On his top-rated radio program on Monday, Rush Limbaugh predicted that, in contrast to earlier congressional responses to mass shootings, this time “there is gonna be some kind of a deal made on new gun control legislation or gun legislation.”
Following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio last week that left over 30 people dead and dozens injured, congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle have been discussing possible gun control measures, particularly “red flag” laws, which many Republicans have signaled that they would support and which President Trump has openly backed, along with improved background checks.
Limbaugh predicted Monday that we would see some form of gun legislation, citing “the prevailing winds in Washington” which are telling lawmakers, “We’ve gotta do something! 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.”
Limbaugh made clear that he doesn’t believe any gun legislation enacted by the federal government will actually prevent tragedies like those that occurred in El Paso and Dayton because, in the end, “it’s not gun legislation that is responsible for it.”
“You can ban guns left and right,” he said. “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.”
But the mounting pressure to “do something,” he predicted, will win the day in Washington this time because of human psychology.
“They’re demanding anything ’cause everybody just wants to feel better about this,” he said of the public outcry for action. “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.”
After playing a clip of Gun Owners of America Senior Vice President Erich Pratt warning Trump about doing an “about-face” on gun control and potentially violating the Second Amendment, Limbaugh stressed his larger point again: The reflex to “do something” ultimately “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,” he continued, adding, “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.”
Limbaugh went on to provide a few reasons he says we’ve seen an escalation of mass shootings, among them that we’ve “scourged the concept of fatherhood and maleness as barbarism” and that social media “has led to the literal isolation of people.” The latter, he said, results in people wanting to do things just to “get noticed,” to “be famous” — and the media inflames the situation by covering the mass shootings “like whoever does this is gonna get the dream that they’ve always wanted.” Then there’s abortion, Rush suggested, which erodes “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,” he said.
Transcript via RushLimbaugh.com