RUSH: The deadliest school attack in this country — deadliest school attack in American history — was in 1927. That was the Bath School murders. Thirty-eight children and seven adults were killed, including the killer himself. Oh. He didn’t use guns. He used dynamite. That’s right. No guns were used in the deadliest school attack in American history. But some people would say, “Well, wait a minute, Rush. What about Waco? Waco holds the record.”

Yeah, that wasn’t technically a school. But at Waco, 74 men, women, and children died (including 12 children under the age of five). That, by the way, did involve guns. In fact: Government guns, tanks and flamethrowers, and a number of other things. It was the attorney general, Janet Reno. Yeah, 1927 was the deadliest school attack. I know this doesn’t matter because…

(New Castrati impression) “Come on, Mr. Limbaugh! None of us were alive in 1927. You’re just trying to divert people’s…”

No, no. I always like to try to bring perspective to things. Everybody… See, I have this belief. Everybody thinks that history began when they were born. Everybody’s historical perspective begins the day that they were born, and everybody thinks they’re living in the last days. Not everybody, but every generation has people that think it’s over. Every generation, from beginning of time, has people who believe we are in the last days

Whether biblically or otherwise. So if you can point to a time in American history when it was worse than it was today, just to keep a little perspective, that helps. But no, no, no, no. “This is the worst!” Because there’s a political agenda that has to be advanced. So we’re not gonna talk about 1927, we’re not talk about dynamite, we’re not gonna talk about Waco, ’cause that doesn’t help the agenda. And don’t discount the importance of the agenda.

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RUSH: No, it’s true. It’s undeniable. Every generation, every one has people who believe that the days they are alive are the last days, either in a biblical sense or an economic sense or just in an overall sense. Now, the people who believe that today are divided into many groups. They’re called the Preppers. There are other groups, survivalists and so forth. Some of them believe that it is the result of an encroaching, unstoppable big government. Others believe that it’s biblical. Others believe it’s gonna have to do with the economy. That we’re simply gonna run out of stuff for everybody and what you have is gonna come down to what you can take. There will not be a chance to earn anything. I mean, I think that’s a fundamental characteristic of every generation.

Look, let me give you one more stat about the worst school killing in the nation’s history. Again, it took place in Bath Township, Michigan, back in 1927. Thirty-eight children, seven adults killed, including the killer. He used dynamite, not guns. And you know why? His name was Andrew Kehoe, K-e-h-o-e, 55 years old. He was mad at being defeated in the election for town clerk in 1926. Now, how do you stop that? Isn’t that what everybody ostensibly is concerned about now? How do you stop this? And I’m just here to tell you that any effort focused solely on taking guns away from people is not gonna solve this.

Do you know that there are mass killings that have been happening in schools all over the world? Most recently in Germany, Finland, Canada, even in China. And the killers in some of those incidents didn’t use guns. They used knives. There have been at least six mass murder school attacks in China since 2010. The total dead is 21. Ninety have been injured. None of the attacks in China involved guns. They involved knives or cleavers. One involved gasoline. But you see, there’s a political agenda here. And when this event happened, I knew that two things were happening immediately. Aside from everything that we were being told about it being wrong, the media, Democrats and leftists were doing everything they could to find a way to blame this on their political opponents. Not just talk radio. Not just Fox News. But on Republicans, conservatives, or conservative values.

They were looking desperately to find a way. And if you want to pooh-pooh that, I just want to remind you that after the Aurora mass shootings at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, ABC News first reported the shooter was a member of a Tea Party, in an effort to cast aspersions on peaceful, nonviolent conservative Republicans. Of course, it turned out not to be true. After the event involving Gabby Giffords wound badly in Arizona, the first thing they did was try to blame Sarah Palin and then me. They even went so far as to blame a graphic on Sarah Palin’s website that featured crosshairs. Without knowing anything that was the knee-jerk reaction. And the same thing was happening here.

The other part of the agenda that was being advanced was, of course, gun control. And there was glee, there was excitement at the opportunity that was presented here. And I firmly believe that this is why so much of the initial reporting is wrong, is because it’s all the result of a tainted universe in which these people live in the first place. The things that they believe are wrong. The things that guide them are incorrect. About us, at least. And so they start looking for evidence to prove what they feel, because what they are constantly doing is attempting to advance their political agenda. And that is what’s going on with this now.

