White House Response To Las Vegas: New Laws Won't Stop A Mad Man

The White House has put together a response to the mass shooting in Las Vegas Sunday night, playing down renewed calls for gun control legislation. CNN on Wednesday morning released the White House’s talking points, which offer administration officials a guide for public comments about the mass shooting that left 58 dead and over 500 injured.

“The President believes that our founding principles, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right to bear arms must be protected while maintaining public safety,” reads one point.

The guide also dismissed the need for legislation.

“When it comes to gun control, let's be clear: New laws won't stop a mad man committed to harming innocent people. They will curtail the freedoms of law abiding citizens.”

President Donald Trump will visit Nevada Wednesday. On Monday, Trump called the shooting an "act of pure evil."

The gunman, Stephen Paddock, had amassed at least 47 guns and explosives. Police found 23 weapons in his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel from which Paddock rained bullets down on the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a country music festival. Twelve of the guns were outfitted with modifiers in order to make them shoot faster, mimicking an automatic weapon, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Semi-automatic weapons that shoot one bullet per trigger pull are legal in the U.S. Automatic weapons that shoot more than one bullet per trigger pull are not.

The talking points also reference Chicago and Baltimore as big cities with strict gun control but also gun violence.

“Some of America's cities with the strictest gun laws have the highest rates of gun violence,” read the talking points.

The guide points out that attacks use other weapons than guns and that safety and constitutional rights are not mutually exclusive.

“We've seen terrorist attacks committed with knives, by people driving cars into crowds, and hijacking plane,” read the guide. “We welcome a reasoned and well-informed debate on public safety and our constitutional rights, but we reject the false choice that we can't have both.”