RUSH: Now, when I mentioned the politicization of this, the full mad dash is on for gun control. Now, what does that mean? What does it actually mean? What does the left really want? I’ll tell you what they want. They want the confiscation of every known weapon in this country. That’s what they mean by gun control. Nothing less than that. Never mind that that’s not possible. That’s what they mean. They will never say it, because I don’t think they’ve got the guts to.
You know something strange about this? I’m listening to all these people demanding we have new laws and new regulations and a new movement to get guns out of the people’s hands. And who are the people saying this? In many cases, these are the people trying to tell us that Donald Trump’s the next Hitler or the next Benito Mussolini.
Now, if you happen to be one of these lunatics on the left demanding that everybody be forced to give up their guns and you also believe that Donald Trump is the next Mussolini or Hitler, you realize what a great contradiction you’re making? You think you’re being led by the next totalitarian tyrant who is going to start putting political prisoners in jail and committing genocide against people he doesn’t like. At the same time you want to take away from yourselves and everybody else the primary way of defending against such a tyrant? Guns.
These people are lunatics. If they really thought that Trump was Mussolini or the oncoming Hitler they would want to arm up and be able to ward off any agents that Trump sent to their house to snatch ’em up and put ’em in jail. These people are cockeyed. They’re literally cockeyed. The Democrats, they come along and they won’t be honest about what they’re actually demanding, what they actually want. They don’t have the guts. Just like they don’t have the guts to tell you the truth about any aspect of their agenda. They have to camouflage that or mask it or just outright lie about it, and they’re trying to do end runs on this whole gun control thing.
They’re not making any sense about anything except they are connecting emotionally. Jimmy Kimmel is making no sense whatsoever, but it sounds sincere. Remember what J.R. Ewing said. “Once you figure out how to fake sincerity, you can do anything.” Once you know how to fake sincerity, you don’t need integrity. You can fool people all day and all night.
There’s also another stat running out there that we need to deal with today. It’s been showing up in the New York Times, and the head coach of the New Orleans Saints, Sean Payton, fell for it. I didn’t know, but Sean Payton apparently is a Republican. He’s the coach of the Ain’ts, and the New York Times a couple days ago had a stat that caused Sean Payton to say (paraphrasing), “Our gun laws are not working. We gotta change our gun laws. I saw the stat in the New York Times, it’s outrageous.”
And the stat is that more Americans have died due to domestic gunfire in the United States than in all American wars combined. Now, while the numbers may be close to being true, it doesn’t get anywhere near telling the true story. And a column in the Washington Post written by somebody from Nate Silver’s website — if this woman ever gets another byline — have you seen this? If this woman ever gets another byline in the Drive-By Media, I’ll be stunned. I’ll be stunned. This woman basically blew to smithereens the whole idea that gun control would work.
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RUSH: Okay. Here’s the statistic. Nicholas Kristof, August 27th, 2015, or thereabouts, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote that more Americans are killed by guns since 1968 than in all U.S. wars. Now, killed by guns means people were minding their own business and somebody came up and shot ’em.
And they conflate this as murder when they start running these numbers, talking about the number of people who died via guns. The murder rate in the United States does not get anywhere near equaling the number of Americans killed in U.S. wars.
We gotta get up every day and listen to the lies and the half-truths and spend a lot of time defending this stuff and blowing the lies to smithereens and correcting it with the truth. So we gotta do it again here today on this.
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RUSH: The way to express this stat, more Americans killed by guns since 1968 than in all U.S. wars, the New York Times has been running this and Sean Payton saw it, he said, “I saw this on the NBC Sports Talk website yesterday,” so it was Monday when Payton would have seen it. He’s a Republican. This is how it works. “We’ve gotta change our laws. Obviously what we are doing now isn’t working.”
So everybody harped on it because he’s a Republican, he’s an NFL coach. “Oh, man, it really must be bad, the Republicans are losing support on this.” And, you know, the New York Times is considered a bible and infallible by way too many people. People don’t understand the New York Times is nothing more than your average leftist organization which is pushing an agenda and does not do news anymore.
There isn’t any news in media, or very little. News defined as a reporter somewhere where you aren’t and recording what happened there and then telling you. That’s what news is. That’s not what’s happening. News is “how can we get Trump” is essentially what the news is today. How can we expose Trump, how can we damage Trump, how can we ruin Trump, how can we separate Trump from his voters. That’s the agenda in the American Drive-By Media today.
So you have a statistic like this. The New York Times is leading the media charge on trying to get rid of the Second Amendment, which is the objective that they all have, and everything they report about it is aimed to further that policy or that hope. But the vast majority of gun deaths in America are by way of suicide, not murder. If you want to compare the number of people who die in war compared to the number of people who are shot with guns in America, the number is one-fourth.
