RUSH: Every time there is a mass shooting like this, I have an objective, I have a goal, and that is to not trample on it for a while, to not talk about it, because invariably the first thing that happens, the Democrats and the left and the media start the predictable and the usual never-ending loop on gun control. Gun control would not have stopped this like it wouldn’t have stopped any of the other mass shootings.

So I generally say, why join the broken-record crowd and just take some time and wait until we actually learn some things about this before going off in a strictly halfcocked partisan manner like everybody else is doing. But it’s just impossible to do. I can’t sit here and not react to what I’m watching. I can’t sit here and not react to some of the literal idiocy that is passing for learned analysis and commentary in the media.

I try to back out of these things. I try not to play. I try not to enmesh myself in the predictable, never-changing political loop that almost seems to feature, in a horrible sense, in a horrible sort of way, there seem to be people energized by events like this because it reignites, for them, an opportunity to bring up a passionate issue: gun control.

And it has always made me blanch, it has always offended me. It offends my sensibilities. It angers me to see people almost excited in the aftermath of an event like this because of the opportunity that it presents politically. It just disgusts me. And every time I back out, every time I try not to play they suck me back in. And sucked back in I am today.

Greetings, my friends, and welcome. It’s the Rush Limbaugh program, the EIB Network. 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

So there are the usual tropes about gun control, predictable, nothing new in them. You’ve heard them all. Don’t need me to recount them. There’s the usual paranoia. There is the usual scare tactics being employed. There is, in fact, even in this, the usual blame for Donald Trump. Oh, yeah, this is all Donald Trump’s fault.

The media cannot wait to report tweets from students at the school claiming not to want any words of condolence from Trump because he’s nothing but an obscenity and obscenity and obscenity and obscenity and they don’t want hear his words, it’s his fault. When you see that, you realize how purely political this is and what an opportunity it presents.

But if you patiently spend some time you will hear some people who do make sense and, and it serves a purpose to highlight them. Other people don’t make sense, and it makes all the sense in the world to highlight them as well.

Right before the program started there was a pretty big press conference with the usual cadre of nameless officials standing behind whoever was speaking. In this case it was the local sheriff. Standing next to him was Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and then Governor Scott was stage right, to the left of the speaker, then the usual bunch of people behind him.

The sheriff, obviously frustrated, the sheriff said something that I found interesting and something that has not — I mean, it’s been said before, but it’s not part of the loop. The sheriff expressed anger at the federal government. The sheriff expressed anger at federal policy. The sheriff expressed a little anger — “frustration” may be a better word — at the federalization of this.

The sheriff said (paraphrasing), “Everybody knew about this guy. Everybody knew about this kid. The FBI had been warned about this kid. The FBI had been warned about the kid. They didn’t do anything about it.” You’ve heard that, right? You’ve all heard the FBI was given a specific warning after somebody on YouTube saw the guy’s threat, and the YouTuber let the FBI know, and the FBI admits that they knew.

Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen, that the FBI may not have the resources to deal with complaints like this? How many people at the FBI are still trying to prove that Trump colluded with Russia? How many people the FBI are being forced to continue to work and waste time on the Hillary Clinton bought and paid for dossier and trying to link it to Trump? “Rush, you better be careful. You’re politicizing.”

I’m not politicizing anything. I’m reacting. I’m not starting anything here. But when I hear that the FBI knew about this shooter well in advance and didn’t do anything, I have to ask, why? And then I start trying to answer my own question “why.” And the first answer you get is, “Well, the kid hadn’t done anything yet. There’s nothing we can do. And besides that, we’re federal, and this is a state and local issue. We don’t have any jurisdiction down there. There’s nothing we can do.”

Well, maybe, but how many people are still trying to prove after a year and a half here that Trump colluded with Russia? How many people still tracking down Hillary Clinton’s opposition research? In fact, folks, if you want to blame Trump for this, I could just easily turn it around and blame it on Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have the FBI so occupied tracking down something that didn’t happen, they may not have the resources to pull this kid off the street.

