News

Trump: Orlando clubgoers should not have had guns

by Jesse Byrnes - 06/20/16 7:20 AM ET

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday clarified his comments about the Orlando massacre, tweeting that only security guards or employees should have had access to weapons, not guests of the Pulse nightclub.

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

{mosads}Trump repeatedly said over the past week that the outcome in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 others were injured by a lone gunman, would have been different had more people in the club had guns.

“If people in that room had guns, with the bullets flying in the opposite direction right at him, right at his head, you wouldn’t have had the same tragedy that you ended up having,” Trump told CNN last week.

“[I]f you had guns in that room, even if you had a number of people having it strapped to your ankle or strapped to their waist, where bullets could have flown in the other direction right at him, you wouldn’t have had the same kind of a tragedy,” he said.

Trump also said at a rally in Texas on Friday that he wished someone had taken down the armed gunman.

“If we had people with the bullets going in the opposite direction — right smack between the eyes of this maniac,” Trump said, pointing to his forehead. “If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist or right to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, boom, you know what? That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks. That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight.”

Those previous comments were widely reported as support from Trump for armed clubgoers.

Trump’s latest tweet came a day after the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) top lobbyist and political strategist said on Sunday that he didn’t want to see armed people drinking at clubs.

“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms. That defies common sense. It also defies the law. It’s not what we’re talking about here,” Chris Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Tags Donald Trump Orlando nightclub shooting