So any attempt to report factually about it or to try to put it in any kind of perspective is going to be met with complete derision, criticism, mocking, and what have you. When in fact the real sickness in this can be found in the left-wing media. Mark “Maxi” Shields, what did he say? Mark Shields said that it is easier to get an assault rifle than it is to rent a car. Now, that’s not true. It simply isn’t true, but that kind of stuff is out there left and right, and, of course, your average low-information voter hears this, and starts thinking, “Wow, what a rotten country. What a rotten place, a horrible place.” It’s just the sheer volume of incorrect data that is passed on.

John Hinderaker had a post at Power Line: “Desperate to profit by satisfying the publicÂ’s thirst for information about the Sandy Hook murders, news outlets — just about all of them, as far as I can tell — rushed to publicize ‘facts’ that turned out to be largely wrong. They reported that Ryan Lanza was a mass murderer, when in fact he is a respectable accountant who learned of the murders — and his own alleged responsibility — via CNN, while working in his office in Times Square. They reported that the killerÂ’s younger brother was found in the woods after the murders, and was hauled out while protesting his innocence.

“Adam Lanza didnÂ’t have a younger brother, and we have heard nothing further about this second person who supposedly had something to do with the killings. They told us that Nancy Lanza was a kindergarten teacher at Sandy Hook and was murdered in her classroom, along with her students. It turned out that she had no connection to Sandy Hook and was shot at home as she lay in her bed, likely asleep. They reported, entirely falsely, that Lanza had murdered his father in New Jersey. On fact after fact, the news media turned out to be wrong. Likely more errors will emerge over time.”

And these people that are wrong, wrong, wrong, they are the primary news source for a vast majority of people in this country. “The broader and more important question relates to the news mediaÂ’s responsibility for Sandy Hook and similar incidents. As I wrote here, it seems rather obvious that mass murderers like Adam Lanza are inspired in part by a desire for fame, which our news media are happy to supply.”

Now, let me make a brief departure at this point. I have spoken often on this program, I’ve had a deep concern for a number of years over what I have seen throughout the young population of this country is this quest for fame. This desire to have everything known about them, just vomiting details about themselves all over Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever. To me, it’s been a serious problem. Fame is a very seductive thing. See, everybody wants to be known, and everybody wants their life to matter. Everybody wants their life to have meaning.

You look at the influences on young people, and you primarily see it on television, what is it that makes people famous? They have to be on TV. Doesn’t matter how, either. Just getting on TV, you’re famous. But many people are going to ask if, in fact, incidents like this feed off of one another. For example, did the Aurora incident inspire something similar in this case, or did a video game do it, or did a movie? Columbine, what was that? That happened, the guys were trying to copycat what they’d seen in the Matrix movies. Then you had Aurora, a guy dressed up as the Joker in the Batman movie. You had other mass murderers emulating Natural Born Killers.

You throw this out there as a possible answer… We’re trying to find the answer, right? We want to know why this is happening, right? But you go anywhere other than guns, and you are gonna be shot down. (No pun intended.) You’re gonna be ridiculed and laughed off the public debate stage. The same people who are eager to blame Sarah Palin or conservative talk radio or Republicans in general for aberrant acts or behavior like this, are the very same people who deny that there is any inspiration or motivation that comes from movies or books or music.

So, as always, it’s the selective application.

If you really want to stop these from happening, if you really want to stop events like this, you have to take stock of reality and you have to be very honest and assess where we are in American culture in 2012. You can’t apply values from the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties. Or “policies,” I should say. Values would work, but policies? You can’t apply them. Bill Bennett was on Meet the Press yesterday.

He said, “You know what? I’m gonna take a lot of heat for this. I’m gonna take a lot of heat for this, but I think there needs to be at least one responsible person in every school that’s armed.” Why did he think he was gonna take a lot of heat? Why does he think he’s gonna take a lot of heat for that? The fact of the matter is that makes utter, perfect sense. And yet he has to acknowledge, he’s gonna take a lot of heat.

Why? Because everybody’s focusing on the fact that the gun single-handedly is the problem. You want to hear an interesting stat? There are a couple of guys who have done a lot of research into mass shootings. John Lott and William Landis. They are economists, and they did a groundbreaking study in 1999. You know what they found? This is another thing that nobody’s gonna want to hear today. It doesn’t fit the template. It doesn’t fit the narrative that’s been established.

