RUSH: Hey, guess what, folks? Obama is TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. What a shock. What an absolute shock. And wait ’til you hear why TIME Magazine chose him. It is a vindication of me, your host, El Squisho, El Rushbo here at the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute. TIME Magazine actually goes out and they say Obama is president because people that don’t know anything voted for him in greater numbers than anybody else. And that is a testament to his strength, to be able to convince people that don’t know anything to vote for him.

Obama is attempting to upstage me yet again even now, announcing from the White House that’s going to put — you may have heard this by now — Joe Biden will be in charge of the regime’s effort to end gun violence, which, now, honestly makes me wonder just how serious an effort this will be. After all, the vice president was the man who was put in charge of making sure there was no waste in the stimulus, and, ahem, Biden was also the man put in charge of protecting the middle class in the first four years. And now the vice president of the United States has been put in charge of the regime’s effort to end gun violence.

You know the problem that we have in all of this? A friend of mine sent me a note last night, his father is a psychiatrist. It was a long note. The friend tells me that his father’s biggest fear was every night dreading a phone call from a patient threatening suicide, the biggest fear that he dealt with, because was dealing with people that needed to be committed and oftentimes would refuse to be. It was a very, very pressure-packed existence. And my friend, the note says, one of his father’s beliefs as a practicing psychiatrist — you know, Shakespeare said, “brevity is the soul of wit.” The fewest amount of words necessary make the most powerful point. This is one of those sentences.

“It is rare to find collective solutions to individual problems.”

Now, many people would say, “What do you mean individual problems? This is a societal problem, Rush. Kids are blowing up people, and people are blowing up movie theaters.” Now, see, this is even better, because look at what we’re doing. Every time something like this happens, what is the first natural instinct people have? Blame all of us. Our society, our culture, and there may be, obviously, cultural rot going on, and there may be things that need to be addressed, but it’s still an individual. Nobody actually put the gun in the kid’s hand and sent him to the school. He did it. Adam Lanza did it, as an individual.

He didn’t tell anybody he was going to do it. He didn’t have a team behind him. He didn’t have a pregame meal. He didn’t have a coach telling him how to do it the night before. He was on his own. And yet we attempt to apply a collective solution to it because we make it out of our own psychiatric or psychological needs, our own problem. As something about us. There’s something wrong with us. There’s something wrong with society at large. And this, by the way, is what enables the Democrats to instantly politicize events like this, is this immediate reaction that we’re all responsible, we’re all to blame, that there is a collective solution to individual problems. And there isn’t.

There is no law that we could all get together on and agree and then pass and have Obama sign that’s gonna stop this. There is no collective solution. People who think there are collective solutions write books with titles like “It Takes a Village to Raise an Idiot.” And we know who the collectivists among us are. They are almost exclusively Democrats. But, for example, gun laws — and there’s gonna be a slew of them now attempted, especially Bite Me. In case you don’t know, Bite Me has a… I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That makes people nervous. That’s disrespectful and a little bit off-putting. The vice president has a long…

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Well, I’m trying to be less threatening, Mr. Snerdley. I’m trying to make young women less nervous as they listen to the program. I’m trying to sound less confident, less sure of myself. In fact, from the earliest days of this program, from the earliest days of criticism, what did I always tell you? The people who didn’t like this program didn’t because I sounded so sure of myself. Nobody’s that sure of themselves. Nobody. Everybody has doubts. Everybody is indecisive, everybody. And I come along and I sound so damn sure about everything, it’s threatening. And I want to be less threatening. I want to be more metrosexual, except for the weight loss. I don’t want to go that far.

But, at any rate, the vice president has a long history as a gun grabber. He really does. Joe Biden has never seen a gun control law that he did not like. So you know and I know that we’re going to get, before the emotional reservoir that’s overflowing, before that dissipates, we’re gonna get a lot of people try a lot of gun laws to capitalize on this fever pitch emotion that everybody’s feeling right now and try to take advantage of something that’s impossible: a collective solution to an individual problem. Now, by the way, I don’t want to be misunderstood on this. I’m not saying that books, movies, TV shows, all these influences are irrelevant and don’t play a role, but that does not mean that we all have culpability.