How does that sound to you leftists? Absurd? Well, it isn’t. But, anyway, it takes me back to what the sheriff said. The sheriff was almost pleading. The sheriff said (paraphrasing), “Let us act before these shooters do things. When everybody knows what the shooter is saying on Twitter, posting on YouTube, let us go get the kid. Let us go get the kid and turn him over to mental health professionals and have an examination. Let’s get rid of this business where we have to wait for these people to act before we can do anything.”

And it got me to thinking. We have nationalized the public schools, in a sense, have we not? I mean, school districts, in order to get paid, have to meet federal criteria. That leads to a federal curriculum. The school lunch program, school breakfast program, school snack program, school dinner program, school wine tasting night, school whatever it is is all predicated on matching, meeting federal requirements.

Even snow days. “We’re a little reluctant here to cancel school because of the snow because the Feds demand that we have 180 days of class, otherwise they’re not gonna pay us whatever.” It’s safe to say that there has been a degree of nationalization of public schools. And when that happens, you know what else happens? The concept of every state becoming an individual laboratory where people in different states can come up with different solutions to different problems to see what works, to try new things rather than to be straitjacketed by federal policy.

Right now the states look to Washington. Schools and states look to Washington. And instead of that, instead of looking to Washington, how about states be granted the responsibility to fix what’s happening in their own schools? ‘Cause it’s different from school to school, circumstances, people. For example, if we allowed the states to independently deal with whatever problems they independently face, we might have some public schools in some states putting armed guards or armed police on premise.

I’m not suggesting it. I’m just pointing out that somebody might try it. And in so doing we might find out if it works or not. Right now there isn’t anybody armed at all in these schools except the perps. And the schools themselves are no-shoot zones, no-gun zones, and the perps all know this, they’re sophisticated enough to know this.

So if you allowed each state to run its school — or even if you want to get more local than that, allow the school districts to run themselves as they wish. Give this sheriff the power to go grab these troublemakers before they make trouble. See if it works. Find out if it doesn’t work. None of that is happening now. In some places, some states might allow teachers to have conceal-carry permits. That’s not the case now. But my point is a whole lot of experimentation starting along ago could have been underway by now.

To actually come to a solution, actually try to find something that worked to prevent incidents like this, because gun control isn’t going to prevent criminal acts using guns. It just isn’t going to happen! I mean, the evidence… This is one of the reasons why I don’t really even like getting into this in the immediate aftermath because it’s just the endless loop. You go to any state, any district, any country where there are strict gun control laws. Look at France and the Charlie Hebdo situation.

No guns permitted.

Cops are not armed.

What happened?

Bad got guns. Bad guys are gonna break the law, by definition. They’re gonna be able to do whatever they need to accomplish whatever they want to accomplish. If it needs guns, they’re gonna get them, whether federal, state, local, Martian law preventing it or not. But all of these different states could have the opportunity to actually experiment with solving this. Federal gun control legislation is not a solution. The solution lies elsewhere.

Is the solution video games? Who knows? What is the impact of young kids playing video games where it’s easy to kill people with the push of a button — and then they come back to life. They’re not really dead. What’s the impact of this over the course of a young life? I don’t know. Is there a desensitization that takes place with all this? But nobody ever looks to banning that kind of stimuli affecting kids. They immediately target guns because they immediately politicize this and make tracks to score political points.

And for the liberal Democrats, this really isn’t even about enacting gun control. It’s simply about another opportunity to advance the issue. I mean, they’d love to do it, don’t misunderstand. But they know it’s not gonna happen in the immediate aftermath of this. But it gives them another opportunity to start bashing Republicans as the usual don’t care, no heart, don’t care about kids. That’s the value of this, plus other things.

You know, federalism was designed so that states and communities could address problems according to their experience and judgment. Federalism means exact what the word implies. Federalism implies the federal government doing everything. It’s the exact opposite of that. Federalism limits the federal government to specifically enumerated powers, and other than that, it’s up to the states. States are supposed to be in charge of education, not opportunistic politicians in Washington.

I tell you, folks, it is just disgusting to watch a national political agenda pushed when families and friends and an entire country are grieving after these horrific demonic acts. It is just disgusting that within five minutes of an event like this you turn on TV, and there’s some politician bleating about gun control and then blaming whoever the current Republican leader is for it. You want to ban something?

