Rush Limbaugh: Left uses massacre to promote gun agenda

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh says attempts to blame the Sandy Hook school massacre on lax gun laws reflect a political agenda by the "media, Democrats and leftists" to attack "Republicans, conservatives or conservative values."

He noted that many in the media and political world did not want to acknowledge that many mass killings were carried out with knives or dynamite, and not by firearms.

"But you see, there's a political agenda here," said on his radio show Monday. "And when this event happened, I knew that two things were happening immediately. Aside from everything that we were being told about it being wrong, the media, Democrats and leftists were doing everything they could to find a way to blame this on their political opponents. Not just talk radio. Not just Fox News. But on Republicans, conservatives, or conservative values."

Limbaugh said he was "not wedded to guns or the Second Amendment," but to everything in the Constitution.

"...(Folks), let me tell you what this point is. The guns in this culture are the secondary target here. The primary target is the Constitution itself.That is what is under assault. That is what is in the cross-hairs of people who are using this tragedy to advance an agenda."

His comments built on his initial response to the "terrible, incomprehensible" killings that expected would be used by liberals against conservatives and Republicans.

"It may sound a little hard-edged to say that, but I've lived through these things for 25-plus years," Limbaugh said on Friday.

While Limbaugh's reaction to the killings remained largely consistent, some conservative voices refined their comments during the weekend.

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a Fox News host, spent the weekend rowing back from sharp comments he made not long after the shooting story broke.

On Friday, he told Fox's Neil Cavuto: "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

He added, "Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end."

By Saturday, however, Huckabee was trying to clarify those remarks, telling Fox & Friends on Saturday that he did not mean to imply that if we had prayer in schools, such tragedies wouldn't happen.

Here's how it put it: "No, my point is a larger point -- that we have as a culture decided that we don't want to have values, that we don't want to say that some things are always right, some things are always wrong. When we divorce ourselves from a basic sense of what we would call, I would say, collective morality where we agree on certain principles to be true always, then we create a culture -- not that it specifically creates this crime. It doesn't. But it creates an atmosphere in which evil and violence are removed from our sense of responsibility."

One of the most striking reactions came from the conservative ranks came Joe Scarborough, a former four-time Republican congressman who co-hosts Morning Joe on MSNBC.

The one-time Florida congressman said the Sandy Hook tragedy hit particularly close to home, not only because he lives in Connecticut, but he has young children, one son has Asperberger's, as apparently did the gunman.

While noting that he kept a 100% voting rating with the National Rifle Congress while in Congress, he did some soul-searching after the carnage in Connecticut.

"Friday changed everything and it must change everything," Scarborough said somber, prepared remarks for the morning news show on Monday

"Politicians can no longer be allowed to defend the status quo," he said. "They must instead be forced to defend our children. Parents can no longer take no for an answer from Washington when the topic turns to protecting our children."

Scarborough linked gun violence in the United States to a "violent popular culture, a growing mental health crisis and the proliferation of combat-styled weapons."

"I say good luck to the gun lobbyist, good luck to the Hollywood lawyer who tries to blunt the righteous anger of millions of parents by hiding behind twisted readings of our Bill of Rights," Scarborough said.

He added that he used to view the gun control debate "as a powerful symbolic struggle between individual rights and government control,"but no longer.

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, however, was quick off the mark, even as the shooting story was unfolding, in noting that the only way to stop such acts is through broader concealed-carry laws.

Bill Bennett, a radio talk show host and former Education Secretary in the Reagan Administration, suggested there should be armed security in schools.

"Let's remember the good things here: the heroism of those teachers and that principal," Bennett said on NBC's Meet the Press. "And I'm not so sure -- and I'm sure I'll get mail for this -- I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing."

Otherwise, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who is now a U.S. citizen, spoke out in favor of gun control measures taken by Australian after a gunman killed 35 people in that country's worst mass killing.

On Friday, Murdoch wrote on Twitter: ''Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy.''

That, says the Morning Herald, prompted a none-too-subtle comment from Australian Liberal Malcolm Turnbull about Murdoch's U.S. cable network. "I suspect they will find the courage when Fox News enthusiastically campaigns for it.''