Twenty-five percent, one quarter of deaths by guns are from homicide. The rest are suicides or accidental deaths. And of the homicides, it’s usually male on male, and a majority of it is gang related. The murder rate cops v. citizens is so tiny it barely shows up, and yet look at what we’re doing! A statistic that is so insignificant it barely shows up is now causing all kinds of hell and havoc in the National Football League.
And now in the effort of the left to literally confiscate guns, because that’s what they want, they publish misleading statistics. And when you hear that more people have died by gunfire in America since 1968 than all loss of life in wars since the beginning of the country, you go, “Whoa!” But it’s not true.
Suicide’s not homicide. But they want you to believe that every gun death is the result of somebody killing somebody. And technically, it is, but the vast majority of deaths with guns in America are suicide. They are not homicide. But the New York Times has got this lie halfway around the world before this program starts every day. So we constantly play catchup.
She admits that she used to believe after every incident such as Las Vegas or Sandy Hook or what happened out in Arizona with Gabby Giffords, she used to be one of these who just instinctively, reflexively started shouting, “Gun control, gun control, gun control, we need more gun control.” So she and her like-minded statisticians and friends at FiveThirtyEight undertook an in-depth research project to prove to themselves that what they were demanding could happen and would make a difference.
And here’s the headline accompanying her story after such research, quote, “I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.” Have you, by the way, heard about this, folks? Brian, have you heard about this story? Have you seen this, Dawn? Have you seen this on cable news? Mr. Snerdley, you said you saw the story, but have you seen it discussed on TV anywhere? No.
The story’s been suppressed. I mean, it was published, but it obviously hasn’t gone much farther than the Washington Post because it just destroys everything the left is trying to get done. It destroys the reasoning, the logic, the facts. It destroys everything by way of leftist research. Here’s how she opens her piece.
“Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.”
Make guns less deadly. A gun is not deadly. It’s who’s holding it that makes it deadly. But you’re never gonna convince a leftist to look at it that way, but a gun is an inanimate object which cannot pick itself up. A gun doesn’t hate anybody. A gun doesn’t have any prejudice, a gun doesn’t have any bigotry, and a gun cannot fire itself. And it doesn’t care who it’s aimed at. It doesn’t even know, much like a fish doesn’t even know it’s in water.
And then she writes, “Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence.”
This is profound from whom it is coming from. Folks, this is profound. She bought in like every leftist does that you can make a gun less deadly, that you can ban assault weapons. These leftists don’t even know what they’re talking about, which she’ll get to here. They don’t even know what they’re talking about when they start talking about assault weapons. They don’t know what they’re talking about when they start talking about semiautomatic.
They don’t know what they’re talking about when they start restricting silencers ’cause they’ve watched too much TV. A silencer is not what you see on a TV show. A silencer does not go pfft, pfft. It’s much louder. It’s not even a silencer. It’s called a suppressor, and it’s to protect the ears of the shooter. Or shrinking magazine sizes. All of these alterations to the guns, she was part of the pack that believed doing those would make the guns less lethal, and she found out that’s pointless, hopeless, and irrelevant.
The only way she said that these deaths might be prevented is by narrowly tailoring interventions, like finding out who’s gonna kill themselves and stopping them. “After a shooting in Las Vegas left at least 58 people dead and injured hundreds, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Oct. 2 said Congress’s failure to pass gun-control legislation amounts to an ‘unintentional endorsement’ of mass shootings.”
Well, she says, “I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be.” I’ll tell you why. She went and looked around the world where they have the strictest gun laws in the world and found they didn’t make any difference. Just as they don’t make any difference in Chicago. Which is only common sense!
Laws do not stop behavior. Laws define improper, proper criminal behavior and proscribe punishment. Law is how society, in effect, charts its virtue and morality. And in some cases, law does provide disincentive, but not universally. We have laws against murder, and people still do it. And she said I figured this out going around the world and looking at places with strong gun laws and finding out that it didn’t matter.
“When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an ‘assault weapon.'” And she was shocked. She was stunned. You know why? Well, she, like everybody else, pays attention to the Drive-By Media. An assault weapon ban, semiautomatic, is how every gun is referenced. And so she was part of the crowd that was led to believe that gun owners are among the most serious reprobates in our society, and they want assault weapons. They’re not hunters. You’ve heard ’em say this. They’re not hunters. These are guys that want assault weapons and semiautomatic.
She found out no gun owner walks into the store to buy an assault weapon. And then she writes this. “It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip.” She found out that those are the qualifications for assault weapon, not massively big magazine, not semiautomatic or automatic firing.