Ban politicians in Washington from commenting on these events for a minimum of 48 hours. You want to ban something? “You can’t do that, Rush. It’s banning free speech.” We can’t ban guns, either. Second Amendment. Somehow we feel like we can encroach on the Second Amendment for emotional reasons alone, but banning professional politician commentary for 48 hours? “You can’t do that!” Why not?

After acts of terrorism affecting air travel, what do we do? We put air marshals on the flights. They’re there. They’re on many of these flights. And you know what? They’re armed. Anybody thought of the idea of school marshals? How about cameras that link to the internet for public viewing? “Ah, it’s a violation of civil rights.” Yeah? How about arming teachers? “Oh, no! No! The teachers might be nuts. Teachers might launch, and teachers might go crazy with some stupid kid smarting off to them. We can’t do that!”

Well, we gotta do something other than listening to the people who told us nationalizing health care would make it cheaper. We gotta start doing something besides listening to people who told us that nationalizing health care would allow you to keep your doctor and your policy. How did that work out? It is an utter disaster. An untested national program confiscating one-sixth of the U.S. economy was rolled out that made everything worse.

That might have even been done on purpose. But the goal was not to help people. It was to control them that’s what the anti-Amendment Two crowd wants to do here. The one consistent problem in this country — the one consistent problem or malady this country suffers from — is liberalism. It limits freedom, and, as such, it limits innovation. It limits experimentation. Liberalism limits intelligence.

It limits new ways of solving problems in exchange for maintaining a status quo that liberals think grants them a political superior position. Americans do not trust the process, and that’s what needs to change. Trust the process. Our process was created by the founders to disburse power to states and individuals, because that’s where the genius and sustained exceptionalism of America is.

The closer you get to where people live, odds are the politics are gonna be very much smarter and more attuned to reality — and that’s where you find innovation. That’s where trial and error can work itself out in small scale experiments so that we never get to events like this. But with the Feds running everything about this — and with the Democrat Party dominated by liberalism pushing to wipe out Second Amendment — we’re never gonna get to what really is happening here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Got an email during the break. “What do you mean? What do you mean liberalism is the one consistent problem the country suffers from?” Well, I’ll tell you what I mean by it. It’s not complicated at all. Liberalism… Call it the Democrats. I don’t care what you call it. Liberalism, the Democrat Party, the American left never allows us to name or identify a problem. We’re never allowed to actually identify a problem. It’s racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic to do so.

If we can’t identify a problem, if we can’t be honest about what the problem is, you can forget about solving it. And that’s why we deal with this endless loop, the same stuff over and over again. I don’t care if it’s the budget, if it’s immigration, school shootings, bad public education, failing cities, stupid health care proposals, there are solutions to every one of these issues. Proven solutions! But we can’t talk about ’em, because of political correctness — which is the official language of liberalism — denies us the opportunity.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is sheriff, Scott Israel, this morning during a press conference in Parkland, Florida. And this is the sheriff… This is the kind of thing that if the federal government had not nationalized public education, then these kinds of things could be tried, perhaps, from state to state to see if something other than the usual endless loop would actually create a solution.

ISRAEL: What I’m asking our lawmakers to do is go back to places like Tallahassee, places like Washington, D.C., and give police the power. If they see something on social media. If they see graphic pictures of rifles and blood and gore and guns and bombs. If they see something… Horrific language. If they see person talking about, “I want to grow up to be a serial killer.” We need to have the power to take that person and bring them before mental health professionals at that particular time, involuntarily, and have them examined. People are gonna be rightfully so concerned about their rights, as am I. But what about the rights of these students? What about the rights of young students that go to schools with book bags and pencils. Don’t they have the right to be protected by the United States government to the best of our ability?

RUSH: Now, of course, you can predict the righteous outrage opposition to this from the standpoint of the presumption of guilt before an act has been committed, the illegal search and seizure, all this sort of stuff. But that’s why, you know, I’m almost open to the concept here of letting some of these things be tried, like armed guards in the school. None of this is permissible anywhere. Nothing that may actually be a preventative, nothing that might actually prevent this is allowed to be discussed or talked about because liberalism doesn’t permit it.

