Trump insists he never said Orlando clubgoers should have been armed
After repeatedly suggesting the death toll in the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., might have been lower if more people inside the club had been carrying guns, Donald Trump now says he meant arming security and staff members — and not clubgoers.
“When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees,” Trump tweeted on Monday.
When I said that if, within the Orlando club, you had some people with guns, I was obviously talking about additional guards or employees
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 20, 2016
But last week, the presumptive Republican nominee was not so obvious.
“It’s too bad some of the people killed over the weekend didn’t have guns attached to their hips, where bullets could have thrown in the opposite direction,” Trump said on Howie Carr’s conservative syndicated radio show the day after the shootings. “Had people been able to fire back, it would have been a much different outcome.”
He made a similar suggestion at a Wednesday rally in Atlanta.
“If the bullets were going in the other direction, aimed at this guy who was just in open target practice, you would have had a situation, folks, which would have been horrible but nothing like the carnage that we all, as a people, suffered this weekend,” Trump said then.
On June 12, a gunman opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The shooter, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, was engaged by an armed security guard stationed just outside the club’s entrance, police say, before he holed up with hostages inside. He was later killed in a shootout with police.
Since then, Trump has repeatedly spoken vaguely about “people” in the club firing back at the gunman.
“If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here — right to their waist or right to their ankle — and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes, ‘Boom, boom,’ you know, that would have been a beautiful sight, folks,” Trump said at a rally in Dallas Friday night.
He made similar remarks after last year’s terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris, and reiterated them in a Saturday speech in Phoenix.
“If you had somebody with a gun strapped onto their hip, somebody with a gun strapped onto their ankle, and you had bullets going in the opposite direction, right at this animal who did this, you would have had a very, very different result,” Trump said.
But the head of the National Rifle Association said Sunday that the gun lobby didn’t want to see clubgoers armed.
“I don’t think there should be firearms where people are drinking,” NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “But I’ll tell you this: Everybody, every American, needs to start having a security plan. We need to be able to protect ourselves, because they are coming.”
“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told ABC’s “This Week” Sunday. “That defies common sense.”
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