RUSH: I’m just predicting there is gonna be some kind of a deal made on new gun control legislation or gun legislation. Maybe not gun control.

But if I had to bet, you’re gonna see some kind of attempt to make a deal between the White House and Congress on increased or so-called improved background checks because the prevailing winds in Washington are telling everybody, “We’ve gotta do something! We’ve got to do something!” In their minds, it doesn’t really matter. Just do something so it can be seen that they’ve done something. So it can be seen that there has been a response by our government to the tragedies.

There isn’t a thing they can do regarding gun legislation that would stop these shootings, because it’s not gun legislation that is responsible for it. The one thing none of this ever takes into account — you can ban guns left and right. You can take guns away from the law-abiding all day. People who intend, who have made up their minds to use guns in a criminal way are going to find them. They are, by definition, criminals.

So what’s happening in Washington is this overwhelming sense that everybody there feels that we’ve got to do something. “We gotta do something, Rush. We gotta do something. We gotta show people we’re responding. We gotta do something. People are demanding that we do something.”

A, they probably are. They’re demanding anything ’cause everybody just wants to feel better about this. Everybody just wants to think we’re doing something about it, “even if it doesn’t matter, we want to do something.” Because of the psychological need to do something. And then you add on to the psychological need that to do something, the government has to do it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Friday night on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox, Raymond Arroyo was the Fill-In Host, and he had a segment with Erich Pratt, who’s the Gun Owners of America senior vice president. They were talking about the potential here of increased background checks, expanded background checks, maybe red flag laws, in the aftermath of the Dayton and El Paso shootings. Arroyo said to the Gun Owners of America senior vice president, “Do your members believe the president’s caving, or is supporting background checks a sensible way to respond to these massacres while protecting gun rights?”

PRATT: What the president is pushing is not the only gonna violate the Second Amendment rights of Americans, it’s also gonna backfire on Republicans. This is akin to George Bush’s “Read my lips: No new taxes,” broken promise of the 1990s, and this is gonna completely backfire.

ARROYO: Mmm-hmm.

PRATT: Look, Rush Limbaugh’s been talking about this, by the way, for the past two days. Here you have a president who two years ago promised, “The assault on the Second Amendment is over,” and yet —

ARROYO: Mmm-hmm.

PRATT: — now he’s doing an about-face. If Republicans stab gun owners in the back, they’re gonna suffer at the polls in the same way that George Bush did.

RUSH: Well, I raised that possibility depending on what is done. But I just want to reiterate, folks, that the whole concept of (hysterical), “We’ve gotta do something!” has taken over Washington. It comes under the umbrella of the false premise that Washington can stop things, that Washington — that legislation — can somehow eliminate these shootings, and what we have here are people that are not really interested in solving this. They’re interested in making people think they care and are doing something.

That’s as far as it goes, and that’s really all you have to do, because everything is about feelings in this country today. So people are out there feeling bad. (sobbing) “Gotta stop it! We gotta stop! We’ve gotta do something.” Washington hears it. “Okay, we’ll expand background checks! Okay, red flag laws.” People go (sobbing), “Thank you. Thank you for doing something. We feel so much better. Thank you.” Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a single thing done that would stop this. All that’s happened is more laws on the already law-abiding have been proposed.

“But, Rush! But, Rush! There need to background checks at the gun shows.”

Fine.

Folks, I’m just telling you here that the motivation for anybody involved in this is not to actually stop this. If somebody knew how to stop this, it would have been done long ago. If anybody had the answer to this, it would have been implemented long ago. Nobody does. Hell, folks, we’re not even allowed to honestly assess the problem. We’re not allowed to honestly identify the problems and the things that create and lead to these problems because everything has been politicized — and when that happens, nobody in politics can afford to lose.

So if a proposal is made in an already politicized environment, then there’s gonna be political opposition to it. So what the people in Washington want to do is come to some kind of a deal where, when it’s all said and done, they can have a gigantic signing ceremony — bipartisan, what have you — and they’ll all be able to say, “We’ve taken it seriously and we’ve done something.” Period. “We’ve not fixed it; we’ve not solved it. Nobody will make that claim. But we’ve done something. We have responded to it.”

Because these are events that people scratch their heads. “Why does it happen? How do we stop it? What can we do?” Well, can anybody recall an era where there has been no crime? Can anybody recall an era where there have been no murder, mass murders? You can’t. These things, they happen. Now, I’m not… Don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying this is normal and normalized, and it shouldn’t be. I just think there are reasons for it that we’re not allowed to discuss. (interruption) Well, like the cultural breakdown of the family for one.

You really want to go down this list?

I think the fact that we have totally blown up the definition of family, that we have so scourged the concept of fatherhood and maleness as barbarism. I think social media has led to the literal isolation of people. People who are chatting with people left and right on social media who don’t know anybody, they feel isolated. They feel alone. They see other people doing odd things to get noticed. Everybody wants to get noticed. Everybody wants to be famous. The media covers these things like whoever does this is gonna get the dream that they’ve always wanted:

Media coverage, everybody knows who they are. When you have a policy of aborting 1.3 million kids every year, you can’t say that that doesn’t do something to the perception of the sanctity of life. I mean, it’s a cascade of a whole lot of things over a long period of time. When you have the murder rate in Chicago! There are more people killed in a weekend in Chicago than in either one of these events, and nobody cares about it. Nobody does anything about it.

It’s a Democrat stronghold. So nobody does anything about it. You don’t have near the sadness, near the compassion, near the media focus. Why is that? Take a look at weekend murder rate and add ’em up for the year in Chicago. Compare it to Dayton or El Paso and ask, “Well, why do Dayton and El Paso get covered?” Because the primary reason for the coverage is to get Donald Trump! The primary reason… Go back and look at the New York Times story today in the front page.

They’ve gotten in the montage business. Now they’ve got a montage, and they’re trying to blame me twice and a bunch of other conservative people for the shooter doing what he did because the shooter heard people use the word “invasion.” This is not unique to us. There’s all kinds of people who are clearly able to — on their own — recognize caravans of thousands of people arriving on the southern border without the ability to process them!

It doesn’t take somebody listening to the radio or watching TV to realize what an invasion looks like. But here comes the Drive-By Media assuming that everybody in America is brainless and incapable of thinking on their own and does not do anything until they get marching orders or thought orders from conservative media.

So this stuff serves a purpose for half of the political population of the country because it permits them to blame the other half for the fact that it’s happening. When events like this have political value, what do you think the odds of solving it are?

Now, this may sound a little harsh, but for crying out loud, folks, go back the Gabby Gifford shooting. What’s the first thing that happened? They tried to blame Sarah Palin for her website! And then they dumped on me for that one too! As an afterthought, after it bombed out on Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin’s still trying to take action against this for what they did to her, trying to blame her for this.

But virtually every one of these — you watch media people, they’re breathlessly excited, they’re looking for any evidence that this event, one that happens most recently can somehow be laid at the feet of conservatives or a Republican president or what have you. When stuff like this has political value, do you realize how far up the creek we are in actually solving it? “Rush, that’s really, really, really unfortunate that you’re saying people see political value.” I defy you to deny it!

When the first word out of people’s mouths is that their political opponents are responsible for it, you think it doesn’t have political value, in their minds? And then we are swept away with the “We gotta do something!” We gotta do something, while the premise is out there that the right is responsible for it. We gotta do something. You put all this stuff together, and guess who ends up being blamed for it? People that didn’t pull the trigger. People that didn’t know the people that pulled the trigger. People that don’t do things like this end up being blamed for it, and then the policy fix derives or descends from that. So I don’t know how serious some of the people claiming they want this to end really are about that.