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Here’s How We Should Approach New Info About Las Vegas Shooting

It’s been a week since the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Why don’t we know the gunman‘s motive for murdering 59 people and injuring hundreds more? Is there anything we do to stop the next mass shooting?

Glenn probably had the same questions you do this morning. Here’s what he wanted to talk about:

  • Will a ban on guns reduce gun deaths?
  • Can lawmakers stop their political posturing and actually help?
  • Why don’t we know the shooter’s motive yet?
  • When will security footage from Stephen Paddock’s hotel stay be released?

Glenn had an important reminder as we try to filter through information around the shooting: “Let’s stay away from the politics, and let’s stay away from the conspiracy theories.”

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

GLENN: It was one week ago, that we began the recover process from the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Stephen Paddock killed 58 people, injured hundreds more. The horror is equal only in how bizarre the investigation has been.

Conspiracy theories now top off political posturing, making an already incredibly complex case even harder to make any sense of. Let's stay away from the politics, and let's stay away from the conspiracy theories.

First, the posturing. Just took a few hours for the calls for gun control to come trumpeting from the left. We also heard a few new words like "bump stock." A bump stock is a device that turns a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic weapon, without modifying the gun. People have been bump firing ever since semiautomatic rifles existed. It's a hillbilly machine gun. All it takes is a trigger finger and a belt loop. It's a firing technique that was created after automatic weapons ban of 1986. Bump stock attachments were born right after the ban.

Gun attachments. Gun attachments that provide a way to circumvent the law should be regulated. Whether you agree with it or not, there is a law against owning fully automatic weapons. Bump stock attachments should be regulated under the law. But the calls for a full-on ban is ridiculous, for this reason: Tell me the last time a full-on ban of anything did anything. How is the ban on illicit drugs gone? How about the ban on guns in places like Washington, DC? After DC banned guns in 1976, homicides rose from 188 to 364 in just in ten years.

Now, that's because -- well, you can buy those guns and bring them, according to people like Michael Bloomberg. Well, not in Australia. That's a giant continent, by itself. In Australia, guns were confiscated. No one could have a gun. Studies show that the gun ban had zero effect on gun-related homicide. Britain also has similar results.

But there are people that don't want you to know those facts. Because it's easy to turn people against guns.

Second, the failure to find any motive has made this shooting the most bizarre case I can remember. Paddock had more than 20 weapons in his room. And we've been showing zero footage of him carrying anything through the hotel. That's just flatout bizarre. Why?

There have been multiple reports of possible accomplices. But we've not been shown a photo or video footage of him in the hotel lobby. A hotel casino has more cameras than a federal prison.

The truth is, is this attack should be the most well-documented crime in history. But for some reason, we're not seeing the footage. And that just needs to be addressed. And the footage need to be released. Because what's going to happen is more conspiracy theories are going to be coming out. This is enabling people from ISIS to Alex Jones to come up with their own claims on what drove Paddock to commit his crime. How do we not know what his motive was?

How do we not know every single detail that happened at least in the casino?

Despite what we don't know, there is no question that this man was deeply disturbed. Since the early '90s, the number of people treated for depression has tripled in America. The number of people on antipsychotic medication is greater than that. A survey by the National Institute of Mental Health found that an astonishing of 46 percent has at least one kind of mental illness. Forty-six percent.

From 2000 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans 35 to 64 increased 30 percent. For men, in Stephen Paddock's age range, that number goes up by 50 percent. Out of every 100,000 men in the 50s and 60s, 30 will kill themselves.

Guns are not the problem. We are. Something is wrong. And we know it. Because we see evidence of it everywhere. It's not the devices that we hold or the guns that we have or don't have. There's something wrong inside.

We're experiencing a tidal wave of mental illness in this country. And we've got to get proactive in dealing with it.

So what is it you can do? Well, how is your own family? I got up this morning, and I saw a Facebook post from a friend of mine, Delilah, the radio host. She posted on Saturday that her teenage son had committed suicide.

He had been struggling for a while. How is that long last friend of yours that you have been thinking about that hasn't called and you haven't called them? How are your neighbors?

Invite a coworker to lunch today. Talk to them. Because, really, everything that ills our society is on us. And we're going to be the only ones that can fix it.

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