Dennis Miller on Va. Tech Massacre

This is a partial transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," April 18, 2006, that has been edited for clarity.

Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET and listen to the "Radio Factor!"

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In the "Miller Time" segment tonight, our intrepid analyst is now in his third week of syndicated radio, and Dennis joins us from Los Angeles.

You know, I'm interested in this. You're primarily a comedian and social satirist. But now you're on radio, syndicated radio, coast-to-coast three hours a day. And you got dropped in your lap a very intense brutal story at Virginia Tech.

No. 1, are you dealing with it in a certain way? And, No. 2, do your callers want you to riff on it?

DENNIS MILLER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: No. Nobody wants me to riff on it. I think they wanted me to be empathetic. And I'll tell you anybody who speaks in the wake of such a devastation with a high degree of certitude, I find myself tuning out, quite frankly.

I heard a pro-gun guy last night named Pratt who seem to have the whole thing figured out. I've heard anti-gun people who seem to have the whole thing figured out.

I think, like I said in the immediate aftermath of an event that is this staggering, this hard to get your head around, I think one's official statement would be befuddled, willing to listen all sides, and try to figure it out. And that's what I've been trying to do on the radio show.

Listen, Bill, one thing I'll say about this is if we think these people are undetectable, like this Cho fellow, I don't know if I agreed to that before this. But I agree with it now. Because if we're not going to detect this kid with the tea leaves that he was leaving out there be to read, i.e. lighting a room on fire, stalking two women, not talking to roommates for eight months, writing highly disturbing Quentin Tarantino "Grindhouse"-like scripts, being pulled over for speeding, being on a suicide watch at one point. If we're not going to glean those tea leaves, then, no, we're not going to catch anybody. Because this kid was sending up some flares, I think.

O'REILLY: And more than that. I mean, we now learn tonight that the state of Virginia, the court system ordered him, ordered him, actually defined him as a danger to himself and others and ordered him into mental health treatment.

Now he goes in there, and this is fascinating. He goes in, and then he's on an outpatient basis, which means he shows up for his counseling, and they give him his dose of meds or whatever. Then he's free to do what he wants to do. But, that's not in the system.

So when he goes buy the gun in Roanoke, the guy does the Insta-check, which they have down there. Nothing comes up. And I assume — you would have to assume this — that the people at Virginia Tech, the administration have no idea that the court in Virginia has ruled this guy a menace. Because if they did, what would this guy be doing living in a dormitory with other people.

So you assume that nobody knew. And then it becomes frightening. Because why didn't anybody know? Is it a medical privacy issue? We still haven't gotten that defined tonight.

MILLER: Well, Bill, it's the same thing we had going on for a while there between the partitioning between our intelligence agencies. The "wall" -- not sharing...

O'REILLY: Yes. That's very good. The CIA and FBI with that wall between them, not sharing information. You know, I think that's what it was. The medical...

MILLER: Well, listen, Bill.

O'REILLY: Go ahead.

MILLER: I'm sorry. We've got a — I'm in a new studio today. We've got a bit of a savage delay.

Let me say this. I'm intrigued by this character Liviu Librescu, the 76-year-old aerodynamics teacher at the college. Now listen, I think in our society we have somehow in current day America been denuded out of the gene that makes us want to survive at all costs.

I think Librescu, a 76-year-old Holocaust survivor who, if you do the math, was probably 12 when he first saw the face of evil, I'm sure looked up at that narrow window and that door and saw the same sick glint, that dead shark thing in that eye that he had seen as a young man. And he went towards it to stop it.

I think right now kids in this culture, between video games which kind of dumb them down vis-a-vis violence, and the non-judgmental aspect of this society, don't know evil if it springs up in a door at their college.

O'REILLY: No, we talked about it earlier. You're absolutely right. It's not that they don't know. It's not even acknowledged. It's not acknowledged in public schools. It's not acknowledged in the secular progressive community. It's fought against.

Now, it didn't take —- and Bernie Goldberg pointed this out last night — more than a hour after the people were killed in Virginia for the anti-gun control people to come out. They just ran out. And in response to them the pro-gun people ran out.