She was shocked when she learned that everything she thought she knew wasn’t true. And she was stunned when she found out that people that go to gun stores to buy guns are not walking in looking for, quote, unquote, assault weapons. It’s the Washington Post published this, and is it ever an eye-opener, because it exposes how the left’s using the media to move their agenda forward has succeeded.
She says, “But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.” Any hobbyist can attach a bayonet mount, a rocket propelled grenade launcher, a folding stock or a pistol grip. She was surprised to learn that’s what an assault weapon is and nobody walks in to buy one.
Then she talks about silencers and how that’s not what they are; they’re suppressors. Hollywood has created incorrect misinformation about silencers. They don’t go pfft pfft pfft and nobody can hear when you fire. She said the suppressor on an AR-15, which is the hated weapon of the day, the hated weapon of the moment, a suppressor, a, quote, unquote, silencer on an AR-15 is as loud as a jackhammer.
And there’s still some to go in this. But you get the drift here. She deigned to look in, after all of these deaths, to find out how to make guns less lethal, and everything she found contradicted everything she’d been led to believe.
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RUSH: One more paragraph here from Leah Libresco, the Washington Post. “As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference.”
Do you realize how profound this is, for somebody like this to be admitting this, published in the Washington Post. They kept looking at the data, less and less it seemed that broad stroke gun control restrictions would make a difference. Here’s the stat, folks: “Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides.” They’re not mass shootings. They’re not murders. Two-thirds are suicides. And there’s not a single proposed restriction on guns that would change that. Not a single one.
She said, “I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?” There’s not a single piece of legislation, there’s not a new regulation, there’s nothing Washington can do to change this. She’s absolutely right.
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RUSH: This piece from the Washington Post, we’re gonna highlight the link to this piece at RushLimbaugh.com. ‘Cause listen to this, now. Again, this author is a former news writer at FiveThirtyEight.com, the Nate Silver website that crunches big data numbers and forecasts election outcomes for Democrats, until it looks like they’re gonna lose, and then against Democrats. But it’s a Drive-By Media site and it’s highly respected and very, very eagerly anticipated, each statistical post.
And this writer, Leah Libresco was somebody who believed that guns could be made less dangerous. Guns could be made less deadly with the proper federal legislation and regulations. She believed that you can turn a gun into not being an assault rifle and make it less dangerous. Then she found out what actually makes a gun an assault rifle or assault weapon and it’s add-on things like a bayonet mount, a rocket propelled grenade launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip.
The gun by itself is an inanimate object. But the left believes that there’s magic legislation that can make guns less dangerous, that we could perfect guns. Actually, they don’t think that. What they want is every gun confiscated. Now, many of them will not have the guts to say that, because they don’t want to expose themselves. They know there’s no way that’s gonna happen, but that’s what they really want.
So they try to get closer and closer and closer to it. But they won’t be honest with you about that, just like they won’t be honest about any of their agenda. So this woman starts researching, she and her team found out that everything they thought they believed was wrong, found out that two-thirds of all gun deaths in the United States are suicides and that there’s not a single federal restriction that would change it.
How do you outlaw suicide? What federal regulation do you pass that will stop suicide? And she’s rightly concluded, there isn’t one. So she said the solution here is not dealing with the guns, but finding a way to get to people who are suicidal and giving them counseling or therapy to talk them out of it. Nothing to do with the guns. And it was a sad, sad discovery. ‘Cause everything she believed, or much of what she believed, blew up.
She traveled around the world and found all these strict gun laws and found out they weren’t making any difference. She didn’t have to go to Australia or U.K. Could have gone to Chicago. Could have gone to Washington. “By the time we published our project,” she says, “I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.”
In other words, she says that most of the left that is touting gun control legislation comes up with things that the NRA is gonna stand up and oppose right off the bat. And she found out she can’t endorse things whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. That’s not going to accomplish anything. But in noticing this, what did she reveal? She revealed that one of the tactics here is to be provocative and to cause the NRA and the gun lobby and gun owners to stand up in righteous indignation and make of themselves bigger targets.
“While the attack on the Las Vegas strip is the deadliest in modern American history, attacks in the 19th and 20th centuries had higher death tolls.” Did you know that? She concludes by saying: “We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.”
Let me read this to you again, because it’s interesting from whom it comes. “We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.”
In other words, she, in her own way, is admitting that the gun is nothing until it’s in the hands of an evildoer or someone who is suicidal.
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RUSH: Rusty, Little Falls, New Jersey. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Yes, sir. Second-time caller. I just wanted to comment, I’m a retired police officer, and I believe it was after Columbine, in New Jersey they tried to pass a law to limit the amount of bullets to six in any weapon. And we got a directive from the attorney general that the police, they started with the police, could only carry six bullets in their weapon.