One of the left’s tricks here in an event like this, I mean, they are the blame-America-first crowd on practically everything. I don’t care if it’s global warming, war, starvation, thirst, pestilence, whatever it is, it’s our fault. In fact, that’s the foundational girding of their whole belief system that America needs to be fixed, that America is imperfect, it’s unjustly, immorally founded, as Obama believes. There is no collective solution to individual problems. Gun laws will not cure emotionally ill human beings, will they? All the gun laws in the world are not gonna cure mental illness. All the gun laws in the world are not gonna prevent people who really want to go get a gun from getting one. So why are we gonna do it? Feel better, feel less guilty, less responsible, less culpable, and, and after all that, feel like we’re doing something.

What’s the phrase? “I want to make a difference.” Yeah, I want to make a difference. And people want to make a difference and want to feel like their lives mean something. So it’s seductive, collective solutions to individual problems is very seductive. It’s how Obama gets elected, by the way. Collective solution to you not having a job. Collective solution to you not having the house you want. Collective solution to you not having the cell phone plan that you want. But gun laws will not cure emotionally ill people. What we can do is let people know some of the things that stir up emotional instability.

For example, in this case, the story’s out now that the kid may have gone over the edge at the thought of being committed. In fact, there are a couple of stories I have seen that tell the story of a person who was told they’re gonna be committed and they committed suicide. They didn’t want to be committed, didn’t want to go to the funny farm. That may have been a factor here, according to some news stories.

But movies and drugs and video games are more harmful to some people. Some people are particularly vulnerable to that stuff. Now, I watch trash. I can’t escape it. I watch filth now and then ’til I figure what it is, and maybe if it makes me curious I’ll stick with it for a while. The point is, it doesn’t turn me into any of these things and it doesn’t turn most people away from who they really are. But it does on some people.

But you can’t have a collective solution that applies to everybody that takes everybody’s freedom away, for example, in order to try to stop the one or two or few exceptions that are out there. There are some young people who haven’t fully formed their neurological systems, much less their morals and ethics. So external influences are going to have more effect on them than on others.

Movies, drugs, video games are more harmful to some people than tobacco is, for example. Yet look at the high horse we’re on about tobacco. Tobacco, to the extent that people believe it’s a killer (and they do), it’s a long-term killer. I mean, if you wanted to kill somebody today, you would not use tobacco, for example. But tobacco, like some of these other influences, can cause harm decades after its use, and it restricts itself to its user.

And if you’re on tobacco, you can work. It doesn’t impair your ability to do your job or anything else. It’s just now become so societally unacceptable. Yet what do we do? We pass laws restricting smoking for adults and we advertise fantasy games of mass murder that are used every day of children’s lives, and we produce movies that fantasize all these horrible things. And the dead don’t always stay dead. They come back to life.

A young, impressionable kid watches Pulp Fiction, and the next day they see John Travolta in the Bahamas after he got shot in Pulp Fiction. “Wow. Okay, so he really doesn’t die.” Depending on who’s watching it, that can be the conclusion. The problems of violent crime by mentally ill people challenge the best minds in the behavioral sciences. I think it’s a joke to have the president show up anywhere. Any president. Clinton did it in Oklahoma City.

The president doesn’t have the answers here, but we’re willing to invest in the idea that the president has the answers, particularly when you have somebody like Obama who cares so much. But I’ll tell you, it’s misleading. It is a false sense of security to trot out a president to appear before the parents of children who’ve been murdered and have him say that had tighter gun laws been passed, the crime would never have been committed.

That is irresponsible. It’s intellectual fraud.

But it’s exactly what we do.

Because it works.

It does have the ability, because of the evolution of our society and culture, to place all this faith and belief in one man, the president (no matter who he is) to fix all these things. But it doesn’t, really, fix anything. And if you have somebody irresponsible in office who’s willing to use these emotions to further advance a political agenda that has nothing to do with mental health or preventing further events, then you have a problem, and that’s what I think we have.