RUSH: Okay, folks, I’m confused. I’m gonna admit being confused to you here. I’m listening to all of the learned analysis and reaction to the murder/suicide in Kansas City on Saturday, Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend. And the reason I’m confused is because I don’t know if Belcher playing football caused him to murder his girlfriend or if the gun caused him to murder his girlfriend. Because we’re hearing from leftist social reformers that both situations are possible, that it was the game of football that led to brain concussions, which led to all kinds of irrationality and oddities.
There’s a big lawsuit going on, former NFL players against the league, and the same people are telling us it’s the gun that caused the problem. In fact, there’s sympathy. You know, I was watching the game last night, like a lot of people were, and even during the pregame coverage, there was a tad of sympathy for Jovan Belcher. He murdered his girlfriend. You know, that didn’t get a whole lot of play during the day. What got the play was his suicide. He went to Chiefs practice facility on Saturday morning and wanted to thank everybody there for giving him a shot. What a good guy. After murdering his girlfriend, he still wanted to go over and thank people. The fact that he murdered his girlfriend and the mother of his child to boot, sort of got second-tier display.
Then of course last night during halftime Bob Costas devoted 90 seconds to the NBC, slash, HBO official political position on guns. A lot of people sent me e-mails and texts, “How come Costas gets to express his opinion during halftime of Sunday Night Football?” And I said, “The answer’s simple, because that’s the opinion of his bosses. He gets to express the opinion because it’s what NBC thinks. It’s what his friends at HBO think. It’s what the left believes.” And so wherever the commentary is given is perfectly fine. It’s only when commentary that does not comport with the leftist view of things is offered, say, in a football game, that it’s not permissible. But if you’re gonna offer liberal opinion, anywhere is fine, anywhere, no limits to where you can do it. But opinion that differs from the traditional liberal viewpoint is not only frowned upon, it is snuffed out and it is not permitted. So that’s the easy explanation for that.
“Why do you keep mentioning HBO for?”
Well, this is inside baseball, admittedly, but NBC, HBO, in my own observation here, nothing official, but the people involved go back and forth, Saturday Night Live, back and forth to HBO. They’re the same people. They have the same political view. If you want to work at either place you have to be a certain political-type person. That’s just the best way to explain it. Just the way it is. I mean, you can count on the fact, anytime you see anybody, anything on HBO, you’re gonna know what they are, and now it’s the same thing with NBC. It’s all I mean.
I also watched last night the season finale of Boardwalk Empire. There must have been a hundred people shot to death in some of the goriest, bloodiest, violent crime scenes ever depicted on television, by the same people who can’t wait to take guns out of everybody’s hands. So, you know, where are we headed here? We want to ban guns because the gun kills the person, not the person pulling the trigger. And, of course, Costas cited in his commentary last night, Jason Whitlock, who has a column at FoxSports.com, and Whitlock basically said, “Look, all I know is this: If the guy didn’t have a gun he and the girl would be alive today.”
No, we don’t know that, sadly. I’m sure there are knives in this guy’s house. And I’m sure that if he wanted to strangle her, he could have, and he clearly was irrational. The gun and even the availability of it is not why he killed her. The gun and the availability of it is not why he killed himself. But to say that, ladies and gentlemen, is totally unacceptable. To say what I just said is to be blind and to ignore the reality staring at us, because if there were no gun, if he couldn’ta gotten the gun then she’d be alive, he’d be alive, and the baby wouldn’t be an orphan and everything would be hunky dory and the Chiefs might have even lost. Everything would have been as it should have been.
I live in Realville and my problem is that I’m governed by logic. And some of the claims that are made by people on the left just don’t hold up. I mean, look where we are now. If we could just ban guns, if we could just ban soda pop, if we could ban sugar, if we could ban salt, if we could ban trans fats, if we could ban private health insurance, ban oil, if we could ban me, we’d have a perfect world. If we could ban all these things, there wouldn’t be any global warming, there wouldn’t be any suicide, there wouldn’t be any obesity, and there’d be no high blood pressure and there’d be no need for national health care, and then nobody would die.
