The good folks at Box Turtle Bulletin were gracious enough to let me share this photo taken Sunday with you. Editor Jim Burroway writes, “As my partner and I were out running errands this afternoon, I snapped this photo along I-10 just south of the Ina Road exit. If you go about three miles to the east from I-10 on Ina, you will encounter the fateful Safeway that is, as we speak, still roped off with police tape and crawling with investigators. The billboard is for Rush Limbaugh’s radio program on local Clear Channel KNST, and it appears on a Clear Channel billboard. Limbaugh’s “Straight Shooter†billboard is festooned with six or seven bullet holes. Given the political climate of the past few years — and especially after yesterday’s events — it’s a damning indictment of what so many on the far right find acceptable in political discourse.”
Limbaugh, specifically highlighted by some on the Left as one of the greatest offenders of the concept of civil political discourse and one whom many believe has blood on his hands for Saturday’s tragic events, yesterday said, “Don’t kid yourself. What this is all about is shutting down any and all political opposition and eventually criminalizing it.”
On yesterday’s show, titled, “This is All About Shutting Us Down,” Limbaugh said, “Do not kid yourself. What this is all about is shutting down conservative media. That’s what this is all about.”
Um, no. What this is about is stopping the shooting of innocent people, including children, not impeding Limbaugh’s money-making machine.
There are eighty-two people shot to death in America everyday. Most of those deaths are suicides. Rachel Maddow last night asked how many of those would be unsuccessful if they didn’t have easy access to guns.
Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, left six dead, including a nine-year old girl, three women in their seventies, and a federal judge, and a dozen or more wounded, including Gabby Giffords, the Democratic Congresswoman for that district.
☛ Read: Rush Limbaugh’s Top Anti-Gay Quotes
Two years ago at the beginning of the Swine Flu outbreak, in “America Is Sick. And It’s Not Just The Swine Flu: Gun Violence Constitutes A National Public Health Emergency,” I wrote, “32 Americans die every day from gun violence [not including suicides involving guns.] Eight of them are children.”
(Sadly, the number of deaths annually now is even larger.)
“According to Daniel Vice of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, ‘In a typical weekend in the United States, more people are shot and killed than in an average year in Australia; the same is true in Britain, and other countries that have tougher gun laws.’ Even accounting for differences in total populations, there is no comparison.”
“Gun violence is the symptom of a sickness. Acceptance of it is the illness that is clouded by right-wing Second Amendment touting teaparty terrorists who happily support an escalating murder rate in the false name of protecting their own civil rights, while denying true civil rights, the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to those 32 Americans who die every day. Those 32 Americans who are gunned down each day no longer have the opportunity to exercise their civil rights, those rights that proud NRA gun-toting, secessionist-threatening, teaparty sign-waving, tax-cutting crazy, Obama-hating, homophobic Conservative “patriots†pretend matter to them.”
But Rush Limbaugh doesn’t see anything but an attack on his personal bank account.
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