The only thing that you can say right now without somebody jumping down your throat is, “We need to get guns out of the hands of people! We need to get rid of the Second Amendment.” You can say that all day long and be applauded. Anything other than that, and you gonna be in deep, deep doo-doo.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Sloatsburg, New York. This is Greg. Glad you called, sir. Medical.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Rush, this morning I was listening to the news conference, and I heard the sheriff say that if you see someone who every Friday normally comes home with eggs and milk, but this Friday comes home with bullets, you should tell the police. And to me it sounded frightening, like something outfits old Soviet Union. And it got me thinking, we do we deal with bank robbery so different than we do should shootings?

Why is it to prevent or deter bank robbery, we use physical security like a vault, bulletproof glass, and armed guards. For bank security, we don’t rely on people turning in their neighbors for unusual activity. Yet to stop school shootings, we’re supposed to give up our rights, be they gun rights, freedom from search, seizure, incarceration. Do we really want to live in a country where someone reporting you for being creepy or changing your daily routine brings the behavior police to your door?

CALLER: Well, I’m gonna give the sheriff the benefit of the doubt here in answering, although I completely agree with your assessment here. But I think law enforcement is frustrated. In this instance, the FBI was told of the guy. Everybody in town knew this guy had something wrong with him. I mean, the guy was posting his intentions, the FBI was alerted, and the sheriff is frustrated ’cause everybody’s dumping on law enforcement. “Why don’t you do something?”

And he’s saying, we can’t do anything until the guy acts. And so the sheriff’s press conference, I’ll read to you a portion of what he said (paraphrasing), “I’m asking our lawmakers, go back to your capitols and give police the power, if they see something on social media, if they see graphic pictures of rifles and blood and guns and bombs and gore, if they see horrific language, if they see a person talking about ‘I want to grow up be a serial killer,’ we need to have the power to take that person and bring ’em before mental health officials, professionals, and have an involuntary examination.”

Everybody’s dumping on them. It seems so obvious. The guy predicted what he was gonna do, told what he was gonna do, everybody knew — not everybody. A lot of people knew. And there was not a thing that could have been done to stop it, according to the sheriff. He didn’t have the power to stop it because of the things you just cited. He did not have the power to go get this kid out of his house and commit him to a mental health agency.

So what is the answer? I think the caller has hung up. (interruption) Well, wait. Snerdley’s asking me if I think we’re gonna allow people to be put in mental health facilities. I must at this point assert we gotta all try to remember, there isn’t anything that could happen here that hasn’t happened before. Why in the eighties was there all of a sudden a massive homeless population? Because the homeless advocates determined that they had been placed in mental health institutions in violation of their rights, and they were released.

The courts made the various agencies in charge of getting them off the street, let ’em go, adhering to their constitutional rights. That they were taken off the street in violation of their rights, mental illness isn’t a crime, who are you, asking authorities. So the streets of certain cities got flooded. So you’re asking me, do I think we’re eventually gonna have roundups of the mentally disturbed? We’ve already done it. We’ve done that and more.

This is one of the reasons that I’m approaching this from the way I’m approaching it. There isn’t enough innovation and expertise in preventing these kinds of things. It’s not permitted because the federal government’s nationalized education. So whatever initiatives might be proposed and then made legal to enact locally, didn’t even have a chance because it just isn’t possible.

I think the sheriff is just frustrated here in this one instance. And I know that after the fact, 20/20 hindsight everybody has, but there are a lot of people saying the guy warned he was gonna do it. Others predicted he would do it. The FBI knew. And nobody found a way to stop it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Gotta be careful blaming the FBI. I mean, how many agents are being used to track down whether or not there are any more sexual abusers in the Trump administration? And how many FBI agents are tracking down nonexisting news about Trump colluding with Russia? We gotta go easy to the FBI here. They may be overextended.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We go to Detroit. This is Tom. Great to have you, Tom. Glad you waited. I appreciate your patience. How are you?

CALLER: Doing well, Rush. How about you?

RUSH: Fine. Thanks much.

CALLER: Good. I’ve got a concern about what the sheriff down in Florida’s asking for, as far as just lack of better term, combing the web and bringing in people because of comments they posted or may have posted, thought that they posted. I think what eventually is gonna happen is what happened with the FISA courts. There’s gonna be an abuse there, and it’s a serious abuse. I’d like your comment on that.