How many of these murder/suicides do you think take place a year in America? Did you hear that number? Six hundred. And you hear about one because it involves a football player. But the other 599 go by and you don’t hear about them, and so there’s not a lot of emotion ratcheted up. I think, folks, you know, I’ve been talking about how I sense a move to radically alter the way the game of football is played, and it’s actually happened. There have been serious proposals to ban it, high school. And pretty close to serious proposals to ban it in college, because it’s the concussions, you see, that lead to the altered brain activity, which then lead to the irrationality, which then leads to the events like we had on Saturday.
In addition, we’re gonna have to stop eating meat. We’re going to have stop sitting for long periods of time. Hear about that now? There’s a new study out that says sitting has just absolutely dire health consequence. And if you’re sitting, stand up, or you’re going to die. I have the story in the stack here. Incandescent light bulbs. We gotta get rid of the incandescent light bulb and go with the compact fluorescent because the incandescent is causing global warming, which is causing the sea levels to rise, which means that we’re gonna have floods. Like we did have, except it was from a hurricane, which of course also came from global warming and oil and the incandescent light bulb and all of that.
I mean, there are bad people, and there are ill people, and there are irrational people, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Certain things are just going to happen. But you look at the go-to liberal reaction. Every highly publicized death in America is to blame the Second Amendment, to blame American gun laws, which are constitutionally granted, and it seems to me that that’s the cop-out and it’s an easy, almost lazy way, to approach this. Because the real root of such things that happened Saturday are never explored because we can’t.
What we might discover (and we might then have to reveal about our discoveries) would make everybody too uncomfortable to hear. And it might lead to charges of racism and discrimination, and we can’t have that. So we’re never going to get to the root causes of events like this. And, by the way, I’ll never forget this. Shortly before my TV show started in 1992, there was the most senseless shooting.
It was in Chicago, remember? Three-year-olds or five-year-olds were killing three-year-olds with guns and so forth, and I did a little commentary on the radio and then on TV: “Have we lost our soul?” It was about kids that were getting hold of guns and killing kids, and I said, “You know, the gun’s one thing, but what in the world is happening to the culture where such a thing is even possible?”
I wondered, “What has happened to our national soul?” I was curious about getting to the root of all this, which we can’t do, folks. We just have to admit it. It’s not politically correct to go there. But there are root causes for behavior like this. There are societal issues that surround events like what happened in Kansas City over the weekend. You can ask some questions.
I’ll go ahead. (What have I got to lose? They’re gonna ban me anyway. They’ve been trying.) Might there have been a better outcome if there had been a marriage involved between Mr. Belcher and his girlfriend? I don’t know. All I know is that I look at all the statistics on single parenthood and children born out of wedlock and what happens to kids in those circumstances; what happens to the fathers in those circumstances.
And it’s not good.
It just isn’t good. Might there have been a different outcome had somebody been able to recognize that this guy, Jovan Belcher, was not right? Was he depressed? You read the news accounts. They’re all over the place. “It was the ideal relationship.” “No, it wasn’t! He was a drunk, and he was on prescription medication,” and, “He was suffering from concussions and brain damage.”
Then, “No, the team has no record of any brain damage or injury.” So we don’t know what to believe. The stories are all over the ballpark. Could we maybe get the feminists of this country to honestly address the subject of violence against women? Instead of making it a political issue to go after conservatives, how about actually looking at it and who is involved in it and why it happens, rather than simply using it as a political football to advance liberalism?
Could we talk about the damage that decades of liberalism have done to the American family, particularly minority families? They’ve busted ’em up. The federal government has been the breadwinner. It wasn’t in this case, but nevertheless there is a social disintegration taking place in way too many parts of this country, and there are reasons why it is happening. And this deterioration and this cultural rot is often glorified.
