. “They’ll sell a gun to anybody! You don’t need to get a background check.” It’s all a bunch of BS. “You walk in, you fork over the money, and they’ll give you a machine gun if you want it,” is the image that they’re trying to portray.  Wait ’til you hear the details on this clown from the Chicago Sun-Times. 

I’ll just cut to the chase.  The guy, his application was not approved.  They found out he’s an alcoholic and he’s got a couple charges of wife abuse or spousal abuse or something, and they would not give him the gun.  He wanted to leave that out of the column, and his editor said, “No, you gotta put it in there.” So he put it in there. But he said (paraphrased), “That wasn’t the real reason they didn’t let me have the gun! They didn’t let me have a gun ’cause they knew I was a reporter and they knew I was gonna try to shaft ’em.”  The background system worked.  The guy didn’t deserve getting a gun. 

He couldn’t pass the background check, is alcoholic (or has had alcoholic issues, I don’t know), and spousal abuse issues, charges.  It’s just classic.  To show you what we’re up against, we have some Kim Kardashian tweets on this that the problem is… Kim Kardashian is what you have as an oracle to low-information people, and she’s got a series of tweets on how easy it is to get a gun, and how background checks don’t exist.  It’s all wrong.  It’s… (interruption) No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.  I have spies.  I’m not reading Kim Kardashian tweets.  I don’t follow anybody on Twitter.  I’m not…

(interruption) No, no, no, no.  It’s from the guy who reports… I read this report yesterday on his daughter is a Millennial, and he tracks her and her friends and reports to me. He’s the guy that told me that “sustainability” is a big deal to them. He’s the one sent me this.  He’s the one out there following this stuff, trying to keep me up speed so I don’t have to do it.  I wouldn’t go following Kim Kardashian.  Anyway, it’s gonna fit right with the Chicago Sun-Times piece.  It’s gonna go perfectly with it.  So don’t worry how I got it.  What does it matter how I got it?  Are you prepared to sit in there and say that your opinion of me might change if you found out that I was following Kim Kardashian? 

Don’t even go there. 

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RUSH: The Chicago Sun-Times columnist tried to show how worthless the background check aspect of getting a gun is and how it totally backfired on the guy. It’s just one of the most juicy stories you’ll ever, ever come across. And there’s some other things out there, too.  I mentioned that this is related to it: The Kim Kardashian series of tweets on background checks; how it’s all pointless.  The reason… I’m not a Kim Kardashian whatever, “follower.”

But I know a guy whose daughter is, and he keeps me up to speed by sending me this stuff. And it’s relevant because whether you like it or not, Kim Kardashian apparently is an opinion maker with a certain segment of the population.  They’re young, easily impressionable, and they hero worship and celebrity worship, and they end up buying into this, and they grow up thinking it. And nobody ever corrects them, and they end up as adults being totally ill-informed and misinformed and helping to skew this country in bad directions.  

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RUSH: This silly notion that if there had just been gun control, that Mateen wouldn’t have been able to do what he did.  This boggles my mind! There were four gun control measures that were being debated on the floor of the US Senate. This always happens.

Every time there’s a shooting disaster, a mass massacre like this, the Democrats get into gear and use the opportunity — take the opportunity — of the event to try to get more gonna control, and every, every sponsor… There were four different bills. Every sponsor admitted that his bill would not have stopped Mateen from getting the gun that he used.  But it didn’t matter, because the purpose of gun control is not to stop Mateen.  You know why?  Gun control can’t stop criminals.  The law does not stop criminals.  The law does not deter all potential criminals. 

If it did, we wouldn’t have any.  If the law deterred crime, we wouldn’t have any crime.  The purpose of law is not solely to deter people from committing crime.  It’s how society defines itself in areas of right and wrong and morality.  It’s how society agrees to punish people that violate various laws.  But the law is not there to prevent criminal behavior, because nobody would be stupid enough to think that alone would do it.  That’s why gun control laws are silly, folks.  They’re not gonna stop anybody who intends to criminally use a gun.  There’s gonna be a black market. 

You can’t ban all guns from a country this big! You couldn’t get rid of all of them no matter you do. If you confiscated every gun, if you were able to — and you couldn’t even do this. If you went door-to-door and demanded that everybody in every house, every apartment, every condo, every business, turn over their gun to you, and if they did it (which wouldn’t happen), you still wouldn’t get rid of every gun in this country.  That’s what’s silly. 

Therefore, the purpose of gun control is not to take guns or keep guns out of the hands of criminals, folks.  The purpose of gun control is to take guns away from the law-abiding.  That’s all it is.  It’s never admitted to.  It’s disguised as stopping crime, protecting your children, keeping our schools safe.  That’s bogus caca.  There isn’t a single law on the books that would have stopped Mateen from getting his gun.  There’s not a single law that would have prevented him from doing what he did when he got a gun.  Not a single law. 