“A common theme of massing shootings is that they occur in places where guns are banned and killers know that they will be unarmed.” Shopping malls, schools, is where they happen. (New Castrati impression) “Mr. Limbaugh, this is absurd. You’re telling us that a mentally disabled, 13-year-old boy would take into account whether they have a gun…?” Yeah.

I’m telling you, this kid was probably a lot smarter than anybody wants to recognize. He probably had an IQ higher than a lot of people want to recognize. He probably did calculate that. One other thing that has been discovered is that these people, these mass murderers stop when a gun is pointed at them. But saying this today is real trouble. It doesn’t fit the agenda, because it makes a gun the solution. “Oh, no! Can’t have that!

“You can’t put guns and the word ‘solution’ in the same sentence. No, no, no, Mr. Limbaugh. You’re missing the whole point. Our problem is too many guns, too easily obtained.” Well, if somebody can convince me — and this has been my argument forever when I run into these low-information, gun control people. And, by the way, some of the smartest, richest, wealthiest idiots I know happen to be pro-gun control.

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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, in the ’90s I found myself at a fashionable, Upper East Side dinner party at a palatial Fifth Avenue apartment owned by wealthy, establishment Republicans. The guests were wealthy establishment Republicans, about 30% of them. Each one of these dinners featured a political topic that was debated either during dinner or after, and this one featured gun control.

A man who had served in the Nixon administration, one of the wealthiest men in this country and supposedly one of the smartest, began his diatribe on guns and how we had to get rid of them. It was senseless. It was stupid. The Second Amendment, we had to abolish it. I said to him (and I’d said this to everybody that I run into that has this belief), “You know what? I’ll give you my gun if you can promise me that when I leave this apartment tonight nobody else out there will have one either.”

“Well, of course that would be a little bit…”

“Well, that’s my whole point,” I said. “Right across Fifth Avenue, there is Central Park. Now, if you can promise me that nobody in Central Park is gonna have a gun tonight when I walk out of your apartment, then maybe we can talk.”

“Well, that’s a shortsighted view.”

“No, it’s not shortsighted at all, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

I said, “You’re just making this argument to make yourself look good, sound good, sound smart, sound whatever. But you’re not thinking. There’s no common sense in what you’re saying.”

He said, “Why do you care about it?”

So I said, “You know why I care? I care about the Constitution. The Constitution is the single greatest document of human liberty and freedom that has ever been devised, and I get very touchy when people want to start messing with it,” and I do.

I think the Constitution is a human miracle.

I think the Constitution and adherence to it are important.

I agree with my friends at Hillsdale College: Therein lies the solution to many of this country’s problems. So that’s why. I am not wedded to guns or the Second Amendment. I love them all. The Second Amendment’s as important as the First is as important as the Fifth at me. I have a reverence and an awe for the Constitution, and, folks, let me tell you what this point is. The guns in this culture are the secondary target here. The primary target is the Constitution itself.

That is what is under assault.

That is what is in the crosshairs of people who are using this tragedy to advance an agenda.

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RUSH: So I checked the e-mail during the break, and people want to know, “Well, what did that guy at the palatial, Republican establishment, Fifth Avenue apartment say to you?” Here’s what happened. The guy starts on his gun control rant to make himself sound like he’s super smart, super caring. You hold the position because you think it says something enlightened about yourself.

I said to him, “If you can guarantee that when I leave your apartment nobody else out there is gonna have a gun, then I might talk to you about it.”

“Well, that’s a very shortsighted view, Mr. Limbaugh.”

“There’s not anything shortsighted about it at all. You’re saying everybody has to give up their guns. Do you think the bad guys are gonna listen to you and give their guns away? Do you think they’re gonna turn ’em in?”

“Well, I think we can work very closely with…”

I said, “Look, there’s no way you can guarantee that I’m gonna be safe out there if I give my gun up. It’s very simple. Right across the street is Fifth Avenue. If you can guarantee me there’s not gonna be a gun in there after I give mine away, I’ll talk to you.”

People ask, what did he say to me? He thought that I was as simple-minded and knee-jerk NRA as I could be. He thought I was the idiot, and that is the reaction that erudite elitists have toward people they think are the hoi polloi.