Pritzker, Hochul Seize on Massacre to Push Anti-Gun Agenda

CLAY: We’re talking about so many different issues out there, in particular the gun violence that exploded on July 4th north of Chicago, but also trying to put that in context with the overall amount of gun violence that happened in Chicago. Illinois’ governor said to people who say today’s not the time to talk about gun control, no better day; no better time.

Here he is. Listen to this.

CLAY: That’s one cut. I want to play the other one where he essentially lets it be known that Second Amendment rights are in fact on the table to be taken away by continuing this musket discussion which I think — maybe I’m wrong on this, Buck — your idiot governor in New York, Kathy Hochul, was also out with the musket argument.

BUCK: Clay, there’s an important rule. Nothing is too stupid for the governor of New York to say it. Nothing. Just remember that.

CLAY: You may not have liked Cuomo, but he’s not an idiot.

BUCK: No.

CLAY: I really feel like…

BUCK: Cuomo’s a thug. He’s not a moron. Kathy Hochul is a moron.

CLAY: Kathy Hochul is a moron. Here’s J.B. Pritzker arguing about muskets versus guns.

CLAY: I think they would have, Buck.

BUCK: What do they think we were shooting at the Redcoats with, by the way? The same weapons they had.

CLAY: That’s right. That’s exactly what I was gonna say. I mean, I think they would all say that if the people who were trying to beat you in a war for American independence had high capacity guns, that you also should have high capacity guns. But the issue here is, I may have missed it, but I don’t think the Democratic governor of Illinois has regularly spoken out about the violence taking place every day in Chicago. I don’t think he’s been outraged by that gun violence.

I certainly haven’t seen him losing his cool effectively as it sounded like he was doing in that discussion. And the question that I believe is really fascinating is, why not? If you truly care about gun violence and if your goal is to limit it, which I think almost everybody out there listening right now regardless of their politics, would say, “Hey, yeah, I wish there were less shootings. Hey, yeah, I wish there were less murders. Why do we only talk about guns when there are mass shootings, and not when there’s daily shootings?”

BUCK: Well, because — and he got right to this actually at the beginning — that whole “be angry, be angry,” you’ll notice he’s trying to channel the anger of people who are very, you know, emotional at that moment it time, not just in the community of Highland Park, but all across Illinois, all across the country, and then it transitions to we allow this to happen, allow this to happen, he says. No one’s allowing this to happen. That is a vicious and stupid lie. What they’re trying to say is, people don’t care about this who don’t agree with my politics.

The people who don’t want to give up all of their guns are the problem, right? So be angry and then channel that anger toward my political opponents. This is the Democrat playbook. This is why mass shooting, a lot of attention. And of course, they’re also right away saying, “He’s a Trump supporter!” First of all, I don’t even want to get into this. The kid looks like a far leftist, but who knows, and the point is he’s a psychopath so why are we all supposed to sit around and pretend to be amateur Sigmund Freuds here breaking down some psychoanalysis of this maniac.

The kid — the guy — is clearly out of his mind, clearly a lunatic. And yet they try immediately now, they say, “Let’s politicize this! Let’s go with this. Let’s push,” and then I say, “All right. Let’s have a conversation. What would not allow this to happen?” and they won’t actually answer. They’ll say, “Oh, background checks.” We have background checks. Oh, other states need to have stricter gun laws. Why is it that the other states with the stricter gun laws don’t actually have the same levels of gun violence? They’re talking about the red states, of course.

Indiana is where all the guns come from. Pennsylvania, from New York, is where all the guns come from. Why is it that the city of Chicago has worse violence than any city in — I mean, my friend David Harsanyi at National Review made a great database argument on this. Look at San Francisco, Clay, look at Los Angeles. Nevada is next door. You get a gun in Nevada, no problem. Right? You have to go through the legal process, but I’m saying it’s a gun friendly state and yet you don’t have the same kind of shootings even in California cities… Chicago is clearly a specific problem.

CLAY: I really come back to — and maybe this is just ’cause I’ve got three boys myself, and fortunately my boys are still young, 14, 11, and 7. And I know this guy was 22. But where is his family? Same thing happens in Buffalo. These are all young, incredibly troubled boys. Where are the dads? And I mean this on a larger scale. To me this comes back to dads and absent dads. I asked the question earlier in the show, why are we seeing an outbreak of mass shootings and violence from young, very troubled men?

And I put it on dads to a certain extent because I think there are a lot of absent dads, but moms could be involved too. Buck, if you and I can watch a video of this kid, 22 years old. We can talk about what age you want to call somebody a kid, but same thing with the Uvalde shooter, same thing with the Buffalo shooter. If we can look at their social media profile and in five minutes we can say, this kid is mentally unwell, where are the parents? And I say that as a dad of three. I know there’s a lot of people out there who are dads and moms and grandparents and grandmas, but if we, as the general public, can look at these kids’ social media profiles and immediately diagnose that they’re mentally unwell, how absent are these parents that they’re not doing something to try to help their mentally unwell child?

BUCK: It’d be fascinating to hear from someone who deals with, in a clinical practice, deeply mentally unwell and dangerous people, right? You know, 99% of people who have mental health issues, including some pretty serious ones, aren’t a threat to anybody; it’s just a question of them having a fulfilling, happy, stable life. But when you get into that 1% who are either a danger to themselves or others, and that’s, I know, where psychiatrists have a duty to actually —

CLAY: The Tarasoff, yeah, warnings.

BUCK: There are things they actually have to do there. Can’t tell people, you know, oh, I’m planning something horrific and there’s a secrecy around that for mental health reasons. But I would wonder, I think that there might be cases — and I don’t know — there might be cases where you have an individual who is just — I don’t know what to say — an evil person. You know, a psychopath and the parents and maybe hides a bit from the parents because this individual from what we know he was posting stuff. Did the parents know about the posts?

You know, did he just seem like a troubled kid? There are a lot of — when I say “kid” I know he’s 22. He looks — honestly part of — he looks like he’s about like 14 or 15, which is one of the things that I think a lot of people are processing about this too. But other part of this, Clay — and I always preface this. This is a hypothesis. I’m not asserting this as true. But I do believe this is arguably true. I think that the pandemic and the way that we were not only locked down, separated, and immiserated.

But also, the constant fearmongering and the we’re all going to die, I think that it was almost like a forced government panic and nihilism that for people. For people like you, me, our audience, it was annoying, it was oppressive but, we’re gonna roll and do what we can do, right, we’re gonna keep on moving forward. But people who are on that edge, who already were psychologically imbalanced, I think it may have pushed some of them into a place where, you know, the circuitry, the wiring in their brains never really recovered. Again, I’m not a doctor, just a hypothesis, but I don’t think that’s crazy.

CLAY: I think there are many reasons. And social media and the internet in general have made people who are crazy easier able to connect with other people who are crazy and/or encourage them to behave in a crazy fashion. I think there’s so much going on there, the toxicity feeds on itself.