RUSH: That’s a good point. Well, let’s look at FISA, since you bring that up. We now have a dossier that to this day remains unverified and uncorroborated. It was used to secure a warrant to spy on Carter Page. Its primary purpose was to get Donald Trump. And the judge at the FISA court may have been misled. We don’t know. We don’t know yet whether the judge was told it was paid for by Hillary Clinton or not.

So your analogy here is — and, by the way, this has made me wonder if this is a one-off or if this is the way this process is happening routinely, that the FISA court has become such a rubber stamp that you can take anything up to ’em and the judge will say, “Go ahead. Here’s your warrant.” I mean, if they can get a warrant on an uncorroborated, unverified piece of garbage like this thing is, then what other warrants have been granted that may not have any real backup? So your point is that is just as dangerous as a sheriff in Florida being able to go pull a kid out of his house and put him in an institution simply because of what the kid’s written and posted on YouTube.

CALLER: Or not even what he may have written, but what other people have written about him. The bullying. You get three, four kids that don’t like Johnny, and so they pick on Johnny and they fabricate stories that get him in trouble.

RUSH: Well, we know that happens. A lot of stuff’s made up on the internet. Speaking of which I can attest to that personally.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Yeah. It is crossing a bridge and then maybe tearing down the bridge afterwards. I can understand the sheriff’s frustration. You know how many people are dumping on law enforcement here?

CALLER: Oh, sure, yeah.

RUSH: I mean, the cops are being shot already because of Black Lives Matter. They’re out there being shot. And, by the way, speaking of that, may I make an observation? This is another thing. Since when did Democrats become big supporters and proponents of law enforcement. Like Adam “Shifty” Pencil Neck Schiff and all these other people out there saying: you can’t criticize the FBI, that’s un-American, you can’t criticize law enforcement.

What have you people made your bones on? You’ve been criticizing the cops. You’ve been joining Black Lives Matter. You criticized the cops in Baltimore. You criticized the cops in Ferguson. You people on the Democrat side have made a career now out of trying to convince people the cops everywhere are corrupt! All it takes is Black Lives Matter to come along and claim that cops are shooting innocent blacks, murdering them and putting them in prison or whatever. And there it’s perfectly fine to criticize law enforcement.

So these law enforcement guys, I can imagine what it’s like to be them. How about this? How about you are being threatened. You are living at home, you’re alone, you’re a woman. You’ve got a stalker. You’ve got somebody that comes up to your window and stares every night, follows you around, never approaches, never touches you. You call the cops, you’re scared to death, you get a restraining order. That’s as much as you can get. The stalker violates the restraining order, but it’s tough to catch the guy in the act.

The point is law enforcement will tell that woman, “I’m sorry, we can’t do anything until he attacks. He hasn’t broken the law yet. He hasn’t committed a crime.” But, meanwhile, the woman is scared to death, or it could be a guy being stalked by who knows who. And then the crime eventually happens, and the woman is either maimed, injured, or killed. And people call on law enforcement, “Why didn’t you do something?” And they’re doing it now.

This shooter was apparently widely known. He had warned everybody he was gonna do this. He threatened to do it. He put it on YouTube, another YouTuber saw it, informed the FBI. Then this shooting event happens yesterday, and can you imagine the number of people talking to the sheriff or the cops down there. “Why didn’t you do something?” The cops are getting frustrated.

Let me put it in human terms. If you’re in law enforcement or anywhere, and you had enough data that you trusted that made you genuinely scared something like this could happen, and you couldn’t do anything to stop it, and then it happened, can you imagine the frustration? And then when you’ve got members of the community calling you and yelling or plaintively asking, “Why didn’t you stop the guy?”

“We can’t.”

So a part of me understands the frustration of the sheriff and law enforcement. But then you come along here, Tom, and your point is exactly right. With the availability of social media and the ability to lie, it is a dangerous, dangerous situation, which is why I revert back to one of my original points at the top of the program.

There is a solution out there. But we’re never gonna get to it if we can’t properly identify the problem, number one. And the official language of liberalism, political correctness, does not allow us to honestly address these things language-wise. Without the experimentation, innovation in various states, local communities, we’re never going to get there.