In brief comments Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump said that the deadly shooting in Las Vegas was “in many ways a miracle” because of the law enforcement response to the shooting.
“Look, we have a tragedy. We’re going to — what happened in Las Vegas is in many ways a miracle. The police department has done such an incredible job, and we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes by,” Trump told reporters outside the White House before traveling to Puerto Rico. “But I do have to say how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”
Trump said that the police were able to “quickly” get into the hotel, however it took police a little over an hour from getting the first call about the shooting to breaching the gunman’s hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, according to reports from NBC News and Newsweek.
The mass shooting was the deadliest in U.S. history and left 59 dead and more than 500 others injured. The gunman opened fire on 22,000 people attending a music festival in Las Vegas from a room on the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel.
Trump also told reporters Tuesday morning that the gunman is a “demented man.”
“He was a sick man. A demented man, a lot of problems I guess. We are looking into him very seriously. We are dealing with a very, very sick individual,” he said.
