RUSH: We have to go to NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday. Sometimes NPR has a guy on to translate me for the NPR audience, and it’s usually done fairly. I mean, it’s not a hit piece by any stretch. It’s a service that somebody at NPR realizes, “Okay, if we’re gonna play a Rush Limbaugh sound bite, we may need to translate it for our leftist audience.”
So in this case, it’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Scott Simon is the host speaking with Brian Mann, the correspondent, about the NRA convention in Dallas. Scott Simon says, “Many of the student survivors of that violence,” Parkland, Florida, “and national figures have pointed again and again to the NRA. Do you have a sense of that at the NRA, at the convention center here?”
MANN: There’s a lot of deep distrust here of traditional news organizations like ours. I had a conversation with one gun owner this week was convinced that the moral outrage after Parkland was just sort of concocted and fake. And I told him I had interviewed kids and parents who endured that horror in Florida who want more restrictions on firearms, that they weren’t fake and weren’t part of some liberal conspiracy, and he seemed really surprised. I — I think it’s important to remember that a lot of these folks get their news and information from very different sources, including the NRA’s own new TV network that they’ve launched. Eh, but also from places like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
RUSH: Yes. So you see, my name is thrown in here into the hopper to help explain why people don’t really understand what happened at Parkland –or worse, think that the aftermath of Parkland was a bit phonied up. Well, just two bits of information. First, the NRA set a record for attendance at this year’s convention, a total of 87,154 attendees. Has anybody stopped to think…? I am sure many of you have. We’re told routinely that there are over 300 million guns in America.
That’s more than one gun per person. What percentage of the 300 million guns do you think are owned by leftists? So you’ve got 300 million guns out there. How many of them are owned by leftists? Give me a number. What do you think? Five, 10, 15, 20 thousand? A hundred? Or are they hypocrites and do they own maybe a hundred million, a third of them? (interruption) Maybe 20%? Okay. So they really think they can survive if it comes to this?
How stupid are they? (laughing) Do they really think they’re be able to survive if they provoke this, if they provoke what they’re provoking? And all it would take is a serious effort to get those guns out of the hands of the 300 million people who love and cherish them, they think they stand a chance here? There’s one other bit of information. You remember we revealed — we were the first to reveal on this program — the PROMISE Program, the federal program?
The acronym for it is PROMISE. That was put in place by the superintendent in Broward County. Guy’s name is [Robert W.] Runcie. They imported him from Chicago. Remember? He was the architect of the PROMISE Program. Do you remember what the PROMISE Program is? (interruption) You do? (interruption) Tell me. (interruption) Just tell me what it is. I’ll see if you pass the test. (interruption) All right. Well, what it…? (interruption) Pretty close. They decided — the Obama administration decided — that they didn’t like the fact that the greatest percentage of prisoners behind bars was African-American.
They thought that that meant the criminal justice system was biased against African-Americans and a bunch of innocent African-Americans had been put in jail because the country’s inherently racist. Now, they used to that statistic… The civil rights community — Reverend Jackson and his crowd — used that statistic repeatedly to argue for the innocence of African-Americans that had been charged with various crimes by suggesting, “A country with only, what, 10 to 11, 13% population African-American, and over half the prison population’s African-Americans?
“It’s a racist country.” And so the PROMISE Program came along, and its purpose was that whenever felonies were committed especially by minors or young adults that were African-American, they were to be ignored! And they would be charged to a much lesser crime so as to avoid placing these perps in prison. This was seen as a solution to the unfair, racist and bigoted policies that had put so many African-Americans in jail — and, as they wanted us to believe, illegally and undeservedly.
Well, when the case of this shooter in Parkland came up, his last name was Cruz, and remember in the aftermath we learned how many different times various people were warned? Law enforcement was warned — the number of times is in the thirties or forties — that this guy was some bad news. Do something before this guy does what he’s gonna do. There were even a couple of people who warned the cops and the sheriff that this guy may light up a school.
It was all ignored because of the PROMISE Program! Because if you’re gonna have to ignore felonies committed by African-Americans, you’re gonna have to ignore felonies committed by others as well. Otherwise the program doesn’t work, because if you start divvying up justice by race, it’s gonna get noticed, eventually. So they had to go lax on every. It turns out that Mr. Runcie had said in response to numerous questions five or six times that this Cruz guy, “Naw, naw. The PROMISE Program had nothing to do with him.
“This guy never interacted with the PROMISE Program. We never exempted this guy.” The news from over the weekend is that he was exempted from actions that he had taken by the invocation of the PROMISE Program five different times. Five different times the shooter at the high school was essentially let go because of the PROMISE Program. Marco Rubio has since found out about this and is livid because everybody was lied to about it.
Now, this would not have come up until much later in the program today, except I had this sound bite from NPR in which they needed to translate what you and I believe. So I wanted to take the occasion here to be crystal clear that much of what you’ve been told about the aftermath — well, even before the shooting. The PROMISE Program was a huge factor. This guy could have been taken off the streets because of previous crimes committed if it weren’t for this Obama program called PROMISE.
Another left-wing program designed to even out the injustices born of a racist America. So they artificially impose beliefs such as, “We have a racist criminal justice system,” and then create a law to deal with that artificiality. As is typical when the left gets involved, rolls up its sleeves and starts monkeying with basic sociology, they make a mess out everything. They ruin everything they touch. It ends up being corrupted. It ends up being damaged one way or another.