Credit where credit is due

As someone who has expressed dissatisfaction with mainstream conservative commentators for giving short shrift to the Second Amendment in the past I also intend to give credit where credit is due. Rush Limbaugh used most of his three hours today to discuss the Virginia Tech shootings and came out swinging for the Second Amendment. Here is part of what he said:

RUSH: Last week, the First Amendment was under assault. This week, the Second Amendment is under assault. The media templates have been set in stone. They started last night, yesterday afternoon even, in regards to this massacre at Virginia Tech, before anything was known, before any of the facts were known. It was one of the reasons I didn't talk much about this yesterday, because it was all breaking at the time, and had I echoed what I was seeing in the Drive-By Media yesterday, I would have been wrong in part. So as I mentioned yesterday I was sitting around and just waiting to gather all the information here. It has been utterly predictable and it has been utterly fascinating at the same time, to watch the Drive-By Media coverage of this massacre. Some people are calling it a "tragedy." I'm even having a problem with calling it a tragedy. A tragedy is a tornado or a hurricane running you down. This is an act of pure evil. This is an act of pure evil on the part of one person that has nothing to do with "American society." It has nothing to do with anybody else who was not involved, and yet the media template is etched in stone here. We have found out that the killer had chains and a lock to keep his victims from escaping.

He had two pistols, one of which he bought back in March or April. He had a vest filled with ammunition, and somehow some kind of gun control law was going to stop him from killing these people. That, frankly, is absurd, and I urge all of you to resist the groupthink that has been part of this. I don't care what network you watch, that has been the template: the Second Amendment and gun control, here. "We need more gun control. If we would have had gun control, why, this wouldn't have happened! Virginia is the headquarters of the NRA." This is going to bring this all back. The bottom line here is that every event -- regardless how bad, how large, or how small -- is covered through the politics prism now. Everything is being looked at here through the prism of politics rather than looking at this for what it is. The shooter bought his first gun, a 9mm handgun, on March 13th, and his second weapon, a .22 caliber handgun within the last week. This is according to ABC News and their source here is law enforcement officials. None of this argues at all for the concept that gun control would have prevented any of this.

This was not a spur of the moment crime. It was not something done in a flash instant. There was preparation here. This guy was going to get a gun. He was able to buy it, but he was going to get a gun regardless. He had it in his mind to do this. So last week the First Amendment's under attack; this week is now the Second Amendment, and it is terrible how an event like this can be so contorted to meet a political end. But that is the primary reason for all of the coverage: to meet a political end. There are several news templates in newsrooms. The Duke lacrosse case is a representative of a great template. The Imus situation is another template, and so is this. They've just released some details of the note that the gunman left behind, and in the note -- isn't this classic? -- he rails against "rich kids and the debauchery of American society." Now, who cares what this guy thinks other than a bunch of psychologists and psychiatrists who might want to examine this for the textbooks? This is the kind of thing that does not happen in this country every day. This is extraordinary, which is why the reaction that we're all having to it is as it is.

This doesn't happen every day in this country. This is not what America is. This event does not provide a microcosm of the evils and horrors of American society. So you have this kid that went nuts here for whatever reason, in a suicide note, railing against "rich kids and the debauchery of society," and wait 'til the Drive-Bys pick up on that and start extrapolating that into the other templates that exist in their newsrooms as to what's wrong with American society. I don't know what his grievance was against "rich kids." I have no clue and we won't know until the details of this note are spelled out. The Drive-Bys are all talking about the "healing" that we all must go through now, and that this is a tragedy. As I say, you can say it's a tragedy, and I may be splitting hairs here, but, as I say, a tragedy is when a tornado runs through town and flattens a building and 30 people die. This is pure evil on parade, or insanity. It's self-contained within the mind and the body of the shooter. It was a sick, evil act, very much like that of a suicide bomber. It was an evil, driven nut who had a couple of guns, and we have to face that head on and deal with that, not hide under our covers in fear and blame and guilt and start asking, "What's wrong with America?"