But it was Rosie O'Donnell and her ilk coming out right away, blaming, you know, America is a bad country because we have the Second Amendment.

I want to play you a clip that I did, my interview with Rosie O'Donnell a few years ago, and I want you to react to that. Roll the tape:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: My point is that you, Barbra Streisand and a lot of the celebrities that come off very judgmental. You have bodyguards, right?

ROSIE O'DONNELL, CO-HOST, ABC'S "THE VIEW": Do I have a bodyguard?

O'REILLY: You have bodyguards?

O'DONNELL: Yes I do.

O'REILLY: Because you need them.

O'DONNELL: Yes.

O'REILLY: You're controversial. They pack?

O'DONNELL: They have guns. Yes.

O'REILLY: To protect you and your family.

O'DONNELL: Yes.

O'REILLY: You have to give that same right to other people.

O'DONNELL: But I never said — I said I want all guns licensed and registered except for the day after Columbine when I said nobody should have a gun.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: OK, but now she's back with the, you know, the gun thing. What do you think?

MILLER: I think that I'd give everybody a 48-hour pass when something like this happens or Columbine happens. I think everybody, like Linus, goes to their blanket. Everybody has a comfort salt lick. Everybody's scared.

I think the only thing we share at this point is sort of looking around and saying what in the hell is happening to this world? And everybody seeks out whatever belief they have.

So listen, I'm not going to judge Rosie on this one. As a matter of fact, one of the things that falls the way from me in the wake of a tragedy like this is all the sturm und drang, all the usual suspects, all that crap that I pretend that I'm interested on a day-to-day basis goes away. And I shoot hoops with my kid, and I don't hear it as much.

I think she's scared like any of us, Bill. And that's her play right now. She has a bodyguard, fine.

All I know is this: I saw the guy who sold the gun. I'm not for overturning the Constitution. But the guy said within ten minutes he was able to sell this kid, as sick, as deluded as he is, a gun.

I can't get a Starbucks in ten minutes. And we've got to figure out some mid-ground here where everybody gives a little...

O'REILLY: I'm with you on that one...

MILLER: Or we're going have to ante up with 32 student lives every couple years or so.

O'REILLY: I'm with you on that one. I can't get my dry cleaning back for seven days, and you know, you get a Glock in ten minutes.

And this is what I want everybody to do, compromise. You know, if we can compromise I think the citizenry has to protect itself. Hurricane Katrina proved that. All right. You can't have roving band of thugs with guns and you don't have anything.

Do you know there are 250 million guns in the United States right now? Two hundred and fifty million. There's only 300 million of us. You and I. There's just a few of us that don't have them.

But to say that we're going to ban them. To say that we can't have them, that's crazy. Because with 250 million, the bad guys can go to — you know, have a stack of choices.

But you're right. Ten minutes is — you've got to check these guys out. But I don't even know, if you checked him out for seven days, whether this guy Cho's sheet would have come back because of medical privacy.

I'm going to give you — I always am trepidatious about doing this, giving Miller the last word. Oh, God. Go.

MILLER: Well, listen, I'm as befuddled as anybody on this. It breaks your heart. I'm saying prayers.

I will say this, though. I think every college in this country tomorrow ought to install comprehensive security cameras at every building. If Reade Seligmann can get himself off the hook at Duke having a moment by moment Jack Webb diary of where he was that night, we should have been able to see this kid coming out of one dorm, going into another in that interim two-hour period.

We better get our game face, people. We better get it on here, because there's evil out there. And us choosing not to recognize it is not going to put it away.

O'REILLY: All right. Dennis Miller, everybody. Always a pleasure. We'll see you next Wednesday.

Copy: Content and Programming Copyright 2007 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Transcription Copyright 2007 Voxant, Inc. (www.voxant.com), which takes sole responsibility for the accuracy of the transcription. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No license is granted to the user of this material except for the user's personal or internal use and, in such case, only one copy may be printed, nor shall user use any material for commercial purposes or in any fashion that may infringe upon Fox News Network, LLC'S and Voxant, Inc.'s copyrights or other proprietary rights or interests in the material. This is not a legal transcript for purposes of litigation.