It's even worth listening to Rush Limbaugh's grating, pompous voice to hear this caller tell him he's full of lies on guns and gun safety.
Limbaugh was bloviating about how the Affordable Care Act means doctors can "rat out" their patients, a claim the right wing has been making since President Obama unveiled his gun safety executive action. Limbaugh and his cohorts saw that as an opportunity to slam Obamacare and gun safety laws in one fell swoop.
But this caller disposed of their claims summarily, pointing out that in some states like Illinois, the requirements for gun storage and ammunition have always been stricter when you have a mentally disabled person residing in the home.
As the caller points out, a lot of this is just common sense. If you have an elderly person with dementia in the house, shouldn't practitioners ask where the guns are stored? That isn't some kind of nasty government act; it's common sense!
Transcript below, via Media Matters.
CALLER: The issue I have with what you said was you said as a result of Obama's speech today, that if you have a mentally disabled person in your home, the laws change on how you store your guns and ammunition. However, I can only speak to the state of Illinois. I am a health care professional and a law abiding citizen and I have our Illinois statutes printed out every year, because they change, and that was on the books years ago. So, nothing changed and your statement of as a result of his speech today you will have to do such and such. At least for the state of Illinois, it's been that way for quite some years.
RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): Well, right. Wait, you're getting confused because three years ago is when it began -- doctors and nurses, but doctors specifically were asked by virtue of Obamacare to start asking patients where their guns were in their houses if they had them and where the ammunition was--
CALLER: No, no. I got that pamphlet in the mail. So you're telling a half-truth, at least for my state -- a half-truth for my state. You need to get the information from the pamphlets that were sent out to health professionals at that time for each state. And we weren't -- it does not say you ask where the gun is. It asks sensible things like "are you going to hurt yourself?" If they are, of course, stupid enough to say yes, you're, you know -- do you have access to ways -- are you planning on hurting someone else? But nothing on that says that I have to ask him, "Where is your gun?" and so forth. I got that information and that was from my state, not from Obama. That was from my state, and I know federal trickles down to state, but I take a little issue with some of your blanket statements when most of it was common sense prior to that, but it is state statute in Illinois a long time ago that if, say grandma has dementia and she lives with you, that you have a certain way to store that, and that's just called gun responsibility.
LIMBAUGH: All I am telling you is what we learned in 2013 as Obamacare came online, the things that it was requiring and empowering doctors to do from the federal level. In California, family members can report gun-owning relatives to the police as of this month, the police have to confiscate the guns -- I'm not making anything up here and I'm not generalizing anything.
CALLER: Do you think that's new? Do you think that's new that if someone calls the police and they say, "Hey, my brother's going to shoot himself, he's got a gun in his house, he just said he's going to hurt himself." Do you think there's not a civic responsibility for them to go, "Hey investigate that?"
LIMBAUGH: That's not what this is.
CALLER: Yes. It is.