We had a semiautomatic at the time which held 13, and they wanted to take our magazines away and put in modified ones. Many officers, myself included, refused to do that and said if you want us to have six bullets, give us revolvers back. And eventually the measure was defeated. But with gun control, they’re not just after the average person’s gun. They want law enforcement’s guns also.
RUSH: That’s absolutely true. That’s a good point. Well, not only have they succeeded in limiting the amount of ammo that you can put in any weapon, they are now enforcing weaponless security staff and personnel. And in some places, the cops are not allowed to be carrying. And it’s all under a false premise. Folks, the left lies to you, the Democrat Party lies to you, it’s so frequent, it’s safer to believe that you’re being lied to every time and then be shocked when you’re not. Rather than trust ’em.
By the way, when it does happen, like in Chicago, it’s ignored where it happens in Democrat-run places. But I mean it’s irresponsible the way they’re going about this. And what they’re doing is actually ratcheting up gun sales. Obama was one of the best friends the NRA ever had, as it turns out. And I have to think they know this. You know, that’s the thing.
Here’s another point. I made this earlier in the busy broadcast. You have an ongoing number of delusional leftists. I don’t even want to mention names ’cause I don’t like amplifying these people’s recognition. But they’re television hosts or they’re bloggers and they’re out there, and they’re all over the place. They’re mainstream leftists. These are not kook fringe people. They’re kooks, but they’re not on the left-wing kook fringe.
They’re right in the middle of the left’s mainstream, suggesting that Donald Trump is the next Hitler and Donald Trump is Mussolini, that Donald Trump is this giant tyrant-in-waiting, and he’s just waiting for the moment to take over everything. And he’s gonna demand that you do this and deny that you can — They live in total fear. And yet what are they doing at the same time? They’re advocating that they and other citizens be forced to get rid of their guns.
Now, if you really believe that the Trumpster is Mussolini-in-waiting and if you really believe that we have a tyrant-in-waiting who’s going to start imposing totalitarianism, why are you gonna take away your number one weapon to oppose him, and in the process thereby understanding what the Second Amendment’s really all about. Did this make sense to you, Mr. Snerdley? I mean, if you thought, if you thought Obama was literally gonna become Hugo Chavez, would it make any sense for you to be running around telling everybody they needed to get rid of their gun? It wouldn’t, of course, but that’s what the left is doing.
They’re stupid. They don’t even think half way through these things they supposedly believe. There isn’t a magic new gun control law that will stop this. This is the kind of stuff drives Jimmy Kimmel crazy. (imitating Kimmel) “Of course there is, of course!” No, Jimmy, there isn’t. There’s not a law you can pass that will change the way guns behave. Because there’s not a law out there that dictates how guns behave. There isn’t a new regulation or a series of them, there’s not a new law that you can pass. We already have laws against murder. We have laws against all kinds of behavior that still happens.
What are you gonna do to stop suicide? When you find out that two-thirds of gun deaths in America are the result of suicide, tell me the gun control law that you’re gonna pass that will stop that or seriously reduce the number of suicides. “Well, we’re just gonna make sure they don’t get the gun. We’re gonna take guns away from everybody.” No, you’re never gonna be able to do that because the bad guys are always gonna get them. That’s a nonstarter. That’s never gonna happen. So give me a realistic law or regulation that’s gonna result in a serious reduction of suicide. Give me a gun law. You can’t. There isn’t one. You won’t even get close to it with a law.
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RUSH: Here’s Bob in Harrisburg. You’re next, sir. Great to have you with us. How are you doing?
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Mega dittos from the capital city in Pennsylvania.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
We live in an age where there is no personal responsibility left anymore. And to that I would submit this. Do you recall the DUI killer who got away ’cause it wasn’t his fault, he suffered from affluenza. Do you recall the schoolteacher who sexually assaulted her student but it wasn’t her fault, she was too beautiful to go to prison. And then the ever-famous, “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit.”
And then perhaps the one that will live in infamy forever were the words spoken by William Jefferson Clinton, “That it depends on what you mean by the word ‘is.'” I submit to you that with no repercussions for your actions defended by the criminal attorneys backed by the huge lobbying body, the American Bar Association, this is why Americans feel a greater need to defend themselves, because the system will not. What say you to that, sir?
RUSH: Well, I know that the plaintiffs’ bar in the great big scheme of things is a problem. The criminal defense bar, now that you mentioned them, there was a theory from a sociologist that was discovered — she’s now dead — Hannah Arendt or Arendt, don’t know how she pronounces it. She basically said the same thing. She said when the country gets so bureaucratized that nobody can solve anything on a local level, not even federal, that frustration sets in. When there’s no solution, when there’s nobody empowered to actually make a decision on something
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