Limbaugh is right about one thing: Culture killed Delbert Belton and Christopher Lane. Our culture. The culture that Rush supports and promulgates killed Delbert Belton and Chris Lane, the one that blames Obama and health care and liberals and racism - anything but the fact we have too many unregulated guns in the hands of children and crazy people.
August 25, 2013


It’s hard to read or listen to Rush Limbaugh’s incomprehensible rant about how no health insurance policy would have saved “Shorty” Delbert Belton and Chris Lane from being murdered without muttering, “Huh?” every other sentence.

Firstly, I have no idea what Rush Limbaugh’s father looked like, but if Limbaugh actually had a son, I doubt he’d look anything like Christopher Lane. Jabba the Hutt, Jr., maybe. And I very much doubt any son of Limbaugh’s would have come anywhere near the personality of Christopher Lane, who was about as quintessentially the All-American Golden Boy as anyone could have imagined... except that he was Australian. An accomplished and respected athlete earning a bachelor’s degree in business and finance, who abhorred guns, even scoffing at the difference in gun laws in Australia compared to the United States not long before he was fatally shot? “He didn’t like guns, he wasn’t a fan,” his girlfriend said. That doesn’t sound much like any son Rush Limbaugh would have been proud of.

And honestly, what’s with Limbaugh using the now thoroughly debunked photograph from the Herald Sun where the third suspect, Michael Jones – who’s white – is wrongly shown as a black man? Worse, Limbaugh claims Belton and Lane were “killed by bored, thug-wannabe African-Americans,” then laughably complains this is something “you can’t even address without being called a racist.” Um, maybe because deliberately claiming the suspects were all blacks is, well, racist?

The Australians don’t think Lane’s death was racially motivated. The prosecutor doesn’t think his death was racially motivated. This constant stoking of racial flames is – excuse the pun – just a smoke screen to the real issue that cannot be discussed in the United States: gun control.

It's become almost ludicrously knee-jerk: An old man and an Australian tourist is killed? It's all somehow the fault of ObamaCare... or something. Kinda hard to follow the convoluted rationalization stretching logic to breaking point: “There's no health insurance policy that woulda saved Chris Lane. There's no health insurance policy that woulda saved Shorty Belton. But everybody in this country's of the opinion that they can't get through the day without a health insurance policy. It's just amazing to me. It really is.”

Me, too, Rush. Mostly because I’m not so stupid I can’t see that one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. No amount of food safety laws could have saved Lane, but most sane Americans might think eating food uncontaminated with arsenic or carcinogenic additives might be a necessary thing. No amount of regulations preventing oil companies polluting the Gulf or ruining aquifers through fracking would have saved Lane, either, but most sane Americans would rather their drinking water didn’t catch on fire. No amount of building safety codes could have saved Lane, but most Americans would prefer their buildings didn’t fall down, that bridges didn’t collapse, that levies weren't so substandard thousands of people drown in hurricanes.

Oh wait, we don’t have much in the way of those either. Would be nice if we did, though, along with affordable, decent health care... which, again, may I point out the bleeding obvious, has nothing to do with Christopher Lane’s death.

But you know what might have? Gun control. And that is where Rush is right about one thing: Culture killed Delbert Belton and Christopher Lane. The culture that Rush supports and promulgates killed them, the one that blames Obama and health care and liberals and racism - anything but the fact we have too many unregulated guns in the hands of children and crazy people. That's a big part of what killed Belton and Lane. Not any failure of our churches or our schools or our parents - we have failed them. Maybe if Americans were finally allowed to talk about reining in the NRA and imposing sensible, sane regulations on gun ownership and the handling of firearms, the way the Australians did after the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, just maybe Chris Lane would be alive today.

Your good buddy, Pat Buchanan, asked, "Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls. But who created these monsters?"

You did, Rush. You did.

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