MIKE: All right. Thanks for being here this morning. Update of what's happening in Orlando. We are just finding out that a 45-year-old disgruntled ex-employee was armed with a handgun and a knife and eventually killed himself. So he killed -- shot five other people and then turned the gun on himself. A former disgruntled employee. One of the things we pointed was a possibility earlier, they're now confirming that. It does not appear to be terrorism-related. It's not Islamist. It's not a terrorist group. It is a disgruntled employee that went back, and for whatever reason, murdered five people and then turned the gun on himself.
It is -- it's one of those situations where now we will begin to have the conversation of, who is this person? Why did he do it? Why did he have access to the guns that he had?
And it's a sad commentary. It really is more about how detached you can be from reality that the option for you is to murder people. Crimes of passion and murders between people that dislike or hate each other are horrible enough to have that kind of hate in your heart. But to murder strangers or coworkers, people that you barely know, it seems to me to be in a deeper place. Addressing a lot of this is important. And the more this comes up, we're going to hear more and more about this in the coming days. Bloomberg is going to come out with a statement. Other people will come out with statements of how we should be ending gun violence and hearing more about gun control. And it really is disrespectful to those of us that believe in firearms.
You know, we -- as I said, I don't see them -- it's not a power. Anybody who has ever fired a handgun or a rifle, you realize the responsibility of what you're holding in your hand. It is nothing to joke about. And nobody that I know does.
But when somebody uses it the wrong way, how do you blame the gun? We're going to find out more and pay closer attention to this person. Whether it's somebody that has had some issues, where they were told to go to counseling -- and if you look at -- statistically, go back through all of the mass shootings that are in recent memory, going all the way back to Columbine. From Virginia Tech to what happened in Tucson, Arizona, with a guy named Jared Loughner, that gunned down a congresswoman, and a judge, and a little girl and multiple other people at an event on a Saturday morning. You look at James Holmes in Colorado, who did the theater shooting. Adam Lanza who did the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school. You look at all of those cases, and what they have in common: Two things, they used guns. But they also suffered from severe dangerous mental illness. And it's such a fine line in America.
We cannot lump everybody together that has some form of mental illness or another as dangerous. We can't do that. Just as like we couldn't say the common cold is the same thing as cancer. It's not.
Two completely different things, both of them labeled as an illness. Things you would go to see doctors for. But one is much more dangerous than the other.
So we can't stigmatize people because they have some sort of mental illness. We shouldn't be able to do that. But, on the other hand, what can we do to people that are a danger to themselves or a danger to society? People that are prescribed psychotropic drugs, that when they're on their medication, can live a normal, fruitful life. But when they don't take their medication, they become a danger to society. They become a danger to themselves.
So we can then, at times, when they pose threats, when they make threats, we can forcibly take them to a hospital, put them on a 72-hour hold, or whatever. Doctors can then medicate them. Now they're on their medication. They're not making threats. They're not a threat to themselves. They're not a threat to society. So we can't hold them any longer. And I'm not saying that there's an easy answer. Because there isn't. The same constitutional conversation you have, trying to take someone's rights or limit people's rights to accessing firearms, there is a very difficult constitutional argument that has to be had or conversation that has to be had about what we can do about the people that are dangerously mentally ill. We are never going to stop every attack, like what we just -- what we're hearing about in Orlando. It happens, unfortunately.
But we can -- when the signs are there, figure out what we can do with people, so that like in the case of Virginia Tech, a guy is not walking in a gun-free zone, chaining doors shut and just shooting people. That, to me, is let's get to the solution of how we stop this. Don't say, as was said by people after Sandy Hook, that people like myself care more about keeping my guns than I do about dead kids. That is a bigger kick in the stomach. That is an insult. I was so torn up over the Sandy Hook thing, I could almost not do my show that day. I didn't know what I was possibly going to say.
I have a five and a half-year-old grandson. Those kids were six. Seven years old. No way you're going to tell me that I'm heartless enough to say, I'm risking their lives. It's not possible.