It doesn’t mean that journalists are not stupid fools.  Journalists are out there now doing story after story, how easy it is to get a gun, how easy it is for criminals and the law abiding to go get a gun. And we’re supposed to infer that it’s so easy, no wonder people are getting involved with mass shootings.  Well, a guy named Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times decided to write a column about how easy it is to get a gun and about how worthless the background check aspect of gun control is.  And wait ’til you hear what happened to him.

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RUSH:  I’m not gonna have time to read much of this guy’s column.  His name is Neil Steinberg.  Neil Steinberg writing for the Chicago Sun-Times: “Would-Be Terrorists Can Buy Guns, But a Reporter?  No.”  See, he didn’t pass the background check, and it’s just classic.  The column is nonsensical because the guy ends up totally exposed as a fraud and ends up blaming “the system” for it.  He’s one of these reporters who goes to a gun store on the premise that anybody can get a gun and the background check is a mere formality and they can get any gun they want.

The background check doesn’t really count. Everybody gets passed. Everybody gets their money, and the guy walks out with a gun, and murder as many people he wants.  Whatever kind of gun he wants to buy!  So this guy goes in to a gun store in Des Plaines, Illinois, Maxon Shooters Supply. He went in there on Wednesday of last week to purchase his first assault rifle, and the first thing he learned is that there’s no such thing.  They told him there was no such thing, but he didn’t believe ’em.  He said he never owned a gun before.  “[W]ith the horror of Sunday’s Orlando massacre still echoing, even the pleasant summer day … took on a grim aspect, the sweetness of fragile life flashing by as I headed into the Valley of Death.

“Earlier, in my editor’s office, I had ticked off the reasons for me not to buy a gun: this was a journalistic stunt; done repeatedly; supporting an industry I despise. But as I tell people[:] I just work here[;] I don’t own the place. And my qualms melted as I dug into the issue. I had trouble even figuring out whether bringing an assault rifle into Chicago is legal. The Internet was contradictory. The Chicago corporation counsel’s office punted me on to that black hole of silence, Bill McCaffrey. I found that Illinois has a 24-hour waiting period between buying and taking possession of a gun. Unearthing that fact alone made the exercise seem worthwhile. I was learning something,” and he goes on to talk about the process. 

Any, here’s what happened.  He went in to buy his assault rifle, and he goes through the process, disguising as how he’s learning things, and  the gun store called him within 24 hours and said (summarized), “I’m sorry, but we can’t sell you the gun.  You didn’t pass the background check.”  And he wants to know why.  And the gun store says, “We don’t have to tell you.  We’re not required by law to tell you.”  But they knew he was a reporter.  He didn’t pass the background check.  You want to know why?  It was discovered that he has issues with alcohol and spousal abuse or something of the sort.  It was discovered that he was a risk. 

So they wouldn’t sell him the gun.

He didn’t pass the background check.  He wasn’t allowed to come back and get the gun, and he ended up portraying this as (summarized), “See?  I’m an innocent guy! I’m a totally innocent reporter…” He didn’t want to put it in the column but his editors made him. He didn’t want to include the abuse. He thought that was not relevant.  His editors made him put that piece of information in his column, and he goes off blaming the system. (paraphrased) “A terrorist can go in, a known-terrorist go in and get a gun, and I’m a decent, law-abiding guy, and I couldn’t pass the background check.” 

Of course, he doesn’t see. Because he’s a closed-minded leftist, he doesn’t see the utter irony in what happened to him.  He goes in to expose the entire background check apparatus as fraudulent and worthless, and it uncovers that he is unfit for a gun, and he ends up attacking the system! When he ought to have walked out of there and said, “You know what?  I’m wrong.  This system works.”  He should have walked out of there realizing, “You know what? I learned something I didn’t know.  The background check is not an automatic.  It’s not something that’s set up to fool everybody into thinking they’re really looking into people’s backgrounds.”

‘Cause this guy walks in thinking anybody in the world could go in and buy a submachine gun if they want to, and it turns out, no. We’ll link to the piece. We’ll link to the column at RushLimbaugh.com.  You really need to read the whole thing, particularly near the end when he admits that he didn’t pass the background check because these reasons. He says that’s not the real reason. “[T]he real reason is: Gun manufacturers and the stores that sell them make their money in the dark. Congress, which has so much trouble passing the most basic gun laws, passed a law making it illegal for the federal government to fund research into gun violence. Except for the week or two after massacres…” So guy totally doesn’t get it.  He exhibits his total closed-mindedness. 

It’s quite an informative piece.  

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RUSH:  No, the Sun-Times reporter thought he was turned down not because of his admitted alcohol abuse and admitted spousal abuse. No! They turned him down because he was a reporter, and they didn’t want a reporter to learn how easy it is to give everybody else’s gun.