It’s held up as something to emulate and be part of, ’cause it’s cool, because it’s different, because it isn’t traditional. Of course, “tradition” is old-fashioned and stodgy and is therefore the enemy. For example, if we hadn’t taken religion out of as many lives as we apparently have, would the situation have been different? I don’t know. I’m just throwing out some possibilities other than the gun.
Because a really disturbed individual was disturbed long before he got the gun.
A really disturbed individual was really disturbed, or snapped, long before he got the gun. I’d like to know how long he had the gun before he used it. Why didn’t he use it the minute he got it if the gun is what causes this to happen? But never… (sigh) Folks, this is probably the last that will be said of this point of view on this, ’cause this is not politically correct, and it’s not sensitive and so forth.
So we’ve gotta get rid of the gun.
It’s the gun, otherwise everybody still be alive. Everybody that’s dead in this country because of a gun would be alive if there were no guns.
That’s the theory, among many others.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: In his halftime commentary last night, Bob Costas quoted Jason Whitlock. One of the things that he quoted Jason Whitlock as saying is, “Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws. They tempt us to escalate arguments and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.” Now, let me respectfully dissent from this. How many places do we know where the citizenry is allowed to carry guns, and the crime rate has gone down?
The crime rate.
How many places do we know with the strictest gun control laws, which also have the highest crime rates in the country? I give you two off the top of my head. One would be Washington, DC, and the next would be New York City. Both places have among the most stringent — the tightest — gun control laws in the country, and yet gun crime is through the roof in both places. I’ll do a Google search on it and I’ll find it for you, the number of towns/communities where citizens are allowed to carry.
You’ll see that crime goes down. When the bad guys know that the good guys are also armed, crime goes down. And what troubles me, folks, is that in all of these scenarios, it’s always the good guys who are blamed. Jovan Belcher was not a good guy. He murdered his girlfriend, the mother of his child. Now, there will be, mark my words, an attempt to have this blamed on football and concussions and head injuries.
Because that’s the trend. It’s where we’re headed. This has been the trend in the NFL for quite a while now. So it’s a convenient way to explain what happened. I mean, it was kind of surreal, almost surreal watching the NFL yesterday as you listened to people talk about this. As I mentioned, you had to really listen closely to be reminded that Mr. Belcher killed — murdered! — his girlfriend.
The story that was told was how he went to the practice facility and ran into the general manager, Scott Pioli, and asked him to get the head coach and an assistant coach (Romeo Crennel and Gary Gibbs) to come out and he spent time thanking them for his shot. He was a free agent. He was not drafted. He went to a small school in Maine, not considered a football factory. Yet he made it. Starting linebacker for the Chiefs.
So he’s thanking these guys, and the story is that they failed to reach him. They were doing everything they could to talk him out of killing himself. But the overall tone of this is, “What a great guy! He shows up and he wants to thank the coaches.” You had to really search for the first part of this story, and that is that he murdered his girlfriend. It was there. It was not that they hid it, but that didn’t comport with the picture that they wanted to paint about this.
So I think it’s pretty safe to assume that a number of cliches which are untrue will now gain even more agreement, and that is that handguns do not enhance safety. You can show where they do, and I’m sorry if it offends you. You can show where the strictest gun laws in the country have no impact on crime. In fact, the highest crime rates in the country are in those places. You don’t hear about it ’cause it didn’t fit the narrative. It didn’t fit the template.
Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend nine times.
There’s something more going on here than just the fact that he had a gun. And you watch. Before it’s all said and done, it’ll be football.
Concussions, brain injury, and so forth.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s a woman by the name of Nicole Brown Simpson. She was at one time alive, but now she’s dead. And do you know what killed her? No, a man. I don’t care, a human being killed her. It’s a trick question. The answer is a knife. But the knife didn’t kill her. It was the instrument of death. The knife is an inanimate object incapable of doing anything without being in somebody’s hands. Somebody using the knife killed Nicole Brown Simpson. So it didn’t matter, got two points here. There wasn’t a gun, and Nicole brown Simpson’s still dead. It was a knife. The question, who killed or what killed Nicole Brown Simpson, the answer is not a knife. Yeah, she died of knife wounds, but somebody had to pick up the knife and use it, is my point. The same thing with guns.
Let me give you some of these statistics quickly before I run on to make another point here. A bunch of websites, fact checks and stuff that I checked during the break, here’s a stat for you. The 31 states that have “shall issue” laws allowing private citizens to carry concealed weapons have, on average, a 24% lower violent crime rate, a 19% lower murder rate, and a 39% lower robbery rate than states that forbid concealed weapons. States with concealed weapon laws allowing the law-abiding to carry experience much less of the kind of crime that happened Saturday in Kansas City than states which do not allow concealed carry laws.
Mr. Whitlock is just wrong. But he’s wrong in a cliched way that has become standard operating procedure belief for the left. Guns kill people, people don’t kill people. All people are good. It’s just external forces and influences usually brought on by Republicans that cause them to do bad things, or policies brought on by Republicans that cause them to do bad things. This is from the Cato Institute, by the way, in case you want the source. Thirty-one states have concealed carry laws: 24% lower violent crime rate, 19% lower murder rate, 39% lower robbery rate than states that forbid concealed carry weapons.
In fact, the nine states with the lowest violent crime rates, every one of them are all right-to-carry-weapon states, right to conceal. The nine states with the lowest violent crime, because the bad guys know the good guy is likely armed, and if the bad guys are the aggressors who set the rules, it’s the good guys who have to defend themselves. The good guys are not responsible for this. The good guys, by definition, they’re good guys. They don’t commit crimes. That’s another thing. You can have all the gun laws in the world you want, if somebody wants a gun they’re going to go get one. It’s called crime.
Chicago has some of the most stringent gun control laws in this country. How many people are being killed every day in that city? How many? This is just a truth that people do not really want to delve into. It’s a truth that many people don’t want to accept ’cause it’s very harsh. It’s very easy to blame the gun, and you can score a lot of points by doing what Costas did. You can score a lot of points by doing what Whitlock did. You can score a lot of points with your bosses. You score a lot of points with the people that you want to score points with. Just come out against the gun, just come out for gun control. That’s why I say being a liberal is one of the easiest choices in life in the world. You don’t have to tackle anything hard. You don’t have to really do anything. You just have to make people think that you follow the pop culture conventional wisdom on whatever the issue happens to be.
I was watching another television show that I kind of like. It’s a British show on the BBC. It’s called The Hour. And season two just began. Episode one of season two, there’s a guy, one of the lead characters in the show, between the season finale of season one and the first episode of season two, has apparently gone on sabbatical and traveled the world and part of his travels were to America. In 1956, 1957 is when the show is set. And it’s about the BBC, by the way, the show is about the BBC and a television program called The Hour. It’s sort of a forerunner to 60 Minutes in the early days of black-and-white television.
This lead character, in one of his first scenes in season one, episode two, is telling the lead anchor, who’s a typical dolt of this show, “You know, I just got back from America. You know what I liked about America? I was a nobody. I was a nobody in a country filled with people who think they can be somebody. They all think they can be somebody in America. And you know what? That was infectious. It made me want that. So I’m back here,” he says to this character, “and I want to be the best I can be.”
Now, the implication was not lost on me. British culture at the time, it’s the waning days of the British empire, but the obvious inference, that the idea of being the best you could be is not something that was part of life in Great Britain, like it was in America. Distinctive American exceptionalism: a Brit sees America for the first time and is blown away about how people that are nobody think they can someday be somebody. I heard that line go back and I hit pause, and I grabbed my iPhone, and I made a note so that I would remember to talk about it today. Because that, to me, is all part of American exceptionalism. The idea that you can be whatever you want in this country, the idea that the sky is the limit. You want to be somebody, you can.
Now, what I fear, is there’s less and less of that thinking in this country, and it’s been replaced by more and more defeatism, more and more fatalism, and to the extent that there are still people running around saying, “I want to be the best I can be. I want to be somebody.” They want to be on TMZ every night or they want to be on Bachelorette or they want to be featured in their house on crib of the week, on MTV 8. Yeah, of course I know about crib of the week. I know all about pop culture. How could I talk about it if I didn’t know about it? Absolutely I know about crib of the week. Crib of the month, too.
My point is, and I’m gonna circle back here to Jovan Belcher and the crime rate in Chicago and all of the social rot that’s occurring in this country, and I’m gonna tell you, folks, that what we are discussing here in trying to explain why Jovan Belcher did what he did, for those seriously interested in finding the answer and don’t want to take the easy route and blame guns. Those who really want to find the answer, in the process you have to admit that you and I have as one of the primary fears that we have in this country, one of the primary motivations for us to go out and vote, was in virtually every walk of life — political, cultural, social — we are concerned about the rot that’s taking place across our culture.
From the highest levels of politics to the highest levels of corporate business, to the highest levels of any industry, to the lowest levels of society, there’s a cultural rot and evaporation, a blurring of the lines which defined morality: right, wrong, good or bad. Now it’s risky territory to wade into the water and say something’s wrong, because that means you’re judging, and you don’t have that right. And I would submit that the thing that has all of us uneasy, those of us who are uneasy, it’s not the fiscal cliff. It’s a symptom. It’s not four more years of Obama. It’s four years of the people who elected him. It’s what has happened.
Have we really reached the tipping point where we’re now like Great Britain in the fifties, where there’s no real thought that you can be somebody in this country? It’s over. Kids are not gonna do better than their parents. All of these things? I mean, I don’t care what issue you’re talking about, be it political, social, cultural. This is what’s bothering us. What is happening to…?
However you want to label it: The sense of propriety, sense of right and wrong, the moral code, our soul. However you wish to characterize it, we’re all uneasy, because the things that seemed to used to hold the culture together, the population together — that seemed to unify us all — have been blown to smithereens. It’s very hard to identify them, it’s very hard to point out ’cause it seems so… everywhere. It seems like you can’t count on any institution to be what you always thought it was.
I mean, we’ve got the commanding officer in Afghanistan with hundreds, thousands, whatever, tweets to a socialite in Tampa who is, in her mind, an actual consulate to South Korea, asking for diplomatic protection? It’s absurd. We got General Petraeus, four-stars, the most respected among us. Of course, there’s Obama. I mean, they’re all over the place. And it seems like that the more outrageous, the more disgusting, the more rewarded!
And then I was thinking, “Okay, but doesn’t this happen all the time, and are maybe those of us that feel this way are aging? Is this maybe a sign that we’ve become what we vowed we would never become, and that is our parents?” When I was growing up, the Beatles were, to my parents, what the cultural rot today is. (interruption) Snerdley, it was to them and I’m saying, “Is it no different today than it was then?”
(interruption) Well, you think it’s a lot different. You think so. It does seem to me that there’s a lot less glue. There’s a lot less agreement in the population at large over what the good things in life are, how to achieve them, how to acquire them, how to live your life and so forth. It does seem that there’s an entirely different cultural and societal structure that exists today. The reason it has me alarmed, the reason it makes me think that it is different than it was when parents were scared to death of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?
If you look at the lyrics of Beatle songs, they’re all about love. If you look at the lyrics of pop music today, it’s all about killing cops — or worse — or what have you. My only point is this Jovan Belcher thing highlights for a lot of us something that really, really concerns us, and it’s not just that the politics of today seem so screwed up. It just seems that everywhere you look in the country, the majority doesn’t look like what you all thought America was not too many years ago.