So last night I was channel surfing and saw that Bill Clinton was on Larry King Live, I figured that I should tune in to see his spin on the Virginia Tech shooting.
Well as it turns out Old Bubba Clinton said the shooting had nothing at all to do with Gun Control, but it was more about the mental health problem in our country.
So this morning I searched high and low to see how media outlets would report what their “Favorite Son” had to say about the shooting, well there was nothing, nadah, anywhere; clearly CNN did not get the response they wanted so they buried it.
I was able to find the transcript to the show here is what Bill “Bubba” Clinton had to say and the media didn’t want us to hear.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0704/19/lkl.01.htmlKING: There are lots of questions today.
One, should we be showing him? NBC has pulled back a little.
What do you think?
B. CLINTON: I don't really -- I think that's something the media will have to decide on its own. I don't think we ought to do anything to glorify this young man, but I do think we ought to try to understand, number one, as nearly as we can, exactly what was wrong with him. And number two, since there were people who knew what was wrong, whether we need a change in law or policy that might have somehow either brought him some support or taken him out of the ordinary population before this occurred.
You know, each of these things you mentioned -- in Waco, in Oklahoma City, in Columbine -- there are things that you can say, well, if they had been done differently maybe you would have had a different result. And actually they were all quite different.
In this case, the issue here wasn't really the gun laws, for example. He cleared the Brady bill checks. But he had been identified as being profoundly troubled and having violent tendencies, at least, either toward himself or others as early as 2005.
So I think we really -- without recrimination, because nobody tried to have this happen, there ought to be some serious attempt to see whether there was some breakdown in the way the law works and the way the mental health systems works, to see if we can make some positive changes to avert this in the future.
KING: Would you change any gun laws?
B. CLINTON: Well, based on this case, I don't think that you can make that case, because he...
KING: He got a gun in a half hour.
B. CLINTON: He got a gun in a half hour, but he passed the background check. And, you know, one of the things that you might argue -- I like the three-day waiting period. But in order to get this -- the Brady Bill passed -- and then get it extended, we had to agree to allow that waiting period to be waived if you could do an automatic background check.
And, you know, that wasn't really the problem here. The problem was that if he had been committed, if it was clear that he was unstable, then he would not have -- if there was something in his record, he would not have passed the background check.
So we have to go back, I think, in this case, to the mental health care record. It's not like Columbine where you -- we needed to close the gun show loophole, which the voters of Colorado voted to do, 70 to 30 -- to do the background checks at the gun show, as well as other sale points.
It's not like Oklahoma City, where we needed, I think, to, you know, have taggants in chemicals that could be made into bombs so we could track them. There are lots of things -- all these cases are different.
This case gives us the obligation to look at how our mental health system works.
