Trump backtracks on statement saying Orlando massacre victims should have been allowed to carry arms into the club
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee later tweeted that he was ‘obviously talking about additional guards or employees’ of the Florida nightclub and not carrying arms
Donald Trump is backtracking from his contention that victims of the Orlando massacre should have been allowed to carry arms into the nightclub where they were attacked – a stance even the National Rifle Association (NRA) says is untenable.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee tweeted on Monday that he was “obviously talking about additional guards or employees” of the Florida nightclub when he spoke about the value of having more people armed to challenge the gunman.
That flies in the face of his comments after the massacre.
A day after the attack, he told radio host Howie Carr: “It’s too bad that some of the young people that were killed over the weekend didn’t have guns, you know, attached to their hips, frankly, and you know where bullets could have flown in the opposite direction, Howie. It would have been a much different deal. I mean, it sounded like there were no guns. They had a security guard. Other than that there were no guns in the room. Had people been able to fire back, it would have been a much different outcome.”
Trump had repeated his suggestion at rallies across the country last week. In Atlanta he said the carnage would have been lessened if “some of those great people that were in that club that night had guns strapped to their waist or strapped to their ankle”.
His statements were a step too far for the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobby for armed self-defense and broad permissions to carry weapons. “No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “That defies common sense. It also defies the law.”
