RUSH: We’ll go to Jacksonville, Florida, this is Peter. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Dittos from the first coast, Rush.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: Yesterday afternoon when my wife and I got home, we had a voicemail from our daughter’s principal. He was telling us that he had to have a student arrested for ‘safety reasons’ and didn’t give us any details. This morning when we were watching the news, we found out it was this 14-year-old boy who had e-mailed to his buddies threatening that he was going to kill a hundred people.
RUSH: This is the school in Florida?
CALLER: Bartram Trail High School.
RUSH: Bartram Trail High School, yeah.
CALLER: He’s being charged with a second degree felony, and… I don’t know. It’s just driving me crazy.
RUSH: I could imagine. Now, when you got the voicemail — was it the principal or somebody at the school, you said?
CALLER: It was the principal.
RUSH: You got the voicemail. Did the voice mail say this kid’s been taken out of school?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: And everything in the school’s battened down and hunky-dory?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Now, imagine that, folks. In the aftermath of this story, you got home, you get a voice mail message from the principal, ‘Hey, we just had to kick a kid out of school. He’s threatening to kill a hundred students. We want you to know everything is okay.’
CALLER: You know, the sad thing is that there are people in the school that if something like this happens, could possibly do something to stop it —
RUSH: I don’t know —
CALLER: — but because of the laws and liberals, they can’t.
RUSH: Well, that’s the thing, they can’t. I mean, they might be able to do something; they can’t. I don’t know what the laws in Florida are on something like this.
CALLER: Well, I have a concealed carry permit. You cannot carry a gun on school grounds.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Even with a permit.
RUSH: Yeah, I understand. I know that. That’s common on a lot of high school and college campuses, but in Virginia, they passed law after law after law saying: I don’t care how mentally disabled he is, you can’t tell the parents.
CALLER: Well, I remember years ago you did a story on Ed Koch driving through New York, and saw this homeless woman defecating on the public street.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: He had her arrested. They found out she was nuts. They put her in a facility that could have possibly helped her, and the ACLU found out about it and said, ‘No, you can’t do that! You’re putting her in there against her will.’
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: ‘Even if she is crazy, she doesn’t know she’s crazy.’
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: ‘She doesn’t know she needs help,’ and then a college hired her after they let her out to lecture on homelessness.
RUSH: I remember!
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: I had forgotten that part of the story, but you’re exactly right. A college hired her to lecture on the victimology associated with homelessness.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm. Exactly — and they had to fire her because every other word was ‘expletive deleted,’ or should have been, anyway.
RUSH: Right. Right. Well, you can’t tell parents about any medical problems their students have. There are laws on this, at least in Virginia — and they were put in place to keep parents from finding out about any STDs and other sex related issues, like abortion. You know, people say that abortion has done more to devalue our reverence for life, and I believe it. I don’t think there’s any way it hasn’t. When you make it common, when you make it a political issue that killing a baby is somehow a ‘right’ that is in the Constitution, and you have young people growing up and hearing this debate, what are they going to think of life? ‘Well, a baby, it’s not born. Oh, that’s no big deal! You kill people, it’s a constitutional right. If a woman wants to do this, then she can do it.’
CALLER: It cheapens all life. We lose respect for all life.
RUSH: It cheapens all life, no question about it. Then you have the abortion laws that expand and grow and, a 14-year-old or 15-year-old girl gets pregnant, and the parents can’t know. That’s why there have been parental notification laws, because people threw their hands up in frustration over this. But that’s why there are all these other laws on campus that if a student is having mental problems, parents can’t know, and the school can’t do anything about it, and they all get an alibi. They all get an alibi: ‘Well, the law says I can’t do anything about it.’ Well, who wrote the laws? And the people writing the laws are the spectators with all the rest of us, as though they were not involved. Yet they wrote the laws, and this is political correctness run amuck. Well, what are you going to do now regarding your daughter that goes to Bartram Trail? How old is she?
CALLER: She is 17.
RUSH: So she’s, what, junior?
CALLER: Junior.
RUSH: What are you going to do?
CALLER: What can I do? Can I take her out of school?
RUSH: No, you probably can’t. The truant officer will probably come get her —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — because they’ll miss the funding if she’s not there.
CALLER: Right. Absolutely.
RUSH: I didn’t mean that. I mean as a parent, here you have — did the principal call everybody, every parent, you think?
CALLER: Yeah, they have some kind of a program there where he records a message and then I guess automatically calls everybody.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, the blast voicemail.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: The old blast voicemail trip.
CALLER: Yeah, yeah.
RUSH: Well, are you going to call the principal and say, ‘I want to know’?
CALLER: Well, I want to make sure of one thing: that he never, this kid never sees the door of that school again, for one thing.
RUSH: Well… Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha. You’re discriminating now against a future American’s education.
CALLER: Oh, BS. (chuckles) That’s too bad.
RUSH: Remember, the kid’s human first and —
CALLER: Well, he’s responsible also for his actions. He’s accountable for his actions.
RUSH: Well, he’s a minor.
CALLER: I don’t care what he is!
RUSH: Oh, no, no. I’m telling you, there are going to be people who are going to come along and excuse this, and they’re gonna be saying — you wait — he’ll have been made fun of in school and get acne pimples or whatever.
CALLER: I was made fun of in school, too. I didn’t run around killing people.
RUSH: Hell, yes! We all were! That’s the point. But it’s being justified now, and that’s what’s in the process of happening here at Virginia Tech. Now, you could see it with this website that’s got 50 or so students not from Virginia Tech, talking about, ‘Well, he’s human first and a murderer second and we can’t discount all the previous days of his life.’
CALLER: Can I tell you about when I found you on the radio?
RUSH: Ooh, I’d love to hear that.
CALLER: It was 13 or 14 years ago I was channel surfing and I heard you speak and I said, ‘Well, let me listen to this Bozo and see what he has to say.’ Pardon me for that, but in those years everybody was a Bozo that was a talking head — and in five minutes, less than five minutes, you had me. You were saying things that I believed in. But here’s the kicker. The first thought that came into my head was, ‘I wonder if the Democrats know about this guy and know what he’s saying, and if they do, they’re going to try and shut him down.’ That was the first thought that came to me when I realized what you were saying.
RUSH: Well, your instincts are sharp. You’re sharp. They’ve been trying that, I guess, since the first year in a number of different ways, and they’re going to continue to try. But as I keep telling people, and your call is great evidence of it, ‘The strength of this program is not me. It’s all of you who listen to it every day and understand what’s said here and when it is distorted and lied about out there, you know it and you do not abandon because you have the sophistication to understand what’s up and what’s happening with the media, the Democrat Party, the left’s assaults on shows like mine and others.’ Peter, thanks for the call. I appreciate it very much. It’s gotta be a tough day. Peter, before you go, a quick question. As a parent — I can’t do this without asking it in a leading way, which is bad — you didn’t offer an opinion on why this kid did it, but is there any part of you that thinks this never ending recycling of the video and photo package from the Virginia Tech shooter might be influencing this kid, or just the news coverage of it in general?
CALLER: I think they take courage from this. I think they do this because they want the publicity. They think it’s cool.
RUSH: That’s right. Everybody wants to matter, and everybody wants to be known.
CALLER: This is their 15 minutes of fame.
RUSH: MySpace.com, Facebook, people are giving up the most intimate details of their lives for one and all to see. There’s this craving for mass attention. All right, Peter, I gotta run.
CALLER: Thanks Rush.
RUSH: Thanks for the call. I really appreciate it.