BUCK: It’s a constant that emotion hysteria and the media agenda in the moment do not lead to good policy decisions, right? It doesn’t lead to government solutions. And, in fact, there are a lot of people who I think are just very uncomfortable with the notion that maybe government can’t solve something, maybe the government might actually make some situations worse by trying to solve them. It all depends on what we’re talking about.

But it’s essential that we have some sense in this era of what I call “the combination of mass media and mass hysteria,” you have to have some sense of what the risks really are, what is actually a concern to you, to your family. Now, if you listen to this show, chances are overwhelming that you certainly do have a sense of what’s Team Reality, what’s actually going on in the country, what it’s like for you, what we need to be focused on and thinking about.

But there are people who push for policies, who push for the government to use its power and its force based upon their emotions in the moment. And that’s not a good idea. It was a terrible idea on covid, as we all know. We can just start with that. On the covid response, people were scared, made more scared — much more scared by the media apparatus — and then it just turned into:

“Hey, anybody who stands in the way of our unprecedented and unscientific and reckless decision-making, whether it’s shutting down schools or shutting down businesses or not letting you go to church or making you get a shot you don’t need,” whatever it is, “masking everybody up everywhere,” it was the hysterics shouting down the people that were saying, “Hold on a second. Let’s think this through. Let’s look at cause and effect. Let’s look at the data.”

“Shut up! You just want grandma to die!” That’s what they said. And on the issue of gun control, which we’re now obviously in a cycle of discussion of this, the same cycles we’ve had before, it’s, “If you don’t agree that expanding a fraction of the gun sales or gun transfers in the country to private transfers going through a federal background check, you don’t care about children dying!” This is what they say.

This is the Democrat position, whether it’s Beto O’Rourke making a jackass of himself when he says it, any number of other people out there, Joe Biden himself. And I would just add, on the background check system that they currently have and the way that it operates in states, Clay, where they do mandate even for private sales ’cause you have to go through federal background check, another way they do it…

Democrat Beto O’Rourke wants to CONFISCATE guns from law-abiding Americans.

“I don’t think that the people who have them right now in civilian use should be able to keep them.” pic.twitter.com/gszDkfAkFE

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 31, 2022

I think this is how they do it in Washington, D.C., for example. It’s not a background check fee one time and then the person has been checked. If you want to sell somebody three guns, if you want to sell a family or gift to somebody three guns, you have to do the process and the fee each and every time because the process is the punishment. They’re meant to bother you with this.

They want to antagonize gun owners. That’s the whole point, to antagonize lawful gun owners ’cause they don’t like you. It’s not gonna actually stop violence anywhere. But the people that push for these ideas do it rooted in emotion and hysteria. Here is a CNN host who was clearly unnerved to the point where it went beyond what was rational in the aftermath of that shooting in Uvalde, Texas. She says that she had a panic attack when she dropped her child off at school.

LAURA COATES: But I’m gonna be honest with you. I had a panic attack dropping my son off at school this morning — a full-blown panic attack. I was terrified at the prospect that it could be my last good-bye with my baby, wondering, “Which would be the picture, the moment, the stories I might have to tell to try to explain what this boy means to me?” I look at the teachers that were opening the car doors to greet ’em, and I prayed in those moments that they would care enough to protect my child. All of our children — and, frankly, I resented that they might have to.

CLAY: All right. So here’s the deal. I understand parental fear. I’ve got three boys. You always worry about something happening to your kids. But this to me, a statement like that on CNN is emblematic of emotion overtaking logic. And what we consistently reward in media very often is emotion over logic. Look, the safest place that your kids can be on a statistical level is school. Your kids are under far more danger elsewhere.

We talked about this with covid because so many parents behaved irrationally analyzing risk there. Your kids… I’m sure that mother did not get in her car and have a near panic attack over the fact that they might get into a traffic accident and she and her child might die on the way to school. It’s infinitely more likely that that would happen. But what happens is — and this is one of the great quotes that applies, I think, even better almost today than ever before.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Passion rules, and she never rules wisely,” and what we have in social media, Buck, is every single day it feels like there is a new emotional lever that is pulled that people are required to respond to. That has been, “Wear your mask in your profile pic, put the Ukraine flag up, demand that all guns no longer be sold,” and those are all emotion-based responses. So, this